Dying In The Mud - Autumn Is Taking Its Toll I THE GREAT WAR - Week 10

October 2, 1914

The Great War has raged for two months with hundreds of thousands of soldiers losing their

lives in some of the bloodiest battles in history but a new and unforseen factor now

entered the war and would play a huge part in determining its course: with the October

rains came the mud.

Overview

I’m Indy Neidell. Welcome to the Great War

When we left off, the British, French, and German armies in the west had reached a stalemate

at the Battle of the Aisne, and in the search for new advantages the trenches had begun

growing to the northwest in the Race to the Sea. The Russians were pushing the Austro-Hungarian

army back into Austria and were also heading north into Poland to engage the Germans, and

both the war in the air and the war at sea were getting serious.

It was now autumn in Europe, and one thing we see that was a regular feature of the war

was mud. Endless mud.

The Austrian army had barricaded itself in the fortress town of Przemsyl, 120,000 strong,

now entirely behind Russian lines, and the Russians began a siege on September 26th.

The Russian Siege

The Austrians had always planned and determined to hold Przemsyl, but the preparations were

typical of the last minute ramshackle efforts of Emperor Franz Josef’s army- half of the

guns were out of date pieces that still used black powder and loads of the shells turned

out to be duds, and though they did build a whole bunch of last minute defenses, including

30 miles of new trenches, they never got around to chopping do wn the trees near the fortress

town, which the Russians had the pleasure of using for concealment, but the Austrians

at least this time had the mud on their side.

You might except the fortress to fall fairly quickly since so far this war no fortress

on either front had been able to hold out against the power of modern artillery, but

the Autumn rains had turned the ground outisde the fortress to mud for many miles, and it

was too heavy and too deep for the Russians to bring their artillery close enough, and

the initial Russian attack would do nothing except produce 40,000 casualties.

The Russian General Ivanov was not pressuring them with his whole force, though. He had

send 30 divisions to the north a week ago. He now decided he wanted to re-group all of

those forces on the east bank of the Vistula River to launch an invasion of Germany. This

turned out to be a stunning piece of incompetence on Ivanov’s part as it resulted, seriously,

in weeks of marching and no fighting at all, with men and horses starving to death and

falling by the roadsides during the march through the muddy Polish autumn.

So you have one army digging in and one army on the move, which on the surface sounds similar

to the western front, with some men stuck in the trenches, while the others were on

the move.

The Battle of Antwerp