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Alan Clark
The Eastern Front 1914-1917 Norman Stone (Hodder and Stoughton £5.50) Whether or not the outcome of the Great War was decided on the Eastern Front, what is incontestable is that it was the volcanic source, the earthquake that caused a permanent shift in the World balance of power, and of its social forces, an event whose influence is with us to this day. This alone should have demanded a major historical work — total war, as Mr Stone asserts, demands total study, and it is remarkable that over half a century should have passed before the gap is filled.
There is a romance about these battles that survived long after the fighting in the West had degenerated into the squalor of siege warfare. The massed battalions of the three doomed European Empires march and counter-march over immense tracts of territory, swaying and bleeding in a sequence of desperate, extravagant (though strategically indecisive) encounters, fought out on a super-Napoleonic scale. In the first weeks of the war casualties soared towards a million. The soldiers still wore their peace-time uniform, the cavalry helmets gleamed and brass-inlaid gun carriages caught the light. But they, and their commanders — archdukes, grand dukes, Baltic barons, scions of the landed aristocracy — were oblivious to the consequences. As Lenin perceived, in fighting each other to the death they were putting the entire social order (which both had in common) in jeopardy. Mr Stone traces the decline in the combatants' fortunes, their morale, and their quality. His military analysis is faultless, as is his perception of "personality factors" — always a major factor in armies where autocracy, protocol and heredity command deference. It was the Germans of course, always the least numerous, who nonetheless dominated the battlefield by virtue of their superior training and command: " . . . careful registration of guns, observation, camouflage, co-operation between infantry and artillery. German guns did not strew shell around in the, Austro-Hungarian manner, in the vague hope of awakening an impression of unconquerable might in enemy breasts. Nor did they in the Russian manner, disdain their own infantry as a worthless mob, tediously blundering into the skilled tournaments of their betters ..."
What insufferable allies the Habsburgs must have been. Not only did they indulge a truly Spanish combination of serenity and incompetence but, whenever things improved at all (almost invariably due to a last-minute, emergency intervention by the Germans), they would relapse into nostalgic day-dreams — the Prussians snubbed, the Balkans ruled, the Poles within the Habsburg Empire, and Sadowa avenged. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand would not share a car with his own chief-of-staff preferring to drive with the automobile officer, "the Jew, Strauss"; he gossiped and joked with subalterns at the expense of senior officers, treated horses with savagery, and made lewd conversation at the
dinner table to annoy his prudish German visitors. The Archduke preferred the company of aristocratic playboys such as his brother lieinrich or Price Rene of Bourbon Parma — but was not above getting himself gazetted a Colonel-General in order to rid himself of his irritating subordination to the German Front commander Linsingen.
All this is very enjoyable, but what gives Mr Stone's book its definitive status is the scholarship and accuracy of his research into what may be called the logistics of the campaign. He has achieved that most exacting of tasks — the copious and informative presentation of statistical evidence (although, in the infuriating modern habit the footnotes are at the back of the book) without disturbing the flow and harmony of the narrative. Only the absence of pictures is a disappointment.
Mr Stone has researched every aspect of his theme — industrial production, retail prices, recruiting figures, raw materials, numbers of artillery pieces — and no assertion, on any topic, is made without the supporting evidence. Nor are any of the old idees recues lightly accepted. Of the crippling shortages of grain in Russia in 1917, he writes: These difficulties were variously written down, by civilians to the army, by anti-semites to speculators, by revolutionaries to landlords and 'kulaks', by liberal economists to blundering price-controls, and — most bizarrely of all — by Antsiferov to peasant prosperity. The greatest and longest-lasting such explanation also happened, not altogether coincidentally, to be the one that seemed to remove most of the political heat from the issue: it was claimed that the railways were insufficient to transport the country's grain, because wartime needs, particularly those of the army, cut across grain supply. The grain crisis was thus said to have been caused by a railway crisis. But the evidence suggests that if anything, it was the other way about.
Even so, the wastage with which the Army transport authorities ran their rail traffic was notorious. Generals wrestled for supply wagons, and were slow in forwarding empty ones; battles of competence developed; crazy prudence reigned with regard to speed and length of trains; unloading was never efficiently carried out.
As the huge load of hardship, wasteful bungling and three-figure inflation accumulated it becomes difficult to believe that the machinery of State could continue to function at all. Yet among the many uncomfortable analogies with our own plight is that characteristic symptom: the failure of the will even of those who have most to lose by talking themselves into defeat. The multi-millionaire Putilov, a member of the Munitions Council, told the French Ambassador — "The days of Tsarism are numbered; it is lost beyond hope. But Tsarism is the very framework of Russia and the sole bond of unity for the nation. Revolution is now inevitable; it is only waiting for a favourable opportunity. Such opportunity will come with some military defeat, a famine in the provinces, a strike in Petrograd, a riot in Moscow, some scandal or tragedy in the Palace". Yet in fact all five were needed, more or less simultaneously before the apparatus broke beyond mending. Even then, as Norman Stone says, . . . the growth of starvation and disease in the towns brought [the masses] together as a revolutionary force in a way that no amount of Bolshevik agitation could have done".
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