Apart from its effect on Russia, a Central Powers victory in the eastern theater might deter Italy from entering the war. Nevertheless, any belief Falkenhayn might have had in the effectiveness of wide-ranging strategic penetrations on the Russian front had been destroyed by the January offensives. The new operation must remain limited. Not only was there no time for grand combinations. Were German aid too generous Austria might continue her policy of diplomatic intransigence, blackmailing Germany at will by threatening to collapse. On the other hand, with too little German support the Austrian front might disappear entirely. The best compromise seemed to be direct intervention: inserting German troops into the Austrian sector, where their presence would be immediately felt, and where relatively small forces might achieve dispro-portinate results. As much to the point, direct intervention would clip Ludendorff’s claws. The new sector would be, at least on paper, under Austrian command, not German.45
Falkenhayn scraped up eight divisions. Most of them had been organized when existing divisions were reduced from four to three regiments. Falkenhayn’s plans accepted the need for a breakthrough, and these troops were as well qualified for the mission as any in Germany’s order of battle. Unlike their predecessors, the new formations were composed of case-hardened combat veterans seasoned in the trench warfare of the western front. Their commander too was, at least in Falkenhayn’s mind, the right man for the job. August von Mackensen made no secret of his belief that breakthrough battles could be won with enough resources and a capable commander. He had shown since Gumbinnen an aggressive willingness to accept casualties in pursuit of an objective. And he was chafing under Ludendorff’s authority. Giving this man an independent opportunity might well diminish Ludendorff’s luster by creating a rival. As an insurance policy Falkenhayn assigned as Mackensen’s chief of staff one of the army’s most brilliant young officers. Hans von Seeckt had gone to war as chief of staff of III Brandenburg Corps, and established his reputation as a planner in the positional warfare of autumn, 1914. The combination seemed both promising in itself and susceptible of control from Berlin.46
Beginning on May 2, 1915, Mackensen’s troops and guns, organized as XI German Army, tore the Russian front wide open on a forty-kilometer sector between the Galician towns of Gorlice and Tarnow. By the third week of June a quarter-million prisoners crowded Mackensen’s cages. Hundreds of thousands more were dead, in hospital, or missing. The Russian army’s disposable reserves of ammunition and material were virtually exhausted, its cadres of regular officers and NCOs virtually destroyed.
The relative contributions to this outcome of German material superiority and tactical skill on one hand, Russian “misfortune and mismanagement” on the other, remain subjects of controversy. Ludendorff insisted almost automatically that with a few more troops on the ground and a broader strategic vision on the part of OHL, the Russian army could have been entirely destroyed and the war in the east ended. Falkenhayn and his supporters pointed to grand-strategic restraints: the Franco-British spring offensive against an undermanned western front; Italy’s declaration of war on May 23, and its attack on Austria’s virtually undefended southern frontier; and the British assault on Gallipoli. Underlying these operational factors, however, was Falkenhayn’s belief that Gorlice-Tarnow could be the first, military step to a negotiated peace with Russia.47
This was by no means an isolated position. Writing in 1915, Max Weber warned that for all the rhetoric about the dangers posed by England, Russia was the only power that, once victorious, could threaten not only Germany’s political independence but her very existence as a nation. Above all the western Slavic peoples must somehow be convinced that escaping Russia’s clutches did not mean violation by Germany. An exaggerated policy of annexation would mean no more than German elbows in everyone else’s ribs.48
Bethmann-Hollweg developed a similar attitude during 1915. His initial proposals to Russia in the summer and early fall of that year were relatively moderate, involving frontier rectifications rather than the drastic changes of sovereignty proposed by the annexationists. They fell on deaf ears. The Russian foreign office, and Tsar Nicholas himself, were not indifferent to the German overtures. But since August Russian war aims, like those of the other belligerents, had grown in proportion to the demands and sacrifices made of the system. Few men in positions of power anywhere in Europe believed their people could withstand the stresses of a long war without corresponding gains. The belligerents depended heavily on hopes and promises. More and more of the empire’s vocal pressure groups advanced specific aims and goals, political, cultural, or economic. Sazonov still hoped for a network of Slavic client states in central Europe—including an independent Bohemia, whose creation meant the end of the Habsburg Empire. In the spring of 1915 the British offered to fulfill a dream of centuries: Constantinople. The western allies also guaranteed Russia a share, unspecified but large, of the reparations to be exacted from Germany at war’s end. A government confident of its own strength might make peace in defiance of these factors. Russia, which had entered the war largely from a sense of its own weakness, was in no position to take such a perceived risk.49
“Russia remains the puzzle,” the German chancellor wrote to Progressive Reichstag deputy Conrad Haussman. Reports on her prospective behavior were “uncertain, changing, and contradictory.” Bethmann, like Falkenhayn, was a product of that belief in Russia’s strength and military potential, which had so influenced Germany’s strategy and diplomacy before 1914. The mind-sets that expected Cossacks in Hohenfinow and accepted the impossibility of conquering, as opposed to defeating, Russia in a two-front war found no difficulty in assuming a level of strength and coherence in Russia’s diplomatic decision making that did not exist—at least not in the context of the combination of threats and pressures Germany produced in 1915.50
Michael Geyer puts the Bethmann-Falkenhayn strategy in the context of modern deterrence theory: balancing limited interests against the risks of general catastrophe.51 Experience suggests, however, that deterrence is successful not so much from actual positions of strength as from perceptions of strength, whether equivalency or sufficiency.52 By mid-1915, what remained of Tsar Nicholas’s government resembled nothing so much as a novice gambler seeking to recoup an initial loss by the process of doubling the stakes. In such a context the game assumes a life of its own, independent of any initial wagers. As long as her allies would back Russia’s bets, even if only with promises, she was likely to remain at the table. Even the first revolutionary government proposed to continue the war.
Does that in turn suggest the validity of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff strategy, of a revived and expanded Ostaufmarsch? The answer, demanding an excursion into the world of might-have-been, involves several levels of consideration. On the tactical/operational level, it remains open to speculation whether the armed forces of any great power could have been in fact crushed by the balances of firepower and mobility technically possible between 1914 and 1918. Time and again Russian armies proved able to evade the ultimate consequences of defeat by withdrawing faster than their enemies could pursue them.