Britain had an empire that spanned the globe, and even though the British army was being
stretched to its limit against the Germans, the British leadership and British people
still knew that their army was certainly far better than any force from the “less civilized”
parts of the world, and could easily handle enemy forces. Well, pride comes before a fall,
and this week, far from Britain, a British army gets into big, big trouble.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War
Last week the French had routed the Bulgarians at Mount Archangel but were unable to pursue
them. This meant they were also unable to reach their Serbian allies at the Babuna Pass,
who were forced to withdraw and now had basically nowhere to go but the Albanian mountains.
At Gallipoli, the decision was made to finally evacuate the disheartened and exhausted troops
there, a new war zone opened up in Libya, and the Italians were unable to push back
the Austro-Hungarian forces.
That battle was called the Fourth battle of the Isonzo River, and Italian General Luigi
Capello was taking the direct route to Gorizia, and yet Mount Sabotino was proving as hard
to take as it had in the first three battles of the Isonzo.
The Italians, as always, began with massive artillery bombardments, and then sent waves
of infantry up the mountain to be mown down by Austrian machine guns. However, at Oslavia
and Podgora, the Italians did have some success, but it came at a terrible cost in lives. So
by this time, the front line was a little closer to Podgora, and the Italians had captured
the ruins of little Oslavia.
Now, General Capello was an interesting character; he allowed journalists to come to the front,
which just about nobody anywhere did at this point, and this was seriously frowned upon
by his superior, Italian army chief of staff Luigi Cadorna. Still, you could see its effect
here, as the press claimed a great victory, which completely obscured the lack of any
serious progress on the Isonzo. The weather was now clearing up, so Cadorna ordered attacks
on Mount Rombon. These were costly and were repulsed handily by Slovenian troops in the
Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army. That army was forced to evacuate Mori and Rovereto on
the 23rd, and asked for German help on the Isonzo.
It was German help that had saved the Empire from collapse against Russia just seven months
ago, and indeed, the Austrians and Germans were now working together, in the invasion of Serbia.
Niš had fallen on November 5th, finally giving the Central Powers a direct railway link between
Berlin and Constantinople. In the two weeks since then, the pressure on the Serbian armies
continued relentlessly. Austrian, German, and Bulgarian forces were making a huge converging
movement to the Kosovo Plain, trying to encircle the main Serbian armies. The Serbs grew weaker
every day, their supply lines cut. They were running out of both ammunition and food. The
invaders grew stronger every day, as their line contracted and they brought up reinforcements.
Early this week, when Novi-Basar fell, the Serbian forces had been driven entirely from
the last corner of Old Serbia.
Actually, a week ago, German General August von Mackensen, commander of the Austro-German
forces, had offered peace terms to the Serbian leadership. If they accepted, all Serbia would
lose was Macedonia and a strip of land along the Bulgarian border. Serbian Prime Minister
Nikola Pašić said this, “Our way is marked out. We will be true to the Entente and die honorably.”
And at the Morava River, where the Serbs had blown the bridges and were trying to hold
the Bulgarians back, old Serbian King Peter himself, now in his 70s, walked the lines
under fire, encouraging his troops.
Now that is something we really don’t see much; national leaders being under fire to
inspire their countrymen. I wonder if that would make a difference to the war. Many of
them did visit their troops; but certainly not on the front lines under fire, and many
remained far from the action.
Britain’s King George, for example, almost couldn’t have been further from the action
this week, as in Mesopotamia, the British march on Baghdad continued, as General Charles
Townshend attacked Ctesiphon November 21st. Ctesiphon is but 40 kilometers from the final
goal. Townshend had done well the whole advance and had good luck at Basra, Qurna, Amara,
and Kut, but not here. Of the over 8,000 British and Indian troops sent into battle, more than
half were killed or wounded, and even though the Ottoman defenders took twice the number
of casualties, they did not break but vigorously counter-attacked.
The British were over 600 kilometers from the sea and could expect zero reinforcements;
the Ottomans could, of course, and had all the resources of Baghdad, only a few hours’
march away. Townshend’s troops were forced to retreat in humiliation, and began to pull
back toward Kut on the 25th, but the retreat was hell. There were no facilities for the
wounded, and the men were exhausted. When they got to Kut and sent the wounded men on
down river, Arab brigands picked them off with rifles from both banks, as they lay helpless in the boats.
So, at Kut the British dug in and prepared for an Ottoman attack, and that didn’t sound
like anything promising, as they knew that German Field Marshal Wilhelm Colmar von der
Goltz was heading their way with 30,000 Turkish reinforcements. Von der Goltz had retired
from active duty in 1911, but had come out of retirement when the war began. He had been
the military governor of occupied Belgium, but was now a military aide to the Ottomans.
A side note about von der Goltz; as the deportations of Armenians in Anatolia continued, von der
Goltz would directly intervene, and said that he would retire his command if they were not
stopped. It says something about his influence that he, a foreign officer, could even briefly
have an effect on Ottoman domestic policy that his position was considered, though this
week, on November 25th, reports state that to this point 500,000 deportees have passed
through the village of Marmura in the Adana District.
So, back to Mesopotamia. The British public had felt that the capture of mighty Baghdad
was only a matter of time, and instead they see that one of their armies might be cut
off and trapped. The British War Council advised Townshend to leave Kut and head down river;
he replied that he was already under siege.
And here are some notes to round out the week.
A dry frost and clear skies at the end of November gave perfect flying weather on the
Western Front, and what might be described as an epidemic of aerial activity resulted.
British, German, French, and Belgian planes were everywhere, with up to 15 dogfights in
a single day. The French introduced a bill calling up 400,000 young men who would ordinarily
not be called for another year or two, and by the end of November on the Eastern Front,
especially in the northern part, winter had set in and operations came to almost a complete
halt. The ground had frozen to a depth of over a meter in many places, and digging trenches
quickly was no longer possible, which meant making an advance and then digging in to hold
that ground was no longer possible. And one more bizarre note: on the 26th, the Tsar woke
up with a bad cold and wrote to the Tsarina that he was considering spraying his nose cocaine.
And that’s the week; an isolated British army in Mesopotamia under siege with no hope
of relief in sight, the Italians making small gains at a heavy cost, the Serbs being driven
from their land, action in the skies in the west, and the Tsar thinking about not “just saying no”.
I’m going to close today with another look at the Armenians. Here’s a thing I found
in Martin Gilbert’s “the First World War” . A Jewish woman named Sarah Aaronshon
set out from Constantinople to her home in Palestine, and she traveled through the Taurus
Mountains. In her biography it reads the following, “She saw vultures hovering over children
who had fallen dead by the roadside. She saw beings crawling along, maimed, starving, and
begging for bread. From time to time she passed soldiers driving before them with whips and
rifle-butts whole families, men, women, and children, shrieking, pleading, wailing. These
were the Armenian people setting out for exile in the desert from which there was no return”.
If you like to learn more about the beginnings of the Armenian genocide, you can check out our episode right here.
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