Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [509]
War. In their primary objective the Russian command had been successful. Her immediate, lightning strikes in the summer of 1914 had taken the enemy by surprise. In the north, Russian forces had raced across Poland and smashed into the Germans in East Prussia, causing a momentary panic-stricken retreat. In the south, a Russian army had swept westward from the Ukraine into Austrian territories, and only just been prevented from cutting north, through Silesia, into Germany and towards Berlin itself.
True, the initial success was achieved at appalling cost. The offensive in the north was not properly supported. When the Germans counter-attacked, the losses were horrific. A quarter of a million men were killed in the August offensive in the north; by the end of 1914 Russian losses, including prisoners-of-war, reached an amazing 1,200,000 men.
But Germany was fighting on two fronts. Her master plan had failed. And the empire of Russia, having been humiliated in her last two wars – the Crimean and the war with Japan – had shown herself a military power to be reckoned with. By the start of 1915, Germany was concentrating its main effort against her. And by March 1915, so necessary was she to France and Britain, that those allies had reluctantly to agree that when the war was over she should receive nothing less than the ancient city of Constantinople – her dream since the time of Catherine the Great – as her prize.
In 1915, however, the Germans were beginning to strike back. And now they were advancing with thunder.
Alexander Bobrov looked at his men thoughtfully. He liked them. He thought they liked him too. But he wished they were better prepared.
For if the great offensive of 1914 had been dramatic, the second round, of 1915, had taken on a very different character.
He had never forgotten his surprise the day they were issued with arms. For when twenty of his men had received rifles, the officer in charge stopped, with an abrupt: ‘That’s it.’
‘But what about the rest?’ he had asked, surprised.
‘They’ll have to get them at the front.’
‘You mean, there are stores up there?’
The officer had looked at him pityingly. ‘They’ll get them from their fellow soldiers,’ he said. ‘The ones that have fallen.’ And it was not long before Alexander discovered that, in some regiments in this section of the front, twenty-five per cent of the men had been sent forward with no arms, expected to scavenge them, so to speak, from the hands of the dead. Somehow he had managed to beg and steal rifles for all his men; but he knew of one unit where half the men were armed with pitchforks, and there was a rumour that to the south, one company were preparing to fight the enemy with their bare hands.
The artillery supporting them, he knew, had only two rounds per field gun; but he had not told his men this.
Then there had been the incident of the wireless.
He had been at the company command post two days before, where they had a wireless set up. The captain was busily engaged with this, giving the colonel a detailed briefing on their position and dispositions and looking rather pleased with himself. But only one thing puzzled Bobrov.
‘Are we transmitting everything like that, sir?’ he asked the captain when he was finished.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, there’s no code. You were transmitting everything in clear.’
The captain stared at him with a frown. ‘Why ever not, for God’s sake?’
‘I just thought – what if the enemy was picking up our signals? He’d know all our dispositions.’
And now the captain’s face cleared. ‘Don’t be silly, Bobrov.’ He smiled. ‘We’re transmitting in Russian, man. The Germans can’t understand a word we say.’
His attitude was not unusual. The transmissions for the entire Russian army were transmitted in clear, which, as the German High Command was later to remark: ‘Made things simpler on the eastern front.’
Why were things so badly organized? Partly, he knew, it was because the high command was dominated by men like the captain: old-fashioned, parade ground