To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [90]
Things were even worse in Russia. In May 1915, on the one section of the front where the Tsar's armies had won substantial territory, from the lackadaisical Austro-Hungarians, the Germans stiffened their ally with a strong infusion of troops and artillery and began methodically pushing the Russians far back into their homeland. Avoiding major attacks in the west, Germany poured all its offensive effort for the year into expanding eastward, and the Central Powers advanced steadily some 300 miles until cold weather and swampy ground finally halted them. The new front line left a wide swath of the Russian Empire—much of what today is Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, and Lithuania—in enemy hands. During the six months of the relentless offensive, the Russian army lost an estimated 1.4 million men, or more than 7,500 a day. By July, the general staff had alerted all commanders to watch for Bolshevik propaganda leaflets concealed in packages sent to the troops from home, and the army was hit by its first large wave of desertions. In August, capturing a besieged fortress, German troops took 90,000 Russian prisoners in a single day, including 30 generals.
As the Russian army slowly retreated on a front more than 600 miles long, its troops destroyed crops, houses, railways, entire cities, anything that might be of use to the enemy. In western Russia a zone of destruction gradually spread for hundreds of miles, where no food grew and few buildings stood. It was the Boer War's scorched-earth policy all over again, but on an immeasurably vaster scale. From this wasteland the retreating Russians also forcibly removed huge numbers of people. Targeted above all were non-Russian ethnic minorities, who the tsarist government feared would cooperate with the German occupiers. After bayoneting and hanging some people to start with, pillaging, whip-wielding Cossacks and other troops drove at least half a million Jews from their homes. Three-quarters of a million Poles were also forced to move east, and, in total, roughly the same number of Lithuanians, Latvians, and ethnic Germans. As these terrified refugees began their flight, they could often look back and see Russian soldiers setting fire to their homes or farms. A British military attaché with the Russian army passed a column of refugees 20 miles long. "Whole families with all their little worldly belongings piled on carts; two carts tied together and drawn by a single miserable horse; one family driving a cow; a poor old man and his wife each with a huge bundle of rubbish tied up in a sheet and slung on the back." By the end of 1915, Russia had well over three million homeless refugees—in caravans on the roads, packed into freight trains, or crowded into makeshift shelters in fields, forests, towns, and cities. A year later, there would be some six million. No one imagined that in a second global conflict less than three decades later the numbers would be so much higher, the expanse of blackened rubble so much wider.
The commander of the retreating Russian army, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, let it be known that after-dinner conversation at his headquarters should be on "diversionary themes not concerning the conduct of the war." In September he was gently eased into another job. The dreamy and indecisive Tsar Nicholas II himself took personal command of his armies. The Tsar, the British ambassador once observed, was "afflicted with the misfortune of being weak on every point except his own autocracy." He moved in at army headquarters in grand style, watched parades, toured the nearby countryside in