Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  The use of soldiers as harvest help symbolized conditions in the German east. In an empire increasingly developing along lines of regional specialization, this area had been left behind. Limited resources, limited capital, and limited markets retarded the growth of industrialization. The agrarian conservatives insisted on maintaining an agricultural system increasingly uncompetitive on a European market. In 1914 the average personal income in the province was about the same as the average for the entire kingdom of Prussia in 1892.

  Underdevelopment generated massive emigration westward, to Berlin and the Ruhr, in search of work and opportunities. Almost the entire natural population increase of the Reich’s eastern provinces from 1870 to 1914 was absorbed by this internal migration. By no means was all of it to the factories. Few German villages did not have a native son or two who had made his career as a NCO. Prussian farm boys were highly desired by colonels of regiments in Alsace, the Ruhr, and the Rhineland as sources and models of old Prussian virtues. Enlisted men could expect to be correspondingly well treated on maneuvers or detached service east of the Oder. Clean straw at worst, feather beds at best; good tobacco and better schnapps; an occasional slap-and-tickle with a maid, perhaps a smile from the daughter of the house; and all for the price of listening to the paterfamilias describe his days in uniform, show off his souvenirs, and boast of his sons on the far side of the Reich.1

  The army’s position in the east was also influenced by a German-Polish struggle that by the twentieth century politicized the entire region at the grass roots. National conflict enhanced mythologies based on national and religious differences dating back to the Middle Ages. The stakes were small and the issues marginal. Nevertheless the electoral process affirmed and intensified cleavages that seemed to defy political solutions. If no East Elbian politician rose in the Prussian Landtag or the German Reichstag to denounce the projected abandonment of his homeland to Slavic hordes as a result of the Schlieffen Plan, a sense of the eastern provinces as an ethnic and cultural battleground was nevertheless too pervasive to ignore. Social democracy, that bugbear of respectable opinion in the Reich proper, was just visible enough in East Prussia’s home towns to provide a sense of danger for the patriotic societies to exploit at their meetings. But ethnic chauvinism had been comprehensively fostered in recent years by the work of anti-Slav, anti-Polish propagandists for the H-K-T Society and similar groups. While the cutting edge of their work was in Posen and West Prussia, their speakers and pamphlets were familiar in this trans-Vistula province as well.

  Nor was this attitude entirely a product of propaganda. The border districts boasted some of the highest crime rates in Germany. Neidenburg, Heydekrug, Niederung—three East Prussian Landkreise were in the top ten of the entire Reich for the years 1903–12. Their common denominator was the possession of significant minorities, Polish for Neidenburg, Lithuanian for the other two. Urbanization and modernization, those often-cited harbingers of disorder, were less significant on the frontier than old-fashioned poverty combined with discrimination. And while efficient municipal police forces and an ever-present gendarmerie could be counted on to keep the lesser breeds in good order under most circumstances, German nationals considered a strong military presence a welcome insurance policy.2

  Rather than being stationed in the countryside by squadrons and companies, like British troops in eighteenth-century Ireland or their Austrian counterparts in Galicia, most of the German regiments in West and East Prussia were concentrated. The principal garrisons of XVII Corps were the old fortress cities strung along the Vistula: Thorn, Graudenz, Danzig. Across the river, most of the men of I and XX Corps were stationed in the small- and medium-sized market towns dotting the East Prussian landscape at thirty- or forty-mile intervals: Allenstein, Insterburg, Rastenburg, Lyck. Some could trace a heritage to the days of the Teutonic knights. Others owed their modern existence to the colonization programs of Frederick William I. All sought and welcomed garrisons. In depressed agricultural areas, soldiers were a major source of income. Almost a third of the male wage earners in Graudenz, for example, wore uniforms. Food and forage, construction and maintenance, could be important items in the ledgers of any local business fortunate enough to get army contracts. Generals and colonels were usually politically astute enough to see that the benefits were reasonably widely distributed, even to Polish landowners and contractors with the right patriotic spirit.

  The army also offered social variety. In West Prussia, ethnic, economic, and historical factors combined to isolate the towns from the countryside. East of the Vistula, most of the towns were just large enough to make monotony a scourge for their residents. In both cases a garrison’s bands and parades provided public entertainment, while the officers were a welcome addition to circles impossibly narrow in terms of the brighter lights to the west.

  The officers themselves frequently had other ideas. At the end of the nineteenth century, service on the frontier was to many officiers moyens sensuels a career-threatening mixture of professional stress and soul-killing boredom. Commanding generals were likely to be fire-eaters who took seriously their task of defending the Reich’s outposts and were correspondingly quick to ensure the premature retirement of anyone failing to measure up to their exacting standards. Gottlieb Haeseler, for years commander of XVI Corps in Metz and the Reich’s most familiar military eccentric, had an equally fearsome counterpart in August Lentze, who from 1890 to 1902 made service in Danzig’s XVII Corps an exercise in anxiety for any officer above the rank of captain. As a familiar Kasino rhyme enjoined:

  Gott behüt mich vox der Grenze

  Gottlieb Häseler, August Lentze.3

  Assignment to a frontier province meant isolation from both the increasingly attractive civilian social scene and the mainstreams of professional development and professional advancement. It meant years in endlessly monotonous small towns with their one good restaurant, their two or three respectable Gasthäuser, their choral groups and gymnastic associations so difficult for any outsider to penetrate. The universal appellation for these places was Drecknester, “shitholes.” Few officers were convinced by the argument that civilian officials, doctors, and lawyers managed to make quite comfortable lives in such communities. Drinking and gambling, often financed by borrowed money, flourished. Unmarried lieutenants consorted with women of questionable reputation. Married captains seduced each others’ wives. Personal antagonisms bred quarrels, duels, and courtmartials. In the hothouse atmosphere of provincial Germany, the stories lost nothing in the repetition among outraged and titillated civilians. In Gumbinnen, when an officer murdered his unfaithful wife, the scandal kept tongues wagging for years.

  In 1904, a disgusted lieutenant published Life in a Garrison Town, a roman à clef describing scandalous goings-on among the officers in For-bach in Alsace. Coming on the heels of Franz-Adam Beyerlein’s Jena oder Sedan, with its exposè of the alleged dry rot in the German army, this work earned the author the rewards critics expected of Imperial Germany: a sentence for libel accompanied by impassioned denials that anything serious was amiss. In fact, the German officer was the victim of a double bind. The army’s pretensions as the school of the nation and the embodiment of its highest ideals generated correspondingly high expectations of its officers. Like Caesar’s wife, they were to be above suspicion—mature, circumspect, and discreet; reflective in judgment and wise in counsel. In such a context even youth’s predictable lapses were unlikely to be ignored. Nor were critics willing to make distinctions between private behavior and that involving matters of public trust. German subalterns were never allowed the license their British contemporaries took for granted.4

  Yet the army’s well-documented reluctance to stamp out antisocial exuberance was not entirely a crude manifestation of militarism. It is easy to forget just how thoroughly domesticated was the German soldier of the early twentieth century. In his unpublished memoirs General Otto von Below described his first courtesy call as a brigadier on his division commander. As he
approached the door he overheard an outburst of scolding. When he rang the bell he found his superior deep in a “discussion” with his teenage daughter. As she flounced out of the house with a final “Oh, Daddy!” the general explosively vented his frustration, while his wife expressed her hope that Below’s own daughter would be a calming influence on their uncontrollable offspring. Both of these family men would take army corps into action in 1914. A few years later Below, in full uniform, found himself stranded in a small rural Gasthaus late in the evening. When he requested a meal the landlady informed him that she had no time; she needed to help her son with his schoolwork. The general promptly and gallantly mounted the breach and earned his dinner by taking the youngster through his Latin exercises.

  Apart from their modification of the image of Imperial Germany as a militarized and patriarchal society, such anecdotes suggest a real problem within the officer corps. Combat leadership, particularly at junior levels, involves a mixture of forceful character and a certain indifference to consequences. Lieutenants and captains are never expected to have long life spans once the shooting starts. No army can contemplate with equanimity the thought of stable, settled, emotionally middle-aged men leading platoons into enemy fire. The German army had to walk a consistently fine line between the Scylla of emasculating its junior leaders by converting them into bureaucratized good citizens and the Charybdis of allowing panache and enthusiasm to degenerate into publicity-generating hooliganism.5

  The war ministry and the general staff agreed that idle hands were mischief-prone. The expansion of the Prussian garrison, from one corps in 1889 to three after 1912, generated a critical mass that fostered efficiency by emulation and competition. Living conditions improved. New formations received new barracks, solidly built, comfortable structures with storage rooms, running water, accommodations for married NCOs, and separate quarters for the bachelor NCOs—the last a minor development that improved discipline and morale by giving the rank and file and their junior leaders mutual privacy off duty. The officers were not always so fortunate. As late as 1913, one major had to content himself with two tiny apartments, ten minutes’ walk apart. To go from his sitting room to his bedroom required the use of a lantern. In bad weather the journey was a nightly adventure. The storyteller leaves the sanitary arrangements to our imaginations.6

  As the army in East Prussia increased in size it became more public. Old regiments like the 4th Grenadiers displayed their silver, their portraits of retired colonels, their trophies from past victories. Newer ones like the 141st Infantry showcased marksmanship prizes. Wise colonels made their regimental bands available for concerts, and regularly distributed invitations to the officers’ club among locally prominent citizens. For everybody else parades, target practice, and route marches offered welcome breaks in daily routines. In Ortelsburg, the lieutenants of the 1st Jäger Battalion occasionally ended a particularly relaxing session in the officers’ mess with an improvised midnight parade through the small town. At least one good citizen, far from deploring his interrupted sleep, complained instead that the merry pranksters never passed by his house. The oversight was remedied at the earliest opportunity.7 The incident, typical of many, suggests that the posturing, monocled caricature of Ulk, Simplicissimus, and the Social Democratic press was to a degree the product of perception and expectation. Particularly outside the big cities, a bit of good will accompanied by some concessions to immaturity was likely to give a garrison town the junior officers it deserved.8

  The German soldier of 1914 was the product of a deferential society. Even the Social Democrats had an articulated, hierarchic organization rigid enough to be frequently described by contemporaries as directly borrowed from the military. At the same time the Second Empire’s was a society sufficiently open to diffuse and defuse a good deal of class antagonism and hostility. In particular the development of a large lower middle class, and the growing complexity of that class, contributed to a general perception of choice as a factor in class identity. The pride of the white-collar worker, so often described in negative terms by academic critics, had a positive side as well: a sense of achievement and a promise of better things to come. Even the socialist movement drew its essential strength from affirmative identities. The ideal party member was class-conscious as well as class-determined—committed to the triumph of socialism because he wished to be so committed.9

  These attitudes were part of the army. The negative aspects of Germany’s military have been so stressed that it sometimes seems every officer from the chief of staff to the newest lieutenant must have had as his first thought on arising, “What can I personally do today to fix the yoke of decaying Junker feudalism on the necks of the emerging proletariat?”10 The army of Imperial Germany was in fact much more than a collection of sullen conscripts marking time till their discharge, destined to shoot down their brothers or be sacrificed in pursuit of militaristic dreams. It was also a significant instrument for integrating and legitimizing the Second Reich.

  The process of legitimation began with the officer corps. Its role was significantly enhanced by the relative confusion of Imperial Germany’s status network. No class, caste, or social group perceived itself as clearly dominant. In this climate an officer’s commission, active or reserve, easily became generally negotiable social currency. To consider it a symbol of bourgeois insecurity or an instrument for co-opting the middle class is to apply models irrelevant to most of the principals in the situation.11 The institution of the one-year volunteer, allowing young men with specific kinds and levels of education to serve a year in the ranks and then apply for a reserve commission, was not democratic. It was in a significant sense liberal in its encouragement of individual development, and correspondingly appealing to the ambitious. Acquiring a commission amounted to gaining membership in a club. The process was just difficult enough to make the goal desirable. But, at least for gentile Christians, it involved no extraordinary humiliations—nothing beyond the normal frustrations of entering a new environment, combined with the kinds of judicious logrolling and compromising that were increasingly the norms of a plural society. Engaging in this process was seen less as selling out than as buying in.

  Even before 1871, the number of Prussian noblemen willing to spend their active lives in military service could not meet the demand for officers. The expanding army of a united Germany presented an increasing spectrum of opportunities to commoners, or to men whose patents of gentility were only a generation old. William II’s rhetoric about the necessity of preserving the aristocratic spirit in the officer corps fell more and more on the ears of aristocrats by ascription.12 The system of commissioning officers definitely excluded social and political undesirables as defined by the establishment. The key to the process of stratification was the right of each regiment’s officer corps to approve candidates for active and reserve commissions into its ranks—an approval that had to be unanimous. Even the kaiser was reluctant to influence the process, and would rarely approve the commission of a man who did not have his future comrades’ assent. Anyone without the right pieces of paper, the right connections, or the right recommendations, found himself on the outside looking in.

  The defects of this selection process have so often been stressed that they hardly require further comment here. The kaiser’s officer corps was, however, neither retrograde nor unique in its approach. Characteristic of secondary institutions in modern societies is their tendency to maintain significant nonprofessional criteria for judging and advancing their members. Board rooms, city rooms, even college faculties, have their own ways of deciding just who qualifies for admission, and just who reaches the inner circle. Subjective qualities valued by the collective—gender, ethnicity, politics, behavior—can count for far more than objective qualifications. A Thatcherite in a British university of the 1980s, a Berkeley professor who voted for Reagan, was likely to know the same kind of loneliness as a closet liberal in the Prussian Guard.

  Contemporary critics of the German office
r corps tended to regard the principle of exclusivity as more important than any actual career opportunities that might be generated by its removal. To Walter Rathenau, denying him as a Jew the chance to become a reserve lieutenant reflected the empire’s failure to use its elites properly. It did not mean he was unable to pursue an eagerly sought career as a professional officer.13 The German army, moreover, softened the system’s edges by maintaining within general limits a kind of free-market system of application. The very requirement of unanimity tended to make a candidate’s final approval something of a formal process. The real weeding had been done earlier, frequently on the basis of common sense exercised by would-be officers and their families. The makeup and the attitude of a given regiment’s officer corps were hardly secret. A candidate prima facie unsuitable in one regiment might be acceptable, or even welcome, in another. Thus while seven of the army’s line cuirassier regiments had images as aristocratic strongholds, the 8th, stationed in Köln, was hospitable to the sons of bourgeois industrialists. Formations with undesirable garrisons or reputations often were in the embarrassing position of finding it difficult to attract candidates of any kind. The 44th Infantry, in the isolated town of Goldap on the Russian frontier, included 79 active officers in its ranks between 1905 and 1914. Fifty-four were transfers from other regiments. Of the 25 commissioned into the 44th, only 9 joined voluntarily. The other 16 were assigned from various cadet schools.14

  The army’s institutional structure paralleled that of society in that its pecking order was determined by such a complex combination of branch prejudices, family connections, traditions, and garrison locations that it is almost impossible to untangle from the perspective of another century. William II complicated the process by a general fondness for bestowing elaborate titles on his regiments. Formations that had for decades contented themselves with a simple number could suddenly sprout references to incidents and generals in Germany’s remote military past. Nor was the gap between guard and line by any means as absolute as in Britain or Russia. Many smaller German counts maintained their own household regiments. Officers of Bavaria’s Leib-Regiment, Württemberg’s Queen Olga Grenadiers, or the Grand Duchy of Hesse’s Bodyguard Infantry were no less proud of their service than the subalterns of “Christianity’s Most Elegant Regiment,” the 1st Foot Guards of Prussia. Within the Prussian Guard itself regiments looked down on some, swore drinking brotherhood with others. Thus in the 1880s the 1st Guard Dragoons considered themselves the finest of the cavalry regiments, and described their sister 2nd Guard Dragoons as representing the barrooms. The Guard Cuirassiers dismissed the 1st Dragoons as carpet-knights and dance floor heroes. The Uhlans, whose barracks were at some distance from the other three regiments, were excluded from this Morris dance of status.15