Nowhere was Nicholas’s optimism more keenly shared than among the officers of the Russian army. Those unlucky enough to be stationed with regiments far from the frontier were frantic with worry lest it all be over before they had a chance to see action. Guards officers, fortunate enough to be leaving immediately for the front, asked whether they should pack their dress uniforms for the ceremonial parade down the Unter den Linden. They were advised to go ahead and let their braid and plumes follow by the next courier.
Day after day, the capital trembled to the cadence of marching men. From dawn until nightfall, infantry regiments marched down the Nevsky Prospect, bound for the Warsaw Station and the front. Outside the city, other regiments of infantry, cavalry squadrons and batteries of horse artillery clogged the roads leading toward the Baltic provinces and East Prussia. In motion with only casual organization, the soldiers walked rather than marched, followed in no particular order by long columns of baggage carts, ammunition wagons, ambulances, field kitchens and remount horses. So dense were the moving columns that in places they left the roads and spread out across the dry summer fields, swarming in a jumbled confusion of dust, shouts, horses’ hoofs and rumbling wheels, recalling the Tartar hordes of the thirteenth century.
Paleologue, driving back to the capital from an audience with the Tsar, encountered one of these regiments marching along a road. The general, recognizing the Ambassador, saluted and boomed out, “We’ll destroy those filthy Prussians! No more Prussia! No more Germany! William to St. Helena!” As each company paraded past Paleologue’s car, the general rose in his stirrups and bellowed, “The French Ambassador! Hurrah!” The soldiers cheered frantically, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Finally, the general galloped away, shouting over his shoulder, “William to St. Helena! William to St. Helena!”
Sometimes, women with children followed for the first few miles: “One … was very young … and she was pressing a baby to her breast. She was striding out as well as she could to keep pace with the man at the rear of the file, a fine fellow, tanned and muscular. They did not exchange a word, but gazed fixedly at each other with loving, haggard eyes. Three times in succession, I saw the young mother offer the baby to the soldier for a kiss.”
The same scenes were repeated in railway stations in every town and village in Russia. In Moscow, British Consul R. H. Bruce Lockhart remembered: “the troops grey with dust and closely packed in cattle trucks; the vast crowd on the platform to wish them Godspeed; grave, bearded fathers, wives and mothers, smiling bravely through their tears …; fat priests to bless the happy warriors. The crowd sways forward for a last handshake and last embrace. There is a shrill whistle from the engine. Then, with many false starts, the overloaded train, as though reluctant to depart, crawls slowly out of the station and disappears in the grey twilight of the Moscow night. Silent and bareheaded, the crowd remains motionless until the last faint echo of the song of the men, who are never to return, has faded into nothing.”
Somehow, it was the men rather than the officers who sensed what was coming. Beneath the gaudy talk of parades in Berlin and cries of “William to St. Helena!” many a Russian soldier marched to war suffused with a melancholy resignation that he would never see his family or his village again. At the front, General Alfred Knox, a British military attache, found a tall young recruit from Kiev downhearted because he had left his wife and five children. Knox tried to cheer him, telling him he would come back, but the soldier only shook his head and said, “They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”
In sheer numbers of soldiers, the Russian army was a colossus. The pre-war regular strength of the army was 1,400,000; mobilization immediately added 3,100,000 reserves. Behind this initial mass stood millions more. During three years of war, 15,500,000 men marched away to fight for the Tsar and Holy Russia. In the British press, this mass of bodies ready to bleed was reassuringly described as “the Russian steamroller.”
In every respect except numbers of men, Russia was unprepared for war. The railroads were hopelessly inadequate; for every yard of Russian track per square mile, Germany had ten. French and German reserves moving to the front traveled 150 to 200 miles; in Russia, the average journey was 800 miles. A general commanding a Siberian corps told Knox that he had been on a train for twenty-three days bringing men to the front. Once the operations began, the supremacy of German railroads allowed the German command to move whole armies rapidly from one front to another. On the Russian side, said Knox, “the Supreme Command ordered, but the railroads decided.”
Russian industry was small and primitive. For every factory in Russia, there were 150 in Great Britain. Russian generals, expecting a short war, had accumulated limited reserves of weapons and ammunition. Russian guns, having fired all their ammunition, quickly fell silent, while enemy shells, arriving steadily from German factories, burst continually overhead. At one point, Russian artillerymen were threatened with court-martial if they fired more than three rounds per day.
Russia’s immense and isolated geography made it impossible for the Western Allies to help. Germany easily blockaded the Baltic, and Turkey, entering the war against the Allies in November 1914, barred the Dardanelles and the Black Sea. Communication remained only through Archangel, frozen solid in the winter, and Vladivostock on the Pacific. Russian exports dropped 98 percent and imports 95 percent. An average of 1,250 ships called at Russian ports
Not all the flaws lay in technology and geography. At its summit, the Russian army was commanded by two men who hated each other: General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, the Minister of War, and Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, the Tsar’s distant cousin, who commanded the armies in the field. Sukhomlinov was a small chubby man with a fat feline face of whom Paleologue observed, “with his sly look, his eyes always gleaming watchfully under the heavy folds of his eyelids, I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.” Although totally bald and advancing on seventy, Sukhomlinov retained a strong taste for expensive pleasures including a voluptuous wife thirty-two years his junior. Mme. Sukhomlinov enjoyed giving enormous parties, clothing herself in Paris and vacationing on the Riviera; her husband was left to pay the bills as best he could. Allowed a handsome traveling allowance based on mileage, he conducted frequent inspection trips to Vladivostock, eight thousand round-trip miles from his office. Once there, local officers found that the War Minister disliked leaving his train.
Sukhomlinov’s reputation was not so much bad as a mournful joke. “The true picture of a drawing room soldier, scented, pomaded, with gold chain bracelets on his white wrists,” recalled a lady who met him in society. “In spite of his mature age, Sukhomlinov was … eager for pleasure like a youth,” wrote Sazonov, his ministerial colleague. “He enjoyed life and disliked work.… It was very difficult to make him work, but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible.” Nevertheless, along with supporting his wife, it was Sukhomlinov’s responsibility to organize and equip the Russian army. A former cavalry officer who had won the Cross of St. George in the 1878 war against the Turks, he believed in the charge—the cavalry with sabers, the infantry with bayonets. Modern weapons, such as machine guns and rapid-firing artillery, he thought unworthy of brave men. As a result, the Russian army entered the war with half as much field artillery as the Germans—seven field-gun batteries per division as opposed to fourteen—and 60 batteries of heavy artillery compared to 381. “Sukhomlinov,” explained General Nicholas Golovine, who served under him, “believed that knowledge acquired by him in the ‘seventies of the last century and largely of no further practical importance, was permanent truth. His ignorance went hand in hand with an extraordinary light-mindedness. These two personal characteristics enabled him to treat the most complicated military questions with astonishing levity. His attitude of easy assurance made the impression on those not familiar with the complicated technique of modern military art that Sukhomlinov handled such problems well and took the right decisions quickly.”
Most significantly, Sukhomlinov made this impression on the Tsar. Like many rogues, he could be enormously charming, and he carefully did everything in his power to please Nicholas. His reports, unlike those of other ministers, were brief and free from gloomy predictions. Knowing that the Tsar took pride in the army, he gave constant assurance that morale and equipment were in splendid condition. When he reported in person, he larded his talk with selections from his vast fund of funny stories. At court, he was known as “
Sukhomlinov was a courtier who used high military rank to support a lavish way of life. His arch-rival, the Commander-in-Chief in the field, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, was a prince of the Imperial blood, a grandson
