German.—Gen. von Lettow-Vorbeck, Reminiscences of East Africa (English trans. 1920); Dr. Ludwig Deppe, Mit Lettow-Vorbeck durch Afrika (1919); Dr. H. Schnee, Deutsch Ost-Afrika im Weltkriege (1919).
Belgian.—P. Daye, Les Conquetes africaines des Belges (1918). (F. R. C.)
EASTERN EUROPEAN FRONT CAMPAIGNS. Under this
heading comes the general story of the campaigns of the World
War which were fought between 1914 and 1917 on the front
between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Till the summer of 1916,
Rumania was neutral, and the theatre of war was limited on
the S. by the northern extremity of that country. Thereafter,
till the conclusion of the peace of Brest, the Russian and Rumanian fronts became one.
The story falls into three main parts, of which the first is considerably the most important. These are:—the open-warfare, free-manœuvre campaigns from the outbreak of war till the establishment of a continuous trench line and the setting-in of trench-warfare conditions, along the whole front in Oct. 1915; the trench-warfare operations on the Russian front from that date to the peace of Brest; and the Rumanian campaigns of 1916 and 1917. The events of 1918 belong rather to the story of the Russian civil wars than to that of the World War, and may be summarized for the present purpose in two clauses—the occupation of the Ukraine, for its economic exploitation, by German and Austrian forces, and the maintenance of a cordon, requiring large numbers of troops, along the frontier of Bolshevik Russia to provide against the contingency of a new eastern front being built up by the Entente and the Soviet Government, or by either singly. As an active element in the operations of the World War, the eastern front closes its history with the battle of Riga in the autumn of 1917, and this event, therefore, is taken as the limit of the present article.
I. The Theatre of War
The operative contrast between the eastern and the western theatres of war lies less in the greater distances and areas of the former than in the fact that there Nature’s handiwork has not been greatly modified by man’s, whereas in France and Belgium there is an intense network of main roads and railways, and in many parts a great industrial development that has covered the country with factories, mines, tramways and workmen’s suburbs. Hence arises a peculiar distinction. Strategically, the western theatre is penetrable everywhere; tactically, it is in many parts so tangled that coherent operations are nearly impossible. In the east, on the contrary, it is strategy that is difficult and tactics that are simple.
The importance of area and distance must not of course be ignored. Without counting Rumanian territory the theatre measures 650 m. x 320 m.—a six weeks’ march under peace conditions from flank to flank, and a three weeks’ march from front to rear. This and the unfamiliar sound of the place and river names to western ears have tended to make the operations of the eastern front seem more difficult to understand than they really are. In fact, the course of operations was largely dictated by geography, and the map, rightly read, shows the lines of geography to be drawn in bold, strong strokes. And even in point of distance, the E.-W. depth of the theatre is not more than 112 times the distance covered by the Germans in their 1914 sweep through Belgium and France, and only half that covered by the Grande Armée in its march from the Rhine to Austerlitz in 1805. The picture of the operations of 1914–17, therefore, is not too large for comprehension, and the meanings of its parts are usually clear.
The broadest characteristic of the eastern theatre is its division into four well-defined regions, (a) The great central salient of Poland on and W. of the middle Vistula. (b) The Pripyat or Rokitno marshes, an area of 240 x 160 m. which, though largely reclaimed in modern times and therefore penetrable to a certain extent for tactical purposes, constitutes an almost insurmountable barrier to strategic movements on a large scale. Lying behind the Polish salient, these marshes, as it were, hollow out its base, leaving on either hand two avenues or corridors:—(c) the northern, connecting Petrograd and Moscow with north-western Poland, and (d) the southern, connecting Kiev and S. Russia with Galicia and S.W. Poland. To the right and left rear of the salient (a) the two corridors (c) and (d) lie exposed on their outer flanks to hostile attack from E. Prussia and Galicia respectively, except in the portions nearer to their eastern entrances where the hostile frontiers curve away to the sea and to Bessarabia. Across the base of both corridors and in rear of the central marshes runs a water barrier consisting of the western Dvina and the Dnieper lines, unbroken save for the narrow gap at the watershed traversed by Napoleon in 1812. This waterline marks the eastern limit of the theatre. Its western limits, which espouse the shape of the salient, lie inside the frontiers of Germany and Austria-Hungary and may be taken as the lake region of W. Prussia, the Oder and the Silesian and Carpathian mountains. This limiting line, in contrast to the eastern, has several gaps, of which the most important is that lying between the Silesian and the Carpathian mountains—which is the gate to Vienna, and, owing to the higher cultural development of Germany and Austria, is strategically more penetrable even where geographical obstacles exist.
Across the whole width of the theatre, cutting off the salient from the corridors and the marshes, runs an almost straight barrier of water, constituted by the Vistula and its tributary the San, from the Baltic to beyond Yaroslav, and by the Dniester from the lakes S.W. of Lemberg to the Black Sea. The only gap is between Yaroslav and the lakes of Grodek.
All railways connecting the salient with the interior of Russia, whether they approach by the northern corridor, the marsh or the southern corridor, converge on the Warsaw-Ivangorod portion of this waterline and thence make south-westward for Upper Silesia. Practically all railways from S. Russia to Austria-Hungary, on the contrary, traverse the gap of Grodek-Yaroslav. The only line from Russia to the German Baltic lands enters E. Prussia at Wirballen at the broad entrance of the northern corridor; and similarly, at the other end of the theatre, a line from Bessarabia comes into the Bukovina system at Czernowitz. Apart from these two, the whole length of the northern corridor is traversed by three lines from Dvinsk, Polotsk and Orsha respectively ending at Warsaw and Ivangorod; the central marshes by one from Gomel which at Brest-Litovsk merges with the third of the northern lines; and the southern corridor by two from Kiev and Berdichev respectively which at Kovel become one, ending at Ivangorod. The significance of the various lateral lines connecting these approach lines is best judged by studying the map, and here it is enough to draw attention to (1) the line along the eastern base itself; (2) the line Baltic-Shavli-Vilna-Minsk with its accessory Vilna-Baranovichi-Rovno; (3) the line Kovel-Brest-Litovsk-Osowiec-Lyck-Memel (4) the line Ivangorod-Warsaw-Mlava-Danzig; (5) the line Skierniwice-Lowie-Wloclawek-Danzig. It should also be noted that, in the salient, no lines exist W. of Lodz and N. of Czenstochowa, and that in the northern corridor about Grodno and Augustowo the Prussian and Russian railways carefully avoid contact. Of the road system, it may be said, broadly, that first-class roads are not numerous, and that they group themselves, in the main, on the same axes as the railways. In the area N.W. of Lodz-Czenstochowa, however, roads to some extent mitigate the absence of railways, and about Augustowo the connexion with E. Prussia, which the railways avoid, is, as regards roads, intimate.
Within each of these broad divisions—the salient and the two corridors—other natural features exercised a considerable influence. The chief characteristic of the northern corridor is the practically continuous waterline which defends its flank from attack from E. Prussia. Leaving the Vistula at Novogeorgievsk below Warsaw, this line is formed by the lower Bug, the lower Narew, the Bobr, the lakes of Augustowo and Suwalki, the middle Niemen to Sredniki, the Dubissa, the Vindavski canal which crosses the low Shavli watershed, and the Venta prolonged by the Vindava to the Baltic. From the Niemen section to Novogeorgievsk almost every important crossing—there are
