For one hundred fifty days huge armies had collided in protracted engagements on a titanic scale, transforming the European continent into a vast wasteland saturated with unimaginable yet predictable carnage. "In the last five months of 1914, more than 800,000 Germans had become casualties, and more than 100,000 of them were dead." (Meyer, p.241) French fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 305,000, with twice as many wounded or missing. (Keegan, p. 135) Russian casualties were an astounding 1.8 million, including 400,000 killed, and Austria-Hungary's over 1.25 million. (Stevenson, p. 76) More than half the British troops who had landed in August were dead or injured. (Meyer, p. 242)
On the Eastern Front, Grand Duke Nicholas's four Russian armies had reclaimed the offensive after the Tannenberg disaster and were massing toward Cracow, the gateway to oil-rich Silesia. To counter the threat, German commanders Hindenberg and Ludendorff directed the newly-formed Ninth Army under General August von Mackensen to move by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw and link up with Field Marshal Franz Conrad's battered Austrians.
On October 6, 1914, Mackensen's eighteen divisions found themselves in the path of sixty Russian divisions ensconced along a 250-mile front covering the Vistula River and anchored on the south by fortresses ringing the city of Warsaw. From the north the Germans made considerable progress until they were slowed by five days of torrential rain, giving the Russians time to regroup and organize a vicious counter-offensive which bent the German left flank at a severe right angle until it faced north instead of east. By October 17, Mackensen was on the verge of disintegration and had no choice but to save his army. In six days he retreated sixty miles, relinquishing all he had gained, with 40,000 fewer men. (Meyer, pp. 225-226)
Flushed with success the Russians rolled west across Poland, only to encounter blown bridges and rail lines and outrun their means of supply. Secretly uniting the Eighth and Ninth Armies, Hindenberg, now Commander-in-Chief in the east, attacked along a seventy-mile front and drove the Russians back to the great cotton-weaving and railway center at Lodz. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Western Front, the Germans used a series of frontal assaults to capture the city on December 6. They pursued the Russians thirty miles east, taking 136,000 prisoners. When the onset of winter brought all operations to an abrupt halt, both sides settled down to digging permanent trench lines in the frozen turf. (Meyer, pp. 234-235) The triumphant Hindenberg was made a field marshal.
"The Germans lost 100,000 men in this last 1914 campaign while inflicting 530,000 casualties on their enemy. Their success, however, was of a discouragingly limited value." The Russians still had 120 divisions on the front while the Germans and Austrians could muster only sixty, and the Russian right flank still rested inside the East Prussian border. (Meyer, p. 235)
Further south Conrad's Austrians exploited a twenty-mile gap between the Russian Third and Eighth Armies, and in a four-day battle commencing December 3 gained forty miles. Their success thwarted the Russians' plans of crossing the Carpathian Mountains and advancing from Cracow toward Budapest and Berlin, but was spoiled by Conrad's third punitive invasion of Serbia. After capturing Belgrade on December 2, the Austrians, buffeted by a blizzard in their summer uniforms and weakened by four days without food, were routed by a Serb counterattack, losing over 200,000 men.
It was the end of creaking empire's fruitless attempts to subdue its tiny, unruly neighbor singlehandedly and of its viability as an independent fighting force. With the war scarcely begun, the Austro-Hungarians were spent, and would never again win a major victory they could call their own. (Meyer, p. 236)
Conrad's thirst for glory remained unquenched. He appealed to the Germans for assistance in conducting a winter campaign to recover Galicia and relieve the fortress of Przemysl. Hindenberg and Ludendorff agreed to send three divisions, securing authorization from the Kaiser himself when their superior, Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, balked.
The operation, which began January 23, 1915, quickly succumbed to the rugged terrain and and harsh winter conditions of the Carpathians. While Conrad enjoyed the comfort of his headquarters far from the action, his frigid, starving soldiers struggled to attack up ice-bound passes. "Soon it was the Russians who were advancing, managing for a while to push back the Austrians and Germans but at last being stopped by the same brutal conditions that had ruined Conrad." (Meyer, pp. 255-257) "By the beginning of April, the Russians dominated the Carpathian Front and . . . were again contemplating a breakthrough over the crests to the Hungarian plains," having inflicted 800,000 more casualties upon the exhausted Austrians since the beginning of the year. (Keegan, pp. 173-174)
Just as Conrad's advance was stalling, Ludendorff unleashed his own ambitious offensive, sending his Eighth Army, the heroes of Tannenberg, from the north and a new Tenth Army from the south into a grand encircling movement. In spite of a five-foot snowfall and forty-degree-below-zero temperatures, the Germans made good progress, taking the Russians by surprise and ousting them from their defenses. Slowed by a sudden thaw that turned ice to ice water and frozen earth to mud, the Germans still managed to surround and seal the Russian XX Corps in an enclave in the Augustow Forest. A valiant holding action by the trapped Russians enabled many of their comrades to escape and limited their casualties to 56,000. Hindinberg was again lauded for his exploits, although he admitted that, while the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes was a "tactical success," he "failed strategically" to eliminate the Russian Army. (Meyer, p. 258)
A minor footnote to the clash was a barrage of 18,000 artillery shells with which Ludendorff initiated an assault at Bolimov on January 31. The canisters contained xylyl bromide, a chemical that was supposed to incapacitate the Russians without killing them. (Meyer, p. 256) Although the first military deployment of poison gas in history was a failure -- no one had been informed that the agent was ineffectual in sub-zero temperatures -- another purveyor of death had been added to the combatants' arsenal. (Marshall, p. 161)
By the spring of 1915, thirteen hundred miles of fortifications stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front and from Belgium to the Swiss border in the West -- the length, depth, and elaboration of which had never before been approached in the annals of warfare. (Keegan, p. 173)
Between the two trench lines -- separated anywhere from fifty to one hundred yards -- lay a desolate, moon-cratered landscape, filled with "rusted tangles of barbed wire." As the weather warmed, the frozen earth would thaw into a muddy morass, causing soldiers' feet to swell, become numb, and burn from the dreaded "trench foot." (Hochschild, p. 135)
Every ten yards or so, trenches turned at right angles, zigzags which better contained artillery and mortar round blasts and prevented enemy raiding parties from seizing long sections with well-placed machine guns. Underground shelters or dugouts carved into the sides of the trenches and reinforced with planks and beams provided sleeping quarters, command posts, and emergency first aid centers. In wet or stony ground, trenches were shallow and protected by parapets of earth-filled sandbags -- which continuously oozed out in muddy rivulets or froze and burst. In low-lying areas, where puddles of water collected in the hollows, soldiers lived like swamp rats, covered in wet mud. (Hochschild, p. 136)
The British-French strategy in the spring of 1915 was to mount a joint offensive against the "northern shoulder" of the German salient -- the Aubers and Vimy Ridges which guarded rail communications to the rear.
Partly because they lacked the manpower to strengthen portions of the front manned by the French and partly because they wished to restore the fighting reputation and assert the independence of their British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Commander John French and his Chief-of-Staff Douglas Haig devised a plan to attack at the ruined village of Neuve Chapelle, where the Germans were known to have thinned their defenses in order to send troops to the Eastern Front. In its unfolding the battle demonstrated the functional defects of trench warfare -- inadequacy of artillery support, rigidity of planning, mispositioning of reserves, and lack of delegation in command -- as well as the structural -- the "relative immobility and total vulnerability to fire of advancing infantry and the absence of means of speedy communication between front and rear, between infantry and artillery, and between neighboring units." (Keegan, p. 162)
At 7:00 AM on the morning of March 10, Haig opened fire with 500 guns, raining 200,000 shells on fifteen machine guns protecting the chosen sector. The bombardment took the Germans by complete surprise, annihilating all 1500 of them in thirty-five minutes, "an achievement rarely to be repeated. Even more of an achievement was Haig's success in having assembled the leading waves of an attack force of sixty thousand men within a hundred yards of the enemy in complete secrecy, a fact scarcely ever to occur again." (Keegan, p. 193) Ordered forward at 8:30, they met no resistance, and within twenty minutes breached the German line at a width of 1600 yards, the first of only three times in the entire war that this would happen. "Ahead was empty, undefended territory . . . an open gate to a tremendous victory." (Meyer, p. 276)
Then the functional and structural factors making for failure set in. The British plan stipulated that advancing infantry were to pause at breakthrough points to allow artillery to disable defenders ahead of them; when a battalion colonel requested permission to disobey his orders and continue forward, he received no answer. "Behind him tens of thousands of troops and support units found themselves jammed together at a too-narrow hole in the line, barely able to move and not knowing what they were expected to do." A four-hundred-yard-wide sector at the northern end of the German line had not been shelled, which left a pocket of defenders intact to impede the attack force with machine-gun fire. (Meyer, p. 277) Poor communications hampered efforts by battlefield units to obtain authorization to deviate from the the original plan and respond appropriately. By nightfall German reserves had filled the gap and brought their flanks forward to link up with the positions at the edges which had never been lost. (Keegan, p. 195)
"Next morning the British renewed the offensive, but thick mist prevented their artillery from locating targets," and they shortly desisted. The emboldened Germans counterattacked on the 12th, although a one-day postponement allowed the British "to consolidate their foothold, site twenty machine guns in commanding positions," and render the effort costly and ineffective. (Keegan, p. 195)
In the end, Haig had expended 11,600 casualties to occupy the ghost town of Neuve Chapelle, while the Germans had lost 8,600 -- an outcome and exchange ratio that would recur with numbing consistency throughout the war. Time and again, as they moved further from their artillery and communications, the aggressors lost the advantages of surprise and concentration, and became vulnerable to defenders firepower; as soon as the latter overextended their own lines, they became exposed to the defects that had undermined their opponents. (Keegan, pp. 195-196)
If Neuve Chapelle was the harbinger of an indelible pattern of lethal futility, so too was the Second Battle of Ypres, which followed a month later. Falkenhayn initiated it for a number of reasons: to divert attention from the transfer of troops to the East; to secure a more commanding position on the Channel coast; and to experiment with a deadly new weapon.
"A suitably novel and horrendous prologue" to the battle was the mining with secret explosives of Hill 60, the highest point on the Messines Ridge overlooking the Ypres salient; the detonation on April 17 killed one thousand Germans and enabled the British to capture the position at a cost of seven casualties. (Meyer, pp 295-296)
Five days later, following an intense forty-eight hour bombardment, opposite the village of Langemarck, two greenish-yellow clouds drifted across the front toward the French trenches and, heavier than air, settled among the unsuspecting Algerian and Zouave soldiers awaiting the enemy. This was not the tear-producing xylyl bromide of Bolimov, but chlorine, which causes excruciating death by overstimulation of fluid in the lungs, or drowning. The effect was immediate and terrifying; within the hour, the first line had been abandoned, a gap 8000 yards wide yawned invitingly, and nothing stood between the Germans and the shattered ruins of Ypres. (Meyer, p. 296)
Disaster was averted by the gallant stand of several reserve Canadian divisions rushed into action, by German fears of asphyxiation by their own hand, and by their failure to mass enough support to capitalize on the breakthrough. By the time the scope of the opportunity was apparent, congeries of British, French, and colonial troops had plugged the breach -- and a British Lieutenant Colonel, having deduced by the greening of his brass buttons that the toxin was soluble, demonstrated that cloths soaked in water (or urine) and tied around the mouth would serve as a prophylactic. (Meyer, p. 297)
"After the first day, Second Ypres turned into a standard Western Front charnel house. The Germans, never having intended to capture anything, settled into routine defensive positions while the French and British launched counterattacks that accomplished nothing." (Meyer, p. 298)
"The profitless slaughter pit of Ypres," as Churchill would call it, dragged on into late May, not ending until the Germans ran low on shells. They had taken forty thousand casualties, the British sixty thousand, while injecting two new elements into the war: mining and gas. (Meyer, p. 299)
Lacking any further technological surprises, on May 9 the British and French launched massive dual offensives which, pledged French commander Joffre, would "finish the war in three months." Two British formations were to storm the Aubers Ridge behind the enemy front line and, moving southeast, link up with the French, who by then would be on the march toward the town of Loos and the plain of Lens beyond that.
The British attack "came to grief quickly and dramatically," in this second battle of Artois. Forty minutes of preliminary but ineffective shrapnel bombardment failed to dent German dugouts reinforced with timbers and sandbags. Losses were 11,000 the first day -- followed by 17,000 more on May 16 and 18 with no ground gained -- "a disastrous fifteen hours of squandered heroism, unredeemed by the faintest glimmer of success," wrote historian Alan Clark. (Marshall, p. 207)
Initially, the French had more success against Vimy Ridge, in part because they waited a week while their 1200 guns poured 700,000 shells on the Bavarian Sixth Army. In three days they were able to penetrate the enemy front three miles -- their deepest thrust since the advent of position warfare -- until heavy rain "turned the ground into a gluey mud that further progress impossible." An impressive but temporary bending-back of the German line was ultimately stymied by last-ditch machine gun nests guarding their artillery. "As usual, the fight went on long after any chance of victory had evaporated . . . When it ended on June 18, the French had lost more than 100,000 men, the Germans just under 50,000." (Meyer, p. 323)
Ottoman Turkey was a slowly disintegrating empire held in the grip of a totally corrupt regime -- the thuggish remnant of the Young Turk revolutionaries who had deposed the sultan in 1908, namely Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha. Sedulously courted by Kaiser Wilhelm, they had finally opted to join the Central Powers when two German cruisers, the Goeben and the Breslau -- ostensibly purchased by Turkey but still under German command -- had eluded their British pursuers, steamed into the Black Sea accompanied by a Turkish flotilla, and on October 29, 1914, shelled three Russian cities. Three days later Russia declared war on Turkey, followed promptly by France and Britain.
The Turkish war effort -- which in time ran aground on three fronts: Egypt, Mesopotamia,and the Southern Caucasus -- cost it one-fourth of its population. "Of 4,000,000 adult males, about 1,600,000 were called to service. More than 1,000,000 families were left without breadwinners. A multitude of women, children, and old folk died of starvation and lack of medical care." (Marshall, p. 121)
Another lamentable outcome was the Ottoman government's undeclared campaign of genocide -- the first in a century of similar catastrophes -- against its Armenian subjects. Between June 1915 and late 1917 nearly 700,000 men, women, and children were force-marched into the desert to die of starvation and thirst -- an act of retaliation for a Russian victory which had enabled a division of Christian Armenians to establish a provincial government inside Russian-occupied Turkish territory and murder native Turks. (Keegan, p. 223)
Several factors directed British attention toward the Turkish Mediterranean front: the consolidation of the immovable trench line on the Western Front, which was causing tremendous loss of life; an appeal from Grand Duke Nicholas for a show of force in the theater; and battlefield evidence of Turkish ineptitude. A strike against the Dardanelles, the thirty mile passage separating the tiny European peninsula of Gallipoli from Asia -- where the Turks had shown no ability to resist an encroachment by a British ship in November 1914 -- was deemed the optimal strategy for crippling the Central Powers.
An admission from Admiral Sackville Carden, commander of the Mediterranean fleet, that, while it would be impossible to "rush the Dardanelles . . . they might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships," gave First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill the rationale to organize such a project. (Keegan, p. 237)
Assembling the most potent naval force ever seen in that part of the world -- sixteen battleships, twenty destroyers, an assortment of cruisers, and thirty-five fishing trawlers outfitted as minesweepers -- Carden promised to reach Constantinople in thirty days.
Beginning February 19 and continuing until March 16, his battleships pounded the forts guarding the strait's entrance into submission -- allowing marines and sailors to land and roam the nearby heights. It was deceptively encouraging progress.
Ten miles further north, at the Narrows, where the sea lane was only a mile wide, other well-protected guns remained menacingly intact. The civilian volunteers manning the improvised minesweepers refused to proceed under fire and had to be replaced by inexperienced sailors. On the night of March 8, a Turkish steamer slipped into the cleared sector and deposited twenty mines underwater. Carden suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced by Vice-Admiral John de Robeck.
Concluding that "forcing the Narrows" would require the coordinated effort of all ships available, de Robeck ordered a grand advance on March 18. Between 11:30 AM and 2:00 PM all went well; the armada chugged a mile up the strait, overcoming each fixed and mobile battery as it moved forward, its firepower reaching the gun emplacements at the Narrows.
"Then, suddenly, the balance of the battle swung the other way." (Keegan, p. 239) The second French battleship in line, the Bouvet, blew up and sunk in two minutes, taking a crew of 600 with her. "The trawler-minesweepers came under heavy fire from the howitzers in the hills and soon turned and fled." (Meyer, p. 280) Two British battleships, the Irresistible and the Ocean, struck mines and sunk. "Both the Gaulois (French) and the Inflexible (French) were badly mauled, with hard damage to structure and some loss of crew." (Marshal, p. 154)
As darkness fell and shore targets were no longer distinguishable, de Robeck withdrew his fleet -- at first despondent, but later re-energized to return to the fray once he received word from Churchill that replacement ships were on the way.
Witnessing the engagement was General Ian Hamilton -- a veteran of the India and Boer Wars, an observer of the Russo-Japanese War, and a close friend of War Minister Kitchener; he had been rushed to the Mediterranean to take command of 70,000 gathering infantrymen. Eager to deploy his army, Hamilton wired Kitchener that strong landing parties were needed to support the resumption of naval activity -- drawing a conclusion probably best left to the Admiralty. Nevertheless, his certainty intimidated de Robeck into acquiescence and rendered Chuchill's protests to the contrary unavailing.
The Turks and Germans were astounded when de Robeck failed to return to the strait. Low in ammunition and mines with no means of resupply, demoralized to the point of readying an evacuation of Constantinople, they believed the British Navy was on the cusp of total victory.
"If only the English will leave us alone eight days!" exclaimed General Otto Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission, whom Enver Pasha had placed at the head of his 84,000 Turkish Army. Finding his purported invaders logistically unprepared for anything as demanding as a landing on hostile shores, Hamilton procrastinated a month -- enough time for Sanders to populate the peninsula, improve its roads, and build fortifications above the beaches. (Marshall, p.176)
On April 25 the most powerful force ever to attempt an amphibious landing in the face of an armed enemy steamed over the horizon from the south and approached Gallipoli -- two hundred transports carrying 27,000 British soldiers of the 29th Division, 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops (Anzacs), and 16,000 Frenchmen, accompanied by de Robeck's bombardment fleet.
Hamilton had devised a scatter shot strategy. The Royal Naval Division was to make a feint toward Bulair at the narrow northern neck of the peninsula, "impossibly rough and heavily manned ground. The French, held in reserve were to make a diversionary landing of one regiment at Kum Kale, on the Asiatic shore." The 29th Division was to touch down on five small, unconnected beaches around Cape Helles, the toe of the peninsula. The Anzacs' destination was Gaba Tepe, a promising-looking spot ten miles up the coast which led to flat terrain. (Marshall, p. 177)
"The invasion should have been a success." At Cape Helles the British outnumbered the Turks six to one, and met heavy fire and barbed-wire resistance at only two attack points, V and W, where they suffered 2000 casualties at the hands of one hundred stubborn defenders. Nevertheless, the invaders took control of their designated areas, and hunkered down to await instructions that never came. (Meyer, pp. 309-310)
"With a terrible absurdity, the same thing happened at the three undefended beaches. The British could have moved inland effortlessly and taken the high ground that lay before them . . . But no one had told their commanders what to do after getting ashore." (Meyer, p. 310)
"At one of the undefended beaches (Y), after standing by idly all day, they spent a hard night fighting off an enemy force that had at last come forward to confront them. In the morning, thinking their position hopeless, they returned to their landing craft and were taken away -- at exactly the same time their Turkish adversaries, also having had enough, were themselves withdrawing." (Meyer, p. 310)
At Gaba Tepe, twelve thousand Australians and New Zealanders made their way ashore in twelve hours -- but a mile north of their target amidst steep rocky hills and ravines. As their advance units struggled to seize the heights of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair, they were met by the lead battalion of the Turkish 19th Regiment. Hurrying his men to the crests was the little-known lieutenant colonel, Mustafa Kemal, whose inspired leadership would become "the genesis of his greater fame as the father of a reformed Turkish Republic." (Marshall, p. 176)
"A day of desperate close-quarters fighting ensued . . . with both sides bringing forward more troops and launching one assault after another. Kemal, directing his men to make yet another charge in which no one seemed likely to survive, uttered the words that would forever form the core of his legend. 'I don't order you to attack,' he said. 'I order you to die.' " (Meyer, p. 311)
"Slowly, at terrible cost, the Turks forced the Anzacs back down the hill toward their landing place." When their commander sent Hamilton a message reporting failure and asking to have his men disembarked, he replied that they were to stay where they were and "dig, dig, dig." (Meyer, p. 312)
On the lower ground at Cape Helles, the British and French made two more attempts to extend their beach heads -- on April 28 and May 6 -- but both were repulsed with heavy losses, as the enemy had reinforced their positions.
Seventeen thousand Australians and New Zealanders remained crowded into, and unable to break out of, the wretched 2000-yard deep, one-mile-and-a-half-in-perimeter toehold they christened Anzac Cove. "Gallipoli turned into something almost worse than outright defeat: a stalemate as tightly locked as the one on the Western Front." (Meyer, p. 312)
Three months later the Allies made a third attempt to storm the peninsula. This time the centerpiece was an amphibious landing five miles north of Anzac Cove at Suvla Bay, where Turkish defenses were known to be weak.
By the morning of August 7, 25,000 soldiers had been delivered on shore with hardly any losses. Unfortunately, their commander, sixty-one-year-old Frederick Stopford, had never known combat. After moving two miles inland, his men inexplicably halted, moving back and forth in confusion, and failed to occupy the undefended heights of the Tekke Tepe, which had been the objective of the whole exercise. By the time one brigade managed to claw its way to the summit, Mustafa Kemal was there to meet it.
"The fight for Tekke Tepe Ridge followed two days of terrible combat at Anzac Cove . . . [during which] without sleep, able to stay on his feet only with the aid of stimulants administered by a doctor who followed him everywhere, Kemal was shot through the wrist while driving the Anzacs from the high point of Chunuk Bair." (Meyer, p. 342)
Although "the second invasion of Gallipoli was essentially finished . . . the hapless Stopford launched three additional attacks," the last on August 21, the largest engagement of the entire campaign. He "all but wrecked the 29th Division that had arrived . . . amid such high hopes in April. These anticlimactic offensives managed to connect Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove but not to capture any of the high ground on which the Turks were now positioned in strength." (Meyer, pp. 342-343)
At a cost of 40,000 casualties during the month, the Allies gained "five hundred acres of bad grazing ground" and a third shallow stakeout on the Gallipoli peninsula." (Marshall, p. 189)
They salvaged one minor victory from the extended debacle -- an evacuation conducted under cover of darkness between December 28, 1915, and January 8, 1916, which should be regarded as no less than miraculous, since each successive day left a dwindling number of troops exposed to annihilation should the Turks comprehend their vulnerability. The ill-conceived and poorly executed adventure cost each side 200,000 total casualties, including 46,000 Allied dead and 90,000 Turkish.
On the Eastern Front, the remainder of 1915 witnessed a series of unmitigated disasters which left the Russians on life support. In May, at Gorlice and Tarnow, their Third Army was overwhelmed by a one-two punch delivered by Mackensen's new Eleventh Army and Conrad's Austrians, who captured 150,000 prisoners and 200 guns. By mid-month Mackensen reached the San River; two weeks later he retook Przemysl, after a defensive stand ordered by Grand Duke Nicholas proved futile against German artillery. By the time the Germans were stalled by supply and transport problems and the Austrians by a counterattack, the Russian losses had soared to 400,000, and would have been greater had not some units barely evaded entrapment. (Meyer, pp. 328-329)
Over Falkenhayn's protests that not enough troops were available to achieve Ludendorff's objective of total victory, the Kaiser decided that the campaign should continue. By June 22, the Germans had occupied Lemberg and pushed the Russians back to the Bug River, completely out of Galicia, an astonishing relinquishment of all they had gained since the start of the war.
On July 1 the Kaiser rebuffed Falkenhayn's suggestion that negotiations be opened with the Russians, and gave his blessing for a renewed three-pronged offensive: one army group would drive southward to the east of Warsaw; another would attack from the west; and Mackensen would move north toward Lublin and Brest-Litovsk. (Meyer, p. 332)
Town after town succumbed to colossal artillery bombardments. On August 5 Warsaw was abandoned; it had been Russian-occupied for exactly one hundred years. (Meyer, p. 332) Scorching the earth as they retreated, the Tsar's Cossacks and soldiers drove over a million of the region's inhabitants -- most of whom were Jews -- from their homes and destroyed stores of grain and other foodstuffs and four million head of cattle. (Meyer, p. 344)
"The scale of the war in the east was breathtaking." Within days the Germans seized the strongholds of Novo Georgievsk and Kovno and their 2000 guns. By now they had taken 700,000 prisoners, the Austrians an equal number. In desperation "Tsar Nicholas removed Grand Duke Nicholas as head of the Russian armies and, to the entirely appropriate horror of his ministers, appointed himself to the position." (Meyer, pp. 344-345)
On August 31 Conrad sent his tattered Austrians in a sweeping offensive aimed at encircling twenty-five enemy divisions south of the Pripet Marshes. Initial success gave way to disaster, when one army, after capturing the city of Lutsk, was outflanked by a Russian force that had concealed itself in the high grasses. In thirty days Conrad lost 300,000 men.
Two German pincer movements -- at Grodno and Vilna -- couldn't close in time to cut the railway lines running east and prevent the Russians from retiring in good order and establishing a new front. Having suffered 50,000 casualties in the effort, Ludendorff "settled down to a busy winter of organizing and administering his substantial conquests." (Meyer, p. 347) The Russian army had been battered, but with shell output increasing and manpower reserves approaching twenty million, it remained a viable fighting force. (Keegan, p. 233)
Impressed by the Turks' valiant performance at Gallipoli and lured by the opportunity to regain territory it had lost to Serbia in the Second Balkan War, on September 6 Bulgaria yoked its fortunes to the Central Powers. It wasted no time, dispatching six divisions westward to act in concert with sixteen from Germany and Austria moving south in an effort to crush the remnant of the Serbian army.
In order to save Serbia and attract Greece as a partner, Britain and France embarked on an exercise as hopeless as Gallipoli. Although King Constantine of Greece -- intent on preserving his country's neutrality -- had dismissed his Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, an advocate of the Allies, he was obliged to allow the landing of a Franco-British expeditionary force at the port of Salonika. As a military base and fountainhead of an invasion, it was totally inadequate: only a single-track rail line ran north into Bulgaria; a few troops stationed on the surrounding heights could hold back legions; and the countryside was malaria-ridden and subject to heavy flooding in winter and intense heat in summer. (Marshall, p. 194)
By the time the rescuers were ashore on October 5, it was too late to help Serbia. Their commander, French General Maurice Surrail, found his route north blocked by the Bulgarian Sixth Army. "The Serbs, trapped between overwhelming forces approaching from two directions, decided to run for the sea. Masses of civilians fled with it . . . Exhausted, without food or other supplies, many were set upon by tribal enemies as they tried to cross the snowbound mountains of Albania." Of the 135,000 surviving Serbian soldiers, only half were fit enough to be transferred on British ships to the island of Corfu to await future service. (Meyer, pp. 354-355)
National pride, political pressure, and Russian pleas for a continued presence there compelled the British and French to linger in Salonika for the duration of the war. It became, in the words of German journalists, " 'the greatest internment camp in the world' . . . a great military hospital, where casualties sometimes exceeded one hundred per cent of the strength of arms on hand," (Keegan, pp. 255-256), a resoundingly pathetic verdict on this "most ponderous and illogical undertaking of World War I." (Marshall, p. 197)
Erupting on September 25, the final 1915 bloodstorm on the Western Front ravaged three distinct killing fields: Champagne, west of Verdun, where French divisions outnumbered German twenty-seven to seven; Artois, where the advantage was seventeen to two: and Loos, where six British divisions were opposed by only one German. "It was the spring offensive repeated on a larger scale." (Meyer, p. 348)
German positions were, however, close to impregnable, consisting of two lines, three miles apart, with concrete machine-gun posts in between, the second of which was constructed on the reverse slope of any height occupied, where it was amply protected from the artillery fire designed to destroy it. German tactics were not to bombard trenches but to barrage enemy infantrymen as they assembled and as they moved forward into no man's land; those who survived that gauntlet would be decimated by the machine gunners. (Keegan, p. 201)
In Champagne, four days and four nights of shelling wrecked the German first line; the French reached the second so quickly that they came under fire from their own artillery and had to pull back. By the time they regrouped and resumed the attack, the opportunity was lost; German reserves had regained the contested ground. Six more weeks of useless battering against an immovable object cost the French 145,000 casualties, almost twice the defenders'. (Meyer, pp. 350-352)
At Artois -- despite its grotesquely cut-up terrain, machine gun cupolas, deep dugouts, belts of wire, and elaborate trench systems (Marshal, p. 229) -- the French briefly claimed the crest of Vimy Ridge for a second time in 1915 before the impenetrable second German line drove them back. Concluding that further attempts were hopeless, French commander Joffre, for whom Artois had been only a secondary holding action, suspended operations -- but secretively, so as not to deter the British from pursuing their own offensive at Loos. (Meyer, p. 351)
Recovering from their own discharge of chlorine gas, which blew back in their faces, the British stormed both German lines, and achieved a stunning breakthrough into vacant countryside -- but too far, it turned out, as they had outdistanced their reserve divisions by ten miles. By the time those reached the front and resumed the advance across open grassland, "the Germans had filled the hole and were hammering away with their machine guns . . . The result was the most one-sided slaughter of the war: 7,861 troops and 385 officers were killed or wounded in a few hours, while German casualties totaled exactly zero." (Meyer, p. 351)
"Nauseated by the spectacle of the 'corpse field of Loos,' the Germans held their fire as the British turned in retreat, 'so great was the feeling of compassion and mercy after such a victory'. . . Though the British persisted with attacks for another three weeks, they gained nothing but a narrow salient two miles deep," at a sacrifice of 16,000 killed and 25,000 wounded. (Keegan, p. 202)
Although hardly without fault himself -- he had failed to provide a reserve from his own attack force -- Sir Douglas Haig was able to convince the King and War Cabinet that his superior, Sir John French, had erred grievously at Loos by holding his reserves too long and situating them too far in the rear. Sir John became the year's most notable casualty when he was dismissed as commander of the British Expeditionary Force and replaced by Haig.
Nineteen fifteen was mercifully at an end.
REFERENCES
Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars; A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.
Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004
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