October 2, 1914
The Great War has raged for two months with hundreds of thousands of soldiers losing their
lives in some of the bloodiest battles in history but a new and unforseen factor now
entered the war and would play a huge part in determining its course: with the October
rains came the mud.
I’m Indy Neidell. Welcome to the Great War
When we left off, the British, French, and German armies in the west had reached a stalemate
at the Battle of the Aisne, and in the search for new advantages the trenches had begun
growing to the northwest in the Race to the Sea. The Russians were pushing the Austro-Hungarian
army back into Austria and were also heading north into Poland to engage the Germans, and
both the war in the air and the war at sea were getting serious.
It was now autumn in Europe, and one thing we see that was a regular feature of the war
was mud. Endless mud.
The Austrian army had barricaded itself in the fortress town of Przemsyl, 120,000 strong,
now entirely behind Russian lines, and the Russians began a siege on September 26th.
The Austrians had always planned and determined to hold Przemsyl, but the preparations were
typical of the last minute ramshackle efforts of Emperor Franz Josef’s army- half of the
guns were out of date pieces that still used black powder and loads of the shells turned
out to be duds, and though they did build a whole bunch of last minute defenses, including
30 miles of new trenches, they never got around to chopping do wn the trees near the fortress
town, which the Russians had the pleasure of using for concealment, but the Austrians
at least this time had the mud on their side.
You might except the fortress to fall fairly quickly since so far this war no fortress
on either front had been able to hold out against the power of modern artillery, but
the Autumn rains had turned the ground outisde the fortress to mud for many miles, and it
was too heavy and too deep for the Russians to bring their artillery close enough, and
the initial Russian attack would do nothing except produce 40,000 casualties.
The Russian General Ivanov was not pressuring them with his whole force, though. He had
send 30 divisions to the north a week ago. He now decided he wanted to re-group all of
those forces on the east bank of the Vistula River to launch an invasion of Germany. This
turned out to be a stunning piece of incompetence on Ivanov’s part as it resulted, seriously,
in weeks of marching and no fighting at all, with men and horses starving to death and
falling by the roadsides during the march through the muddy Polish autumn.
So you have one army digging in and one army on the move, which on the surface sounds similar
to the western front, with some men stuck in the trenches, while the others were on
the move.
There the race to the sea continued, with the Germans and the French trying to outflank
each other and the trench lines growing and growing toward the coast.
Now, on September 26th, the Germans began bombarding the forts around Antwerp. Liege
and Namur had fallen and Antwerp was the last bastion of Belgian resistance. Thing is, the
allies seriously needed as long a resistance in Antwerp as possible. Once the Germans conquered
it, they could quickly move to the ports of the English Channel, which would force the
British to retreat to western France, and which would represent a very real threat to
Britain herself. If Antwerp could hold out for even just a week, the British could get
in place a defensive line in Flanders blocking the coast, and from there could ideally launch
an offensive to liberate Belgium and push the Germans back across their own border.
The Belgians by this point were understandably demoralized and began sending their archives
and national treasures to Britain.
On the evening of October 2nd, came a meeting of British giants- Secretary of State for
War Lord Kitchener, Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, and Winston Churchill, who you probably
remember more from the Second World War than this one, but was at this point First Lord
of the Admiralty. Realizing that continued resistance in Antwerp as long as possible
was essential for the war effort in France, Churchill himself would go to Antwerp and
spend the next three days in the trenches or meeting with the Belgian government.
But trying to get them to continue to resist in general was an uphill battle- and one big
reason is that the Belgians could not dig trenches for protection; the ground between
the forts and the city had been deliberately flooded and digging trenches was impossible.
Once again, we see the mud of October determining the direction of the war. It was dire straits
in Antwerp indeed.
Imagine being Belgian in 1914. Your little country, your neutral country had been overrun
and turned into a war zone and your cities bombed and in some cases burned, and you had
nowhere to run. While the war at home in the other warring countries might not have been
in such a state of crisis, it was very much in a state of flux.
Think about it- you suddenly have all sorts of new rules and regulations on your life,
rules which would continue for over four years. Germany, for example, banned speaking English
in public while Russia banned the German language. Even speaking German on the phone was a 3,000
ruble fine and you were liable to be sent to Siberia for speaking German in person.
Yep, Siberia.
Soup kitchens were established in towns throughout Europe to provide for families who’d suddenly
lost their source of income. France did a good thing here: they imposed a moratorium
on rents and paid an allowance to the families whose breadwinner had gone to the army that
was in many cases more money than the family had made before the war. The French government
considered the price worth paying to sustain morale.
But if you were fairly poor and relied on some form of consumer trade for a living,
you were out of luck, and the pawnshop was probably your new best friend.
You can also really see the social divisions in, for example, Britain in labor issues.
Trade unionists who had made truces with employers when the war broke out were now seeing many
of those same employers making tons of new profits and wondered why they weren’t getting
a share. The friction that arose from this would lead to dramatic work stoppages, and
by 1915, three million working days would be lost in Britain because of industrial disputes.
New industries sprang up like lightning to create nouveaux war rich: spades, shells,
canvas, leather, explosives, canned food and... pencils and paper.
See, most Europeans were literate by 1914 and the war produced a colossal amount of
correspondence. If you look back at the Franco-Prussian war 40 years earlier, during the entire war
the Prussian army received about 500,000 pieces of mail. In 1914, the German army received
9.9 million pieces of mail EVERY DAY.
Here’s a weird fact that I got from the pages of Max Hastings’ book “Catastrophe”
about Lord Kitchener:
There’s an industry that you might not expect to boom during wartime goat farming.
Everybody was playing some part in the war effort, at home, at work, or on the battlefield,
and in the colonies of the empires things were no different.
The German colony in what is now Namibia was probably their most profitable colony, right?
With both diamond and copper mines. Well, this week saw the Battle of Sandfontein.
The brilliant German general Heyderbreck, with a force of 1700 mostly native riflemen,
sprung a trap on the South African forces, surrounding and overwhelming nearly twice
his number of men, after cutting the phone lines so that backup could not be called in.
Funnily enough, after the South Africans surrendered, both sides all hung out together, and Heyderbreck
and Colonel Grant, the leader of the South Africans, congratulated each other and discussed
the battle.
By 1915 the Germans would be forced to surrender in southwest Africa, but they won a string
of victories in 1914 that were really important in tying down South African troops and preventing
them from heading to Europe to help the allies in the major battles that fall.
So at the end of the week, the Russians were wandering around the Polish mud and laying
siege to the Austrians in the Austrian mud. The French and Germans were still shelling
each other in the trenches at the ongoing battle of the Aisne, but the Germans were
now pushing to take Antwerp, the last free city in Belgium, and the British were rushing
to defend it, while in Southwest Africa the Germans were being exceptional and tying down
the South African troops.
In September 1914, the war of rapid victories ended as the war of continuous battles in
the trenches began, and as October began the autumn rains turned the battlefields of Europe
to mud in both the east and the west, making marching excruciating and making life in the
trenches torture. Over the next four years, millions of men would die in the filthy mud
of Europe, many of them nameless, faceless, and unsung.
See you next week.
If you want to know more about the early weeks of war, check out our first episodes from
July 28. Please recommend our show to your friends or even to your history teacher and
let us know what you think in the comments.