Читать книгу World War One: History in an Hour - Rupert Colley - Страница 8

The Eastern Front

War had begun on the Eastern Front. Two Russian armies bore down into East Prussia, while the German army was led by the formidable duo of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. The Germans, in full possession of Russian plans, decimated the first Russian army. ‘The tsar trusted me,’ wailed the Russian commander, Alexander Samsonov. ‘How can I ever face him again?’ He didn’t – he walked into a nearby wood and shot himself. The second Russian army fared no better. The Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes went down as terrible defeats for Russia. The Austrian–Hungarian empire, the instigators of this whole war, was faring no better.

Russian infantry, 1914

The Germans now found themselves in the very situation they had wanted to avoid – a war on two fronts. A system of over 1,000 miles of defensive trenches appeared on the Eastern Front. Although much longer – unlike the Western Front, the front lines were often as much as fifty miles apart – these fronts were not continuous, and were lightly defended. German sources of manpower and equipment were stretched even further when, throughout the war, they were obliged to send reinforcements to help the Austrian–Hungarians. They felt as if they were ‘shackled to a corpse’.