October 30, 1914. In the last three months and two days since
the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, hundreds of thousands of men have
died violently in battle. These men were the professional or trained conscript armies of
Europe, but with their passing and with no end of the war in sight, the warring nations
were now forced to send untrained recruits, even teenagers or middle aged men, to die
in battle like lambs to the slaughter.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
When we left off, we saw the Germans retreating from Warsaw, the Austrians launching and losing
a big attack on the Russians at Ivangorod, the British and Germans suffering enormous
losses at Ypres, the Belgians holding the line at the Yser, and the Japanese blockading
the German port of Tsingtao. Here’s what happened next:
On the Western Front, German Army Chief of Staff Falkenhayn had assembled an army of
new recruits to fight at Ypres in Flanders , and as novices in battle up against the
British professionals, they had died by the thousands marching in large masses up against
machine guns and rapid rifle fire. But there were thousands more German recruits coming,
and this week the new reserve recruits managed to gain some ground further north. On October
24th, they crossed the Yser River.
This was really bad news for the Belgians, as the Germans could finally reach the sea.
The Belgian commanders proposed retreat, but King Albert refused. The situation called
for something drastic though, and after a further 20,000 Belgians were lost in battle,
something drastic was done. The lock gates at Nieuport were opened at high tide to flood
the surrounding land with seawater, and after a few days the Belgian countryside was flooded
a mile wide as far south as Dixmude. This was impassable and the Germans were forced
to withdraw. The allied left flank was now secure and Albert was now not only king, he
was a national hero.
As a side note here, one of the ambulance drivers around the Nieuport area was British
aristocrat Dorothie Fielding, who, for her work on the western front became the first
woman to win the British Military Medal for Bravery. She also received the French Croix
de Guerre and the Belgian Order of Leopold II for her service. Just thought she deserved
a mention here.
Looking back, German hopes of reaching the sea were by now as vain as British hopes of
pushing the Germans deep into Belgium, and we see further south that the battle ON the
Ypres salient was now the battle FOR the Ypres salient.
Falkenhayn was still optimistic about breaking through here and nearly did so at Neuve Chappelle
the 27th, but was beaten back in hand to hand combat by Indian troops the next morning,
but German reinforcements were being brought up along the whole sector and Falkenhayn’s
next offensive would soon begin.
See, to him, the capture of Ghevault was essential and a prelude to the eventual capture of Ypres
and the sea. In response, French General Foch agreed to send support from further south
to help the beleaguered British, but it would take a few days to arrive. The Germans moved
into position. I’d like to take a look at those British
troops now for a minute. When the war broke out, the British regulars were the only fully
professional army in Europe, but because of their small size they’d initially been mocked.
However, over the past three months, they’d repeatedly shown their capability in the field,
but the race to the sea and the First Battle of Ypres would mark the end of the British
regular army[ab] and usher in a period of conscription because of the following numbers:
Three months ago, British Commander John French led 84 battalions with nearly 1,000 men each.
As November began, only 35 of those battalions had more than 200 men remaining, 31 had between
100 and 200, and 18 battalions were down from nearly 1,000 to fewer than 100 men.
But it certainly wasn’t just the British who were forced to recruit new and often untrained
soldiers. In the battles of Ypres and the Yser, the German army had sent tens of thousands
of raw recruits into battle with no experience of battle or training and their losses were
catastrophic.
At the cemetery of the German volunteer corps today in nearby Langemarck, the bodies of
25,000 student soldiers lie in a mass grave. There are gravestones that read such names
as “Musketeer Braun” and “Volunteer Schmidt”over graves that contain several
bodies each, a testament to the “kindermord bei Ypern”- the Massacre of the Innocents
at Ypres, which it was, when in a desperate attempt to break through, the Germans sent
men who had no business being on a battlefield against the best trained soldiers in Europe,
the British regulars.
Now, the British, as we’ve seen, had the occasional luxury of reinforcing their troops
from their whole empire, but they weren’t the only ones. Russia had been bringing troops
from Siberia and Central Asia to fill out her ranks, and they had been arriving for
the past two weeks, turning the tide in the east against the Germans.
The Germans had been retreating from their aborted attack toward Warsaw, realizing that
the sheer number of Russians was simply too much to attack for the moment.
There was heavy fighting further south though, as the Austrian army was disengaging and falling
back from their huge loss to Russia at Ivangorod. Austria was by now in the grip of an ammunitions
shortage, with artillery rations were down to only four shells a day per piece, and there
was a big defeatist mood among the Austrian army.
This was compounded by an outbreak of cholera among the troops, which killed nearly 4,000
Austrians this month and weakened many more. Since it took time for the vaccine to be authorized
and then distributed, many Austrian soldiers faked the symptoms to get away from the front
lines. Austria further had the problem of Slavic soldiers defecting join the Russians,
seeing them as their true nation and not the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire..
So the battle of the Vistula, also called the battle of Warsaw ended, and it did with
a ringing Russians victory. The Germans and Austrians were pushed back to the original
positions from which they’d begun their offensives weeks ago and Russia had made up
a lot for her losses to the Germans two months ago.
But Russia would have more to deal with in the future than merely the Austrian and German
empires it seemed, for on October 29th, the Ottoman Imperial navy bombed several Russian
ports on the Black Sea. Russia might soon have a third empire to fight.
There was a lot going on at sea this week, actually. The Audacious, one of Britain’s
most modern “super dreadnoughts” was sunk by a German mine off the Irish coast. Since
she took about 12 hours to sink, all crew was evacuated, but this was a real blow to
the British Fleet- who were much stronger on paper than in reality- and the sinking
was not officially reported until after the war, apparently for morale reasons, and Audacious
still appeared in the fleet lists. However, there were American sailors on board who took
photos of the ship and the sinking appeared in the American and subsequently world press,
so the cover-up didn’t do the British authorities a whole lot of PR wonders.
Also this week, the German light cruiser Emden attacked allied ships at Penang, what is now
part of Malaysia. In a quick raid, the Emden sank a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer
before fleeing. The Emden was alone in the area, the rest of the German East Asia Squadron
had left for Germany at the beginning of the war, and she continued her raiding adventures
for another 10 day[ax]s until being damaged by the Australian warship Sydney and being
run aground. During her raids, Emden had captured or sunk over 20 civilian vessels and become
the scourge of the local seas.
Now, before I wrap things up today I’d like to tell an unrelated side story here that
I don’t know where else to put. I got this from Max Hastings’ book “Catastrophe”-
at this time in Ypres, Ronald Colman was wounded in the leg and the war for him was over, but
he went on to become a Hollywood star. Funny thing is his regiment also contained Basil
Rathbone, Claude Rains, and Herbert Marshall, who all also became Hollywood stars. What
are the odds of that?
So at the end of the week, the Belgians are flooding away the Germans, further south the
British are awaiting French help while the local Germans get ready for a huge new offensive
in Flanders. The Russians are on top now against both the Germans and the Austrians, but Russian
ports have just been bombed by the Ottomans. It was also around this week in 1914 that
the term no-mans land appeared describing the space between the rival trenches.
So when would it stop? It was a good question. Now that hundreds of thousands of men had
died and the warring nations were recruiting teenagers and students to send into battle,
when would it all stop? When would we win? Well, it wouldn’t stop for another four
years after a shocking number of those new recruits died violently in the mud or drowned
beneath the seas because, as George Orwell so simply put it: the only way to swiftly
end a war is to lose it.
subscribe now and avoid a lonely death in the darkness.
And even though this war had took the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, like any
war, it also had its fare share of mythical heroes whose stories would fascinate or terrify
common soldiers on both sides of the trenches. One of these greater than life figures was
Manfred von Richthofen aka The Red Baron. Check out this special video we made about
him as a first part in our new ongoing series about special individuals in The Great War.