They’ve tried new weapons, new tactics, new battlefronts, but the war keeps growing
in size and there’s no end in sight.
By now we’ve reached the point where morale has crumbled to where the leaders will try
anything - attacking their own men, creating new nations, freeing prisoners - ANYTHING
to be able to continue the war.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the 9th Battle of the Isonzo River began and ended, with the Italians nearly
breaking through the Austrian lines, but the Austrians being saved by reinforcements in
the nick of time.
The Romanians held their own in the mountains, the Bulgarians were pushed back in the Balkans,
and German flying ace Oswald Boelcke met his fate.
It had been quiet at the Somme, but it wasn’t this week.
British Commander in Chief Sir Douglas Haig had determined that the seventh British attack
on the Germans at the Transloy line would take place November 5th, and as usual, he
set objectives beyond the line itself.
The fact that finally taking Transloy would not end the ordeal provoked Lord Cavan, whose
men would actually carry out the attack, to speak up.
He insisted to Haig’s second in command Sir Henry Rawlinson that there was no chance
of success in the attack, and though Cavan realized that they must support the French,
even if it meant a sacrifice, this sacrifice would do nothing much to assist the French
and would destroy morale in the men.
Rawlinson didn’t budge, and sent for a small “test” attack the 3rd to see what might
be expected the 5th.
And what might be expected was failure, because that’s what just happened to the test attack.
Cavan said he wouldn’t attack until Rawlinson had personally seen conditions at the front.
So Rawlinson turned up, looked around, and said, “yeah, let’s not do this attack.”
He convinced Haig not to do it.
But then Haig changed his mind, and the attack was back on, and you can guess how it went.
It failed.
With a couple thousand casualties.
The Germans didn’t budge.
The Germans were trying not to budge elsewhere this week, in Dobrogea.
Against the Russian and Romanian forces, but there were problems with the Russians by now.
The German advance had threatened to break the allied lines, so Russia had to call off
any strikes further north against Hungary on the Southeastern front to plug the gap here.
German General August von Mackensen’s Bulgarian forces were poised to cut off Bucharest from
the sea and by this point it seemed like only big Russian reinforcements could prevent a
Romanian collapse.
26 Russian infantry divisions and 11 cavalry divisions were now heading south.
However, the Romanian railways that took them there could only handle 19 trains a day, and
each Russian Corps required 130 trains to move, so there literally was no means of getting
the Russian troops to Romania.
In any case, the Romanians had only provided 30 actual trains, so Russian soldiers had
to arrive all the way from Czernowitz on foot.
By November 9th only the Russian IV Corps had arrived and they were sufficient to hold
the Bulgarians south of the Danube.
No one knew if any more Russians would arrive in time.
Still, though, Mackensen’s line was actually giving way a bit this week to Russo-Romanian pressure.
He retreated through Topal and was now only 20km north of the Cernavoda-Costanza railway.
On the other Romanian front, in the mountains, the Germans resumed their offensive and the
situation there still looked like it was anybody’s game.
And it was probably just as well that Russia was no longer on the offensive on the eastern
front; on the 5th, British observer Colonel Knox wrote in his diary (Gilbert), “The
plain truth is that without airplanes and far more heavy guns and shell and some knowledge
of their use, it is butchery, and useless butchery, to drive Russian infantry against
German lines.”
Knox was told by General Nikolai Dukhonin, Russian Quartermaster General, that “since
the beginning of June, Russian killed and wounded exceeded a million men”.
But they had not just held out against the Central Powers, the Russian summer offensive
had steamrolled the Austrians and come close to knocking the Empire out of the war.
And by this point (Gilbert) the Central Powers no longer had confidence in a decisive breakthrough
because of French and British perseverance in the west, Brusilov’s Russian advance
in the east, and Italian tenacity in the mountains.
The Kaiser thought maybe there was a political solution to the war- winning over the Polish
to the German cause.
General Erich von Ludendorff dreamed of a Polish army under German leadership that could
fight in the east so Germany could concentrate in the west.
On November 5th, Germany and Austria-Hungary announced that Poland will be established
as an independent state with Warsaw as capital.
But Germany would keep a tight grip on her, and the Poles wanted political power, not
just military.
Polish military leader Josef Pilsudski said “No army without a government to command it”.
When government was denied, Pilsudski withdrew his 10,000 strong brigade from Ludendorff’s command.
This whole scenario backfired on the Germans, because German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg
had been exploring the option of a separate peace with the Russians.
But think about it, whatever the land agreement in that peace would be, does anyone think
the Tsar would’ve agreed to an independent Poland being carved out of the west of his empire?
Furthermore, informal- and secret- talks had already taken place in Stockholm between German
industrialist Hugo Stinnes, and the vice president of the Russian Duma, A.D.
Protopopov, but now they were discontinued.
Vladimir Lenin was actually relieved about all of this - in exile in Switzerland - because
he was worried that a separate peace between Germany and Russia would ruin the chance for
a Russian revolution.
Wheels within wheels.
But everyone needed new men to fight the war and the Poles would’ve helped.
Look at Austria-Hungary.
On just the Isonzo River against the Italians, the Austrians had lost 130,000 men since August
and had no real hope of replenishing their losses, but Italian Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna’s
advantages weren’t as strong as they appeared.
His recruits were poorly trained, likewise the new officers, and the little ground gained
for enormous casualties was far from a limited success at a reasonable cost.
And he still blamed failure on the infantry’s lack of fighting spirit, and the impact of
all this on the morale of his men was obvious.
None of Cadorna’s offensives had given the men the feeling they’d actually won something,
and since Italy was fighting an aggressive war, if they were not advancing then they
were, by definition, failing.
A lieutenant fighting on the Carso summer it up, “It’s not the dying that is the
demoralizing thing, the thing that grinds you down, it is dying so uselessly for nothing.
This is not dying for the fatherland, it is dying for the stupidity of specific orders
and the cowardice of specific commanding officers.”
By now there were even mutinies.
Last week 6 men were executed for mutiny and Cadorna issued a directive that commanders
had to decimate mutinous units.
Morale was failing everywhere.
For two years at Ruhleben POW camp, prisoners kept their spirits up by hoping the war would
soon end, but after the British and Germans agreed to exchange all civilian prisoners
over 45 years old, everyone else realized that they were going to be there for a long time.
One guy sent home, Israel Cohen, wrote on November 6th in the preface to the first published
history of Ruhleben camp, “Hundreds of tragedies are being slowly and secretly enacted behind
the brick walls and barbed wire fence of Ruhleben... of men torn from their families, reft of their
livelihood, and tormented daily by gnawing anxiety about the future struggle for which
physical privation and mental depression are rendering them more and more unfit.”
And here are some notes to end the week:
On Nov 5th at Verdun, the French occupied whole of Vaux.
On the 6th came the defeat and death of Ali Dinar, former sultan of Darfur, near the frontier
at Wadai.
That same day the liner Arabia was sunk by torpedoes off the Greek coast.
On the 7th, Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term as U.S. President, and on the
9th, Portuguese troops were now ready to leave for the Western Front.
And a busy week of war ends with British failure at the Somme, logistical problems for Romania
and Russia, a glimmer of hope for the Poles, and morale crumbling everywhere.
There is a quick fix for that.
On the Italian front, the men on the lines knew they were going to attack soon when the
military police mounted machine guns behind them, ready to shoot at soldiers who hesitated
when the charge was called.
There’s no hard data on how many men were killed this way, but in memoirs and diaries
you get an impression.
“The White War” recounts that in one minor action in the Dolomites, 80 men were killed
by enemy machine guns, and 25 by the military police.
Cadorna said, “When a soldier lacks the spirit and will to fight, he lacks everything”.
Unlike most Cadorna-isms, this is actually pretty true, but he also believed in the converse,
that having spirit and will made soldiers unstoppable, and that is one great falsehood
of modern war.
More often than not the soldiers would break under these conditions and suffer from what
was then called Shellshock.
If you want to find out more about the psychological effects of modern war, click here to watch
our special episode.
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