AUGUST 1914
The Red Wheel/Knot I
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Harry T. Willetts
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
854 pp., $50.00 cloth, $19.95, paperback
With quadrangular bayonets fixed firmly upon their rifles, thereby transforming them into ungainly weapons a full six feet in length, Russia's peasant soldiers marched into East Prussia on August 15, 1914, the fifteenth day of the Great War. Like their comrades in England and France and their enemies in Germany and Austria, they marched toward a war whose dimensions men could not yet fully envision. None had yet seen the destruction that would be wrought by massed heavy artillery or the deaths that a few minutes of machine gun fire could inflict on advancing troops. The men who were planning the strategies that moved armies across Europe's frontiers had yet to see the terror in the eyes of men who faced clouds of poison gas and agonizing death. Certain that impending battles would be fought quickly and the war ended within a few months at most, the military planes who served every general staff in Europe had underestimated the reserves of men and material the Great War would consume. In August 1914, no one would have believed that the armies of Europe's great powers still would be locked in combat more than three years later.
The Old World's passing
The Great War's impact can be measured not only in terms of destruction wrought upon the face of Europe; great too were the speed with which armies moved and the rapidity with which decisions affecting the lives of millions had to be made. Before the war, balance and discretion had marked the maneuverings of nations. "All were fitted and fastened--it seemed securely--into an immense cantilever," Winston Churchill wrote as he later cast a longing glance back toward those days from the turmoil of less certain times. "Words counted," he remembered, "and even whispers. A nod could be made to tell."
As Europe's armies went to war in August 1914, the limits of time and space shrank as never before, and the old world of privilege, sense, and sensibility slipped away forever. Carefully worded dispatches and cautious negotiations had formed little of the frantic diplomatic maneuvers that filled the last days of peace in 1914, as they had in days gone by. Clattering telegraph keys announced the war, and ringing telephones summoned men to battle. In 1914, statesmen and generals began to measure time in days and hours. As airplanes soared above the enemy's rear areas to report troop movements to artillerymen whose heavy guns could reach out to shatter targets beyond the horizon, minutes, even seconds, became important.
For Russia, the nation with the most space, the least developed sense of time, and the fewest instruments of modern communication, the war's first weeks brought the greatest disasters. The czar's military establishment had learned none of the lessons that other nations had drawn from Russia's war with Japan a scant decade before. Russia's five-and-a-quarter-million-man army therefore went to war with fewer than five hundred motorized transport vehicles and only half that number of airplanes. Large parts of Russia's western and northwestern borderlands, the region in which a war most likely would be fought, had few
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