After months of savage fighting, Russia wanted to make sure she would receive compensation for her sacrifices: she wanted, above all, Constantinople and the Straits, major objectives of her foreign policy since the eighteenth century. She was stimulated to demand this prize by the British action against the Turks in Gallipoli, which was designed to open a naval passage to Russia. Rather than welcoming this operation, which might free her of the blockade, and joining in it, as she had promised, Russia grew anxious about British designs on the area. On March 4, 1915 (NS), the Foreign Minister Sazonov dispatched a note to the French and British governments claiming for his country Constantinople and the Straits as a prize of war. The Allies reluctantly acceded to this demand from fear that Russia might sign a separate peace with Germany and limit her military operations to the Turks. A year later, in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and England, which provided for the division of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was allotted, in addition, generous territories in eastern and northeastern Anatolia.
Surveying the situation after three months of combat, the German High Command faced a bleak prospect. Schlieffen’s grand strategic design had failed: the Western Front had solidified, with neither side able to make significant advances. No quick victory was in sight here. Germany now confronted the prospect of a protracted two-front war, which her generals had worked so assiduously to avoid. Von Moltke the Younger, the chief of the General Staff at the outbreak of the war, concluded as early as the beginning of September 1914 that the war may well have been lost.53
The only remaining hope of victory lay in knocking Russia out of the war. Moltke expressed a view that gained ascendancy toward the end of 1914: that the decision had to be reached on the Eastern Front because the French would not sue for peace as long as the Russians held on, but would do so once their ally had gone down in defeat. “Our general military situation is now so critical,” he advised the Kaiser in January 1915, “that only a complete and full success in the east can save it.”54 An additional argument in favor of launching a major offensive in the east was to keep the demoralized Austrians from dropping out of the war and leaving Germany’s southeastern frontier exposed to Russian invasion. From these considerations, late in 1914, at the urging of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but against the advice of Falkenhayn, the German High Command decided to launch early in the spring an all-out offensive against the Russians for the purpose of annihilating their forces and compelling them to sue for peace. German troops in the west were ordered to dig themselves in: thus began the static trench warfare that was to dominate operations there for the next three years. Concurrently, in utmost secrecy, the Germans began to transfer established and newly formed divisions to the east. By the time spring arrived they had assembled, south of Cracow, unbeknownst to the enemy, an Eleventh Army under General August von Mackensen, of ten infantry divisions and one division of cavalry. This army was reinforced in the months that followed, until by September 1915 over two-thirds of German combat divisions (sixty-five out of ninety) were deployed on the Eastern Front. In April, the Germans enjoyed a considerable advantage in manpower over the Russians and an overwhelming superiority in heavy artillery, forty German guns facing one Russian. The strategic plan called for a giant pincer movement: Mackensen, assisted by the Austrian Fourth Army, was to drive the Russians in a northeasterly direction, whereupon the German Twelfth Army would strike southeast from Pomerania. When the two met, they would have trapped up to four Russian armies, as well as cut off Warsaw.55
The Russians were in poor shape to meet this threat. Their troops were exhausted. They lacked heavy artillery and had only two rounds of ammunition left for each field gun. Rifles and shoes were in short supply. Unprepared for what was to come, their troops took shelter in shallow dugouts that offered little protection against German heavy guns.
