Grey Tide In The East

by Andrew J. Heller

  As he watched, he described what he saw on a field telephone to General deCastlenau himself, at Second Army Headquarters. The General asked Hughes a question. “The boche artillery was pounding them, General,” he replied. “As you know, their field pieces outrange our 75s. The artillery bombardment went on for about two hours, causing very heavy casualties, as the Corp’s position had no natural cover and the men were not dug in…” (because they were taught that the French soldier never digs in, he only attacks, Hughes thought) “…and then they were taken by a surprise attack in the flank from a forest… a moment please, General…” Hughes fumbled with a map, finally succeeding in unfolding it to the right section. “…the Forest of Bride and Koeking, about three kilometres east of here.”

  Another question came from the commanding General of the Second Army. “General, I do not believe that these men will be able to rally this side of Nancy, but they may be able to fight again if they get behind our fortress line. In the meantime, may I suggest that if we do not get some reinforcements to plug this hole in our line, the boches may be in Nancy before our men are.”

  After Hughes returned to Headquarters, he quickly went through the reports from the entire Second Army. The French offensive had been everywhere either driven back by German counter-attacks, or forced to retreat to avoid being surrounded when a neighbouring unit was defeated. The next day he discovered that the same story had been repeated up and down the line: all the French armies, from the Swiss border to Luxembourg, had been repulsed with heavy losses. Plan XVII was an unmitigated calamity.

  Hughes had heard that the Russians had surprised everyone by launching an offensive into East Prussia before anybody thought they could be ready. He wondered how they were doing. Better than us, I hope, he thought. If not, we are in very bad trouble.

  Chapter Five: EAST PRUSSIA, AUGUST 21, 1914

  In the sharply angled sunlight of late afternoon, Ray Swing peered through his field glasses at the Russian positions in the little village of Bischofstien, perhaps a mile away. Beside him in the stone barn, Lieutenant-Colonel Max Hoffman of the German 8th Army was also surveying the hastily prepared earthworks the defenders had thrown up.

  Hoffman had been posted as a military observer attached to the Japanese Army during the Russo-Japanese War, and was therefore considered something of Russian specialist in the German Army. He had learned respect for the phenomenal courage and endurance of the Russian soldier. On the other hand, he had nothing but contempt for the officers who led them. He shared his conclusion that the Russians were particularly incompetent in the area of logistics, describing two occasions when he saw the Japanese overrun Russian positions when the defenders ran out of ammunition.

  “The typical Russian officer is brave, has some understanding of platoon-level tactics and can usually sit a horse well,” Hoffman said. “Beyond that, he understands practically nothing about modern warfare, and that describes their entire officer corps right up to their General Staff, as far as I can tell.”

  The two men were waiting for a German assault to begin, the day’s second attempt to take this key crossroads and complete the encirclement of the Russian Second Army.

  They had witnessed the first try, earlier in the day. The German artillery had pounded the Russian trenches heavily for half an hour. Shells screamed overhead, blasting great fountains of dirt, mud, wood and pieces of unidentifiable objects into the air. Several of the houses in the little village were knocked down, and many of the wood-shingled roofs were on fire or at least smouldering.

  Swing, who had never before witnessed combat, found the violence of the bombardment impressively terrifying. He found it hard to believe that anyone was still alive in the Russian trenches after the barrage. When the shelling let up, he was about to ask Hoffman his opinion, but before he could, the German was already answering the unasked question.

  “Not enough, not enough,” he muttered without taking the binoculars from his eyes. “That is not going to do it. Raymond, if you want to see what a modern rifle can do, watch closely,” he said.

  Whistles blew, and the German assault troops emerged from behind the trees and buildings where they had gathered prior to the assault. They moved forward across potato fields in dense bunches, their rifles pointing forward at the enemy, their bayonets fixed. The Russians began to fire, a faint crackling sound, and the Germans began to fall, first a few at a time, then many more in rapid order. Swing could hear the cries of the wounded men as the attack moved forward.

  Now, there came a new sound, a deep chattering noise. “That would be the 1910 Maxim,” Hoffman said. “Effective range is around 1000 metres and it fires 600 rounds a minute.” As he spoke, Swing saw the Russian machine gun cut swathes in the grey-clad soldiers. Before a single German had reached the Russian lines, the attack had faltered, the soldiers flinging themselves to the ground just to stay alive. The whistles blew again, and the Germans went back to the jumping-off points, carrying dead and wounded comrades.

  “Terrible,” commented Hoffman. “Completely inadequate artillery preparation. The position must be bombarded for twice as long as that to break up their earthworks and neutralise those machine gun nests.” He pulled his watch from his pocket, and said, “There is time to organise one more assault today. With more thorough artillery preparation, it can be done.”

  They settled down to wait.

  * * * * *

  Ray Swing had spent considerable time and money cultivating potential sources since he had come to Berlin. An experienced British reporter he met shortly after arriving in Germany had suggested that, if he wanted good inside information on the German Army, he could do worse than talk to Lieutenant-Colonel Max Hoffman. Swing had taken the reporter's advice, spending several moderately expensive evenings buying drinks for Hoffman (the Lieutenant-Colonel favoured French cognac), and becoming friendly with the man. As soon as war was declared, Swing called Hoffman to see if some strings could be pulled that would get him to the front. As it happened, Hoffman himself was available to take Swing out to the front lines.

  The 41 year old Hoffman was tall and burly, with close-cropped hair on his large head. He was intelligent, knowledgeable and helpful to his friends, of which Swing was glad to include himself. He had served in the Russian section of the General Staff before the war, and then been posted to 8th Army in East Prussia where he was General Prittwitz’s deputy chief of staff. The 8th’s assignment was to defend East Prussia in the unlikely event that the Russians were able to launch an offensive there before the Schlieffen Plan had crushed the French and released the armies committed in the West. That all changed when orders from Berlin cancelled the Schlieffen Plan, called off the invasion of Belgium, and sent 750,000 men of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Armies that were originally intended to march west to East Prussia instead.

  The 8th Army was placed in reserve, while General Moltke himself directed a hastily devised campaign against the Russians, using the field armies that had been shipped in from the west. Under the circumstances, Hoffman found himself with time on his hands. When Swing approached him, he readily obtained permission to go on detached duty to conduct the American reporter around the battlefields (“To keep him out of trouble” was the way Hoffman described it to General Prittwitz.)

  As they rode the train to Marienburg, the end of the line in East Prussia, Hoffman filled Swing in on the military situation.

  “As it turned out, it was fortunate for us that the invasion of Belgium was called off,” Hoffman explained. “The Russians weren’t supposed to be able to organise anything bigger than a cavalry raid for two months after the war started, but somehow they were able to deliver two field armies to the border and send them into East Prussia in less than two weeks. We estimate that they have about 600,000 men altogether.” He shook his head at the thought. “I still do not see how they were able to bring up enough ammunition for that many men, leaving aside the question of food.” He paused, as if calculating something, and then went on. “The Eight
h Army had a total of perhaps 135,000 men to stop them.”

  “That’s more than four to one in their favour,” Swing said. “But, with the new German troops coming from the west…”

  Hoffman nodded, “The balance tilts back in our favour. Heavily in our favour, I would say. There is a question of quality, after all. For example, consider artillery.” His voice took on an authoritative ring, as if he was delivering a report to the General Staff. “We have both more guns and superior ones, as well as better trained crews. Just based on that advantage alone, the combat efficiency of a German division is probably half again that of a Russian one. Also, the Russians will certainly have serious logistical issues. They will be operating far from their nearest railheads, and their wagon train is completely inadequate to supply such large armies. As for their leadership… let us just say that the Russian officer corps is not trained to German standards.” He shook his head again.

  “Objectively, I would rate the fighting power of a German division at twice that of a Russian one,” Hoffman concluded. “So you see, we really outnumber them in effective combat strength by at least two to one.”

  Swing had been scribbling furiously while the German spoke. “Would it be fair to say that you are confident the Russian armies will be driven off German soil?” Swing asked, his pencil poised over his notepad.

  Colonel Hoffman’s lips curled upward in a grin, which could only be described as ‘carnivorous’. “No, Raymond, I do not expect the Russian armies to be ‘driven off’ German soil,” he answered. “I expect them to be annihilated.”

  * * * * *

  In Marienburg, Hoffman took Swing to 8th Army headquarters and introduced him to his commanding officer General Prittwitz and another general with the oddly Gallic name of Francois. That the 8th Army had not been given an active role in the German plan, disgusted Prittwitz and his staff. Swing discovered that Hoffman’s colleagues on the 8th Army staff were as surprised as he that the despised Russians had managed to organise an invasion so quickly, and that they were equally as confident as Hoffman that the Tsar’s soldiers would soon be obliterated.

  Hoffman asked for a copy of Moltke’s marching orders, then for a map of the planned offensive. He studied the materials closely for a few minutes, pulled his watch from his pocket and glanced at it, then stabbed the map decisively with a thick finger.

  “We will go over to Bischofstien,” he told Swing. “The Twentieth Corps will be assaulting the town this afternoon.” Hoffman ordered a staff car and driver, and they were bumping down a dirt road through the Prussian countryside a few minutes later.

  Hoffman used his fertile imagination to get them to an artillery O.P. in a stone barn near the starting line for the attack. Swing’s German was far from perfect, but it sounded to him as if Hoffman claimed that Oberstgeneral Moltke himself had authorised him to bring the American correspondent with him up to this advanced post almost at the front line. He was not one hundred percent sure, but he thought he heard Hoffman tell a sceptical artillery Major named Bruckner that Swing was a nephew of President Wilson.

  * * * * *

  The assault on Bischofstien was renewed three hours later, beginning with an artillery barrage that made the one Swing had witnessed earlier in the day seem positively feeble by comparison. The Germans were evidently using both more guns and larger calibre ones as well. This bombardment did not stop after a mere thirty minutes, but instead went on for an hour and a half.

  The effect of the second shelling on the Russian works was almost indescribable. Swing saw blasts fling brown clad soldiers out of their shallow entrenchments like rag dolls, machine gun nests and their crews buried under mountains of loose earth. His field glasses showed a scene of hell on earth, with trees knocked flat, houses blown to pieces, horses gone mad with fear running wildly across no-mans-land and dead men lying everywhere. The wooden, thatch-roofed houses that made up the little farming village of Bischofstien, most of which had survived the morning assault reasonably intact, were reduced a pile of flaming rubble. A light eastern wind carried wisps of smoke and the sharp smell of cordite to the German lines.

  When silence finally fell, Hoffman nodded approvingly. Through the ringing in his ears, Swing heard the German say, “That should do it.”

  He dimly heard whistles blowing, and thousands of voices shouting. Once again, from out of the woods on either side and in front of the barn jogged masses of grey-clad soldiers. As they moved across the open field toward the town, Swing heard the crack of rifle fire and saw orange muzzle flashes from the Russian trenches. He was amazed to see that even this heavy shelling had not killed or incapacitated all of the defenders.

  Swing could tell from the sound that this time there were many fewer rifles firing, and no Maxim guns in action at all. Some of the Germans were felled by the defenders’ fire, but not enough of them to even slow the down the momentum of the assault. It was clear that there simply were not enough Russian riflemen left to hold the position in front of village. In just a few minutes, the German assault was across the fields and in the town, overrunning the Russian positions, shooting the defenders at close range, or spearing them with their bayonets. Swing was surprised that the Russians did not surrender, even when it became obvious that continued defence was hopeless.

  Hoffman was thinking along the same lines. “Brave bastards, aren’t they?” he commented. He lowered his binoculars. “Give them a few more minutes and then we can go into the town behind them, if you want a look at the Russian positions.”

  Swing fought to keep his lunch down as he inspected the mutilated bodies and parts of bodies in the formerly Russian trenches. There were only so many corpses that he could look at before he had seen his fill. Hoffman was inspecting the Russian dead thoughtfully.

  “Just look at how few rifles are here,” he said, sweeping his arm to indicate a section of earthworks containing perhaps twenty dead Russians. “I see no more than six. I wonder…” He set off rapidly, surveying another section of the field works, Swing at his heels.

  “You know,” he said at last, “I do not believe they had weapons for more than half of their men, perhaps not even for that many. How were they supposed to fight without rifles, I wonder?” He shook his head at the thought.

  “We can go back to Marienburg now, and tomorrow we will return to see the Russians surrender, I think,” Hoffman told Swing.

  As they trudged across the shell-torn field back to the staff car, Swing asked, “Surrender? How can you be so sure?”

  “The road through Bischofstien was the last connection their Second Army had back to their supply train,” Hoffman explained. “After two days of fighting, they are almost certainly either out or nearly out of food, small-arms and artillery ammunition, and everything else. Also, their communications are cut to pieces, so headquarters is no longer in control of their men. By tomorrow afternoon, there will no longer be a Russian army here, only a leaderless mob.”

  That night, after he had finished writing his story, he paused to wonder again who had made the decision to cancel the invasion of Belgium, and why. Whatever the reason, it looked as if it had been the right one for Germany. This as yet unnamed great victory in East Prussia was only the beginning, he suspected. The grey tide of the German Army was flowing strongly into the East, and Russia was about to be engulfed in it.

  Chapter Six: EAST PRUSSIA, AUGUST 25, 1914

  As First Lieutenant Joseph Stilwell listened to his host, he experienced a mix of amusement and irritation, although he made sure not to allow either to show on his face. Captain Ernst von Luettner had done nothing to rate either: particularly to the latter, the man had gone out of his way to be helpful.

  The source of the amusement was that the German’s appearance was at such variance with his speech.

  Von Luettner could have served as the model for a painting entitled “The Prussian Military Beast.” He had the requisite ramrod stiff posture, the Iron Cross (second class) pinned to his chest, the duelling scar on his
cheek below the left eye (from Heidelberg, no doubt), the Kaiser-inspired, upturned, waxed, spiked moustache, and even the obligatory monocle dangling from a silver chain on his chest. One look at him, and you knew that he would speak with the arrogant bark of the Prussian military aristocracy, and his English, if he bothered to learn it at all, would carry the sharp Teutonic accents of his class.

  So when this prototype Junker introduced himself, Stilwell was forced to suppress a smile when out of Luettner’s mouth came a pure upper-crust Oxbridge English accent with a speech pattern to match. Even after spending half a day in the Captain’s company, Stilwell found that if he closed his eyes when the German was speaking, he could imagine he was listening to the Duke of Bedfordshire, the Earl of Southampton or some other twig from the tree of the British aristocracy. There was an explanation, of course. The loquacious Luettner volunteered almost as soon as they met that he had attended Oxford for four years on a Rhodes scholarship. The contrast between Luettner’s appearance and speech was therefore the source of Stilwell’s amusement.