RUSSIA IN THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 113, 8 November 1918, Page 12

RUSSIA IN THE WAR

BATTLES OF MOVEMENT

HOSTS PARALYSED BY REVOLUTION

FROM TRIUMPH TO TRAGEDY

Th<» details of the Russian campaigns have lalready sunk deeply out of sight, for the pattern of military events on the East front, as the war went on, rapidly interwove into that of the much vaster product of the political loom, and Russia is now a political rather than a military problem. But in the first two years Rusoia was a vast, military factor. The first and constantly dominant fact about Russia as an Allied' belligerent was that she was isola-ted,\during the whole period of her activity, from the restoosf s the Entente group. Germany's naval control of the Baltic cuts Petrograd off from London. Turkey, (Aider the German thumb, closed the Dardanelles at the flrst\alarm. One long single line of railway led from Petrograd to the port of Archangel, icebound in the winter and inadequate in the summer; and seven thousand miles of railway joined the military heart of Russia with Vladivostok—a" route practically strangled," for military purposes, by its vast length. Russia was to all intents and purposes closely blockaded. Her natural resources guaranteed her, given good internal government, against starvation; but they by no means guaranteed her full munitionment, even with the best of management. The urgent need for drawing upon Russia's surplus of grain, and of supplying munitions in exchange, was. on© of the prime motives of the Gallipoli campaign. Russia lacks railways as modernised countries know them; it lacks the modern national press; the waves of impulse that spread like ripples on smooth over a Western nation move hut sluggishly through its vast areas. Yet, with all these difficulties, Russia was a mighty foe to the Central Powers. Berlin had calculated that Russia would; take six weeks to mobilise; she mobilised in about a week. The Russian transport was notoriously bad, and in the early part of the war the peasant's lighf> cart, seized as it was needed, was the chief military conveyance. Yet a month after war was declared, Russians were hammering at the gates of Lemberg, in Galicia; on the 10th of September the Austriana had suffered a tremendous defeat; and even earlier in the north the swift invasion of East Prussia had occupied German armies that, if they had been sent to France, might have won thei Battle of the Marne. The invasion of Prussia ended in the disaster of Tannenburg; but itß work for France was done. "After Tanneriburg," writes Dr. Sarolea, "the Russian armies doggedly ropeljed five fierce attacks of Hindenburg's armies on "Warsaw. They occupied the-greater part of Galicia. They captured Lemberg and Przemysl and advanced to the outskirts of Cracow. There is evory reason to believe that they would have succeeded, on the one hand, in forcing a passage through the Car. pathians into Hungary, and on the other hand in pressing from Cracow into Silesia, if at a decisive moment they had not run short of ammunition." The Russian military problem was a constant, subject of popular misunderstanding. In the beginning of the war Russia was visualised as a vaßt "steamroller," which would loom .up over the Prussian frontier and move ponderously but inexorably down upon Berlin;. and this strange false notion was extraordinarily tenacious of life. Nothing was, indeed, less likely, though Russia's numbers might have been sufficient fpr that role if they had been fully armed. The steam-roller, one might say, had plenty of water in. the boiler, but there was not enough coal in the bunker. And when finally the dream of the steam-roller had passed away and tho great retreat had ■been made, a new dream arose of Napoleon's great disaster repeated—a dream of German legions led far into.the Russian Beyond, to linger and die out in a limbo of swamps and snowfields and starvation. But that dream faded, too, thanks to the railways that Hindeiiburg had and Napoleon had not. It was Russia that pined away. Bled terribly by the enormous losses of the war, all the greater because of the insufficient supply of arms and ammunition, she was struck at the heart t>y Germans and German tools and German dupes; and at last tho revalation swept the whole nation into tt chaos from which it is still struggling to emerge. STRATEGICAL ELEMENTS. In the circumstances, the actual course of military events on_ the Russian front scarcely calls for detailed treatment, and it can be described briefly. The strategical elements are simple. Russia had two enemies to face—Germany on the north and; west, and Austria on the south of Russian Poland, the frontier of which was like a huge horse-shoe. Of Austria, the economically-important province of Ga-Hcia—grain and fruit-producing, and oil-bearing country—lay within easy reach. Of Germany, the narrow eastward extension of Prussia on the north waa tender aa the cherished homeland of Prussian autocracy, while in the southwest lay Silesia, one of Germany's great industrial areas. Russia struck first at Galici*—a blow for Serbia, whom Austria was assailing—and at East Prussia. The Prussian adventure, as we saw, ended at Tannenburg in the terrible defeat at the end of August that set Hindenbufg up godlike upon a pedestal before the Germans. But the Galician drive flourished, and! tho intense pressure imposed apon Austria not only prevented the overwhelming of Serbia, but enabled 1 the Serbs to win a magnifioent victory. It was not till Russia had been virtually abolished as a dangerous enemy that the Central Powers were able to crush Serbia and enter the Balkans as conquerors. As Poland, from which the Russians had to conduct all their main operations, with Warsaw as their central base, was Btirroimded on three sides by the enemy, the operations naturally fell into three simple sub-divisions. In the north, there were, during August, 1914, aggressive operations, infringing Prussian soil, almost to Xonigsborjr. in the centre, the battles were fought almost entirely in Russian territory. In the south, the Aiistrians proved unable to resist the impetus of the Russian offensive, and it was not till German genera-Is, with German soldiers and German guns to help them, took charge that the invaders were swept away. • GALICIA INVASION AND THE BATTLES FOR WARSAW. "l°!ie Russians swept into Galieia at its eastern end, and marched west, ihrowing or' a Hank ijnard to hold the southern b'o.uulary, the line of the Carpathian,!. Lemberg was captured dn 3rd September ; the fortress of Przemvsl was besieged on the 22nd. By the 28th the Russian arimer> had swept over practically the whole length of Galicia, ira-v----ing i'raemyol invested, to stand a- siege that lasted tin 22nd March, 3915, exactly, six months sifter the. investment began. A» tlia Matern •dvaao^.SKafcfe ca,

the flank .guard pressed over the low j passes of the Carpathians, and* threatened Hungary with invasion, which to some extent was carried .out by cavalry detachments. Meanwhile the Russian northern armies, ejected from Prussia at the beginning of September, were driven back as the armies in the south advanced; and afi Cracow was being approached the Germans were, fighting a battle for the Niemsn river," between Kovno and Grodno. The front swung back to the German dido of the frontier early in October. The Russian front, much longer than that in France and Belgium, and' manned *nd armed on "a much lower scale, never during its period of activity became permanently fixed in trenches like that in the West, and in the campaigning season the battles were manoeuvre battles, full of interest as they swung picturesquely over the vast field. Within the horseshoe of Poland the opposing armies forged back and forth. Three times the Germans drove mightily but in vain against Warsaw. The first drive began on the sth, and ended on the 25th of October; "the second lasted from the 13th November to the 25th December; the third, which began on 3rd February, 1915, and was; aimed from the north, was smashed' by the Russiaa victory at Przaanytz at the end of the month. The first of these drives ended in a German defeat, which not only stopped th« attack, but drove the Germans right back to the frontier; and Germany was slightly invaded on a wide front, between- the Warta and Tistula rivers, in November. After the third great attack, the front gradually straightened up till it ran from the Galician position in Western Galici* nearly due north across Poland to the Prussian border, and roughly along that border .to the sea. MACKENBEN'S DRIVE AND THE GREAT RETREAT. The repeated defeats of the German armies in Poland, and the potential menace of the Russian positions in Galicia and lukqvina, which had been almost entirely occupied by January, 1915, demanded new measures, and in the beginning of the year a great mass of attack was secretly gathered into the : hands of Yon Mackensen in Western Galicia. The blow fell at the end , of. April. In the Battle of the Donajetz (a small river which flows north about' 40 miles east of Cracow) the Russian line was pierced by an attack delivered oh a narrow front by an extraordinarily heavy phalanx of German troops. The Russians now felt intensely the handicap of insufficient munitionment-r-a condition afterwards laid ,to the charge Of, the allegedly treacherous Minister for War, Sukhomlinoff; and, thrashed by the storms of German shell-fire to which reply was impossible, they began their great retreat. They moved back steadfly and regularly, with Warsaw gradually becoming the head of a great falient defined by the San, the Vistula, and the Narev. Prz6mysl was rescued by the enemy on 2nd June; Leniberg on the 22nd; Halich on the 28th. Everything depended upon the strength of this great river line, and it collapsed. In' the north, a great battle on the Narev began in ths middle of July. ; at the end of the month ths Vistula was forced in the south. The swift advance of the enemy upon the important railway junctions at Lublin and Cholm crippled the Russians on the Vistula,; Ivangorod fell on 4th August, and Warsaw the next day. Already the line in the far north had swung back, "the Germans having groatly increased their strength there by landing forces at Libau, from wh»ch they invaded Gourland. Oh the 10th . August they moved forward on the whole front. Kovno fell on the 17th. At this moment the enemy tried to hasten, things by a surprise landing in the Gulf of Riga, which his warships entered in a fog, but the attempt was abandoned four day* later. On the 25th, the Germans entered Brest Litpvsk, on the Bug, over a hundred miles east, of Warsaw, being them in contact with Bialystofc and Grodno. At this stage, the Grand Dske Nicholas, Cominander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, was superseded, and a new thrUl of patriotism and determination inspired the Russians when "the Little Father," the Tsar, took over the general leadership of his fighting forces. But the retreat had to continue. Vilna, after a short Biege, fell on the 18th September, and the front gradually retired till, -at _ the end of October, it ran. from the Gull of Riga along the Dvina river to Dvinsk, southward to ths east of Baranovitchi and Pinsk and Lutsk, and west of Tarnopol, to the Rumanian border. Only a small angle of Galicia remained in Russian hands; all of Russian Po-. land arid almost all of Courland, were in those of the Snemy. Thus the front was destined to remain till midsummer. The retreat Kad been matt skilfully conducted, seldom exceeding a pace of five iriHee » day, and -with a minimum of losses in men. Time_ after time the Russian generals' extricated themselves from dangerous situations, and their methods were the theme of general admiration. But the Germans believed that Russia wae for the time being done with; and, contenting themselves with screening the front against offensives, they turned their Eastern efforts in the direction of the Balkans, where the entry of Bulgaria into the war and the renewed attacks by the Central Powers quickly resulted fB" the over-running of Serbia. REVOLUTION AND COLLAPSE. In June, 1916, however, there was a sudden revival in the Russian armies. Austria, on 14th May, bad undertaken a daring, and, as it proved, disastrous attempt to invade Italy; and while her armies were deeply involved in the narrow valleys of xrentino, General Brusiloff, on 3rd June, struck heavily at the Austrian armies in Volhynia. At the first blow the enemy's trenches were pierced, and 13,000 prisoners were cnunded up, while enormous numbers were captuiiid as the offensive developec>, and Lutsk -Man taken on the 7th. On th 6 10th the Austrians were routed, losing about 35,000 prisoners by a fresh offensive iu>ar C/.ernovitz, in the Bnkovina. This offensive, like the initial- invasion of Prussia, showed that Russia, in apifco of, its virtual isolation, yet maintained a bond of military unity with the Western groups. In relation to the offensive against Italy it*was a most shrewdly-timed' effort, and while the Russians were forging ahead Vienna called back the spearhead from the Italian mountains, and it was severely

battered by General Cadorna's coun-ter-offensive as it withdrew. But Russia was toon to begin the first •low descent into the political mael-. strom, and when, on 27th August, Rumania declared war on Austria, signs— not truly read at first, but all too significsftit later I —appeared to indicate the decay. The Russians sent armies to assist the Rumanians; but promises were only partially fulfilled. Rumania was more completely isolated than Russia, and depended entirely upon Petrograd for supplies of war; and Petrograd betfrayed her. In March, 1917, the Russian Revolution broke out, but the-quick hope that this seemingly bloodiest change, which swept away .-' Tsardom, and seemed to carry away the pro-Ger-man powers with it, would clean the Augean (table, wae pitched too high. "Bolshevism" soon made its appearance, and an offensive which opened in Galicia on lsl July with every appearance of success in front of it, was the last of Russia's big military contributions in Europe. The Germans in Galicia launched a counter-offensive on the 19th, and insubordinate units in the Russian Army, inspired by . the crazy propaganda of the new cult; turned their backs to the enemy. Kercnsk'y, who succeeded Prince Lvoff, first Premier of the Revolution, about that time, was helpless, a)id the enemy proceeded to complete the. overthrow of Rumania, and at the same time to terrorise Russia into surrender by a threatened attack upon Petrograd itself, was captured on<3rd September; a German fleet appeared in the Gulf, and after a brief campaign the Russian naval opposition was crushed, the island* in the Gulf were mastered, and a German army invaded Esthonia and Livonia, and began to. march east, towards the capital. BREST LITOVSK. The Germans had calculated well. The Bolsheviks in Russia were spurned by Berlin, as unrepresentative of the> new Republic, until their domination appeared, temporarily at least, trafficient for Berlin's purpose. But by the end of November the Germans felt safe to move, and announced their readiness to treat with the Bolsheviks. Followed then the bullying process at Brest Litovsk, where the "peace" .conference began on 2nd December. Lenin and TrotBky, prime movers of the new regime, made, a show of protest in February against the Germans' "impossible terms," but announced that Russia would fight no more. A week later the German mailed fist threw out new attacks to prove the possibility of any terms it chose to offer, and on 2nd March the treaty was signed. Rumania, which had fought heroically on the mountain and river front which guarded the uninvaded portion of Moldavia, and which was now left "in the air," and with no hope of succour, made peace on 7th May. , SUBSIDIARY CAMPAIGNS. Besides waging war againit Germany . and Auitria-Bungary, Russia spread her military energy out against Turkey, and maintained the campaign until long after, the Civil War Vhich followed the revolution had begun. Expeditions were Bent into Persia, to attack Turkey in Mesopotamia and join hands with the .British, and the larger army of the Caucasus advanced into Armenia and completely conquered x it. These activities are dealt with in a separate section. In July, 1916, a Russian contingent was landed in the South of France, and placed on the Champagne - front; and here it did excellent service until, infected by the spirit of the wild revolution at home, it became unreliable, and,.had to be removed. Another contingent was "shipped to Salonika _ about the same time. " Russia's share in the war at sea was comparatively small, and is discussed in the sketch of i the naval campaigns.