To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [191]
NOVEMBER 1917
DESPITE THE UNBRIDLED OPTIMISM THAT POURED OUT THROUGH the communication lines of British headquarters, the news from every European front of the war had done nothing but devastate the morale of soldier and civilian alike.
In 1915, the Italians had joined the war on the side of France and England, causing an immediate response from the Austrians to their north. But after two years of stalemate along the newly opened front in northern Italy, the German High Command had grown weary of the Austrian army’s inability to force a breakthrough. Ludendorff had sent German units southward to boost the fighting strength of the Austrians, and in October 1917 the results had been decisive. The battle was called Caporetto, a massive surge by the German and Austrian forces that had finally broken the back of the Italian defensive lines. The breakthrough was so complete that the Italian army simply collapsed, a massive chaotic retreat that handed the entire Italian front to their enemy, and effectively eliminated the Italians as an effective ally who could help divert pressure away from the French and English along the Western Front.
The Italian collapse followed another blow to the allies. The Romanians had joined the war in mid-1916, spurred on by the opportunity to satisfy old ethnic conflicts against their neighbor Bulgaria, who had sided with the Germans. But the Romanian army was ill prepared, underequipped and poorly led, and when they launched an attack against their hated neighbor, the German-led Bulgarians not only crushed the Romanian forces, they pushed the Romanians back so far into their own territory that within a period of less than four months, Germany was able to capture the invaluable Ploesti oil fields and drive the Romanians completely out of the war.
While the Italian and Romanian catastrophes had been distinct and definite, for over a year the reports emerging from the Russian front had been wildly inconsistent, a mix of success and failure, hope and pessimism for both sides. In 1916, the Russian army had launched a massive attack, named for its commander, Alexei Brusilov. The Brusilov Offensive had successfully pushed the Austrian army back nearly fifty miles. But the Austrians were soon reinforced by far more effective German troops, who stopped the retreats and inflicted a horrifying toll on the Russian forces. Though the offensive cleared their enemy from a large swath of territory, that success cost the Russians nearly a million men. The propaganda value of the offensive could not offset the devastating blow to the Russian people, already suffering from deprivations and shortages. Increasingly disillusioned with their leadership, particularly the autocratic and aloof Czar Nicholas II, the despair of the Russian people gave considerable fuel to the cause of the Marxist revolutionaries. By the spring of 1917, the hapless czar had been swept from power. Though the moderate Russian government tried to maintain some control, the Marxists, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, had secured the loyalty of much of the Russian army, which had virtually ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. The German High Command had taken full advantage of Russia’s internal crisis, quietly supporting the revolutionaries, especially Lenin. Once the revolutionaries took control, Russia would certainly be out of the war. With a cessation of fighting along the eastern front, the Germans would then be free to transfer a massive number of troops to their lines in the West, seriously altering the balance of the three-year-old stalemate. The allies could only predict that very soon after, Ludendorff would launch some massive new offensive, which neither the British nor the French could contain. As each day passed, the war of attrition had drained too much life from the Allied armies. The