WITH THE RUSSIAN ARMY, 1914-1917.*
By far. the best book on the War from the Russian side is that which. Sir Alfred Knox has just published. He had gone as Military Attaché to Russia in 1911 and he was thoroughly familiar with the conditions of the army and of the country when the War began. He went to the front in August, 1914, and saw much of the fighting in every sector, from Samsonov's defeat at'. Tannenberg down to Brusilov's summer campaign of 1916 and' the subsequent reverses. Ho supplemented the results of his own observations with the operation orders and the secret statements of mobilized strengths, reinforcements, casual- ties and armaments which were given him by the Russian authorities. Thus the book, though not a complete history of the Russian campaigns, is a first-hand authority for salient and typical-episodes. It is written in the form of a diary, inter- spersed with copious " after-notes " and illustrated with some good maps. Hit is somewhat difficult to read, it deserves serious study, for. it shows why the Russian armies failed. and why, indeed, they-were bound to fail so soon as they encountered the armies of' Germany. Allied military critics were obsessed by the stupendous numbers of men which the Tsar had at his disposal. The chief moral. of Sir Alfred Knox's book, we might almost say, is that Russia had too many men. She could not arm, feed nor clothe them ; she could not find enough officers capable of leading them and was woefully short of N.C.O.'s, though the Russian rank and file, more than half of whom were illiterate, needed far more supervision than Western troops. There was no patriotic middle class " in Russia—or at least it was far too small: to • leaven the lump of stolid peasantry. Russia mobilized her millions, but the organization required to make and keep them efficient for war was lacking. The railways were inadequate and badly managed. The roads were bad, especially east of the Vistula. The army had few motor vehicles, few telephones and very few aeroplanes. But its organization and equipment were not so faulty as its generals. The Higher. Command was always divided between two plans of campaign— one against Cracow and Silesia, the other against East Prussia. The generals and the senior regimental officers were too often quarrelsome and incompetent. Against the disaffected Haps- burg armies the Russians could win easy victories ; by the Germans. they were outmatched from the first.
The author's account of Tannenberg confirms all that we have heard from General Gourko on the one side and General Luden- dorff on the other. The French Government begged their allies to create a diversion in East Prussia. Therefore General Rennenkampf was ordered to invade the province from the east while General Samsonov invaded it from the south. The mere threat sufficed to draw German divisions from the West to the East. Had the two Russian commanders co-operated, they might have done more than threaten Konigsberg. As it was Rennenkampf, after an early success, stood still and allowed Marshal Hindenburg to overwhelm Samsonov. The Germans, knowing their enemies, left two brigades of cavalry to oppose Rennenkampf for a whole week. Samsonov's hosts, the author says, "were just great, big-hearted children who had thought out nothing and had stumbled half-asleep into a wasps' nest." In three weeks. Marshal Hindenburg with 150,000 men defeated two superior Russian armies, inflicting 250,000 casualties and capturing nearly all their guns and transport. We can see now why the Germans mocked at the popular British idea of the " Russian steam-roller." In the first three months of the War Russia suffered from bad generalship. Her losses, especially in regular officers, whom she could not replace, were enormous. After that, she began to experience in ever-increasing measure the scarcity of rifles, ammunition and shells which fatally hampered her armies until the outbreak of the revolution.
With the Russian Army, 1914-1917: Being chiefly Extracts from the Diary of a ali•lierfr Attach& By, MaiortGeneral Sir Alfred Knox. London Hutchinson. vols. Dee. net.)
The author makes it clear that the fault lay chiefly with the Russian War Office, which refused at first to place orders in America and resented the well-meant warnings of the Allies. He tells us how in the retreat from the Narev the artillery were limited to three rounds a day per gun and thus were powerless to save their infantry from the incessant German shelling, while unarmed men waiting in the support trenches to take the rifles of their dead or wounded comrades were destroyed in hundreds. In these circumstances Russian commanders, with a complete disregard for human life, ordered mass attacks, that were bound to fail, on the German lines. Up to January, 1915, Russia lost, the author estimates, nearly two million men, and the casualties continued to be heavy to the end. He was not at the Dunajec, when Mackensen's " phalanx " broke through, but he confirms the belief that General Radko Dimitriev had failed to prepare rear lines of defence and thus had to sacrifice tens of thousands of brave men in vain efforts to check the enemy's advance. Sir Alfred Knox remarks bitterly on one occasion that the Russian staff officers were playing at war. After being refused a copy of the operation orders on another occasion, he went for a walk and found a copy lying under a hedge. The happy-go-lucky temperament of the Russians was not depressed even by the loss of Warsaw and Kovno. But it is clear that even the docile rank and file began to lose all con- fidence in their leaders, and that the almost unbroken series of defeats on the German front prepared the way for the revolution.
The author says that he deprecated Lord Kitchener's desire to visit Russia in June, 1916. Ho thought that " the Russians required a rest and time to digest the many plain and unpalatable truths with which M. Thomas had fed them " in the preceding month and that Lord Kitchener's visit " would irritate rather than stimulate them," as they wanted our money and not our military advice." That summer the army was far better equipped than over before, thanks in largo part to the Allies, but it was poorly trained and the transport services were still very bad. The Government could find rails for a strategic line in Turkestan but not for the lines sorely needed behind the Polish front. General Bruailov's offensive was begun prematurely at the instance of the Italian Government. It was partially successful, especially against the Austrians, but it cost the Russians 450,000 men up to the end of July. It was followed by an offensive of the Guard Army on the Stokhod in August, which was a. lamentable and costly failure. The finest Russian infantry, attacking a much inferior enemy, were slaughtered in thousands, mainly through the fault of the artillery. On the Galician front the situation was then complicated by the inter- vention of Rumania, which, according to the author, hindered rather than helped the Russians. There was no love lost between the new allies. Sir Alfred Knox was, none the less, hopeful in the winter of 1916-17 that the Russian army would improve in leadership as well as in equipment. The revolution shattered his hopes. Under timid and shifty Ministers like Kerenski no army could have done anything. Sir Alfred Knox gives a clear and interesting account of the events of 1917 and shows how Kerenski by his pitiful folly prepared the way for the Bolsheviks. Yet it is only fair to remember that the troops who mutinied had borne intolerable hardships and suffered cruel losses through the hopeless inefficiency of the Tsar's generals and ministers. The wonder is that their patience had endured so long.
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