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

by Dennis Showalter

  Most of the 1st Division and part of the 2nd streamed off the battlefield in disorder. But the Russians had been too badly shaken to take real advantage of the German discomfiture. Once out of the zone of their own artillery, most of the running men stopped to catch their breath, then milled around until their officers and NCOs began sorting them into companies and platoons. Messengers on bicycles finally reached the gunners and informed them of their error. Between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. the Germans began moving forward again. Around 3:00 p.m. they reached the Gumbinnen-Kussen road. There they stopped.

  Straggling and heat exhaustion by now were felling more men than Russian bullets. Officers, themselves tired and stunned from a day’s hard fighting, could no longer galvanize their staggering riflemen. The I Corps had no reserves left to exploit its success. There was no sign of XVII Corps, supposed to be advancing from the south. At 4:00 p.m. François reluctantly gave the order: halt for the day.

  What had become of XVII Corps’s attack? Its commander, August von Mackensen, is most familiar as a background member of Adolf Hitler’s entourage in the 1930s: a hawk-faced, fiercely mustached old man, eyes deep-set under the fur busby with the skull-and-crossbones insignia of his old regiment, the 2nd Hussars. But Mackensen’s symbolic role in fusing the old and new Germanies began far earlier. Born in 1849, the son of a nonnoble estate manager, he served as a one-year volunteer in 1869 and spent two years at the University of Halle. Recalled to active duty for the Franco-Prussian War, he earned a field commission as a reserve officer, then after a brief return to the university, transferred to the active army and made a successful career as soldier and courtier. One of the new empire’s finest horsemen, he first attracted notice for his performances on the amateur turf. Detached to tutor the future Kaiser William in military history, Mackensen did much to establish the young Prince’s image of an ideal officer. But it was his skills as an administrator, unusual for a cavalryman, that earned him assignment to the general staff without the usual background of War Academy training, and subsequent appointment as Schlieffen’s adjutant in 1891. William II not only named Mackensen an imperial adjutant—a status giving him the continuing privilege of direct access to the kaiser—he sent his eldest son to serve under Mackensen’s command in the 2nd Hussars.

  By this time the commoner’s boy had become almost too polished for some of his contemporaries. His elegant manners, especially a predilection for kissing the imperial hand, evoked hostility. But his six-foot good looks aroused enough open, and reciprocated, admiration from the court’s ladies to stifle any snide remarks about Mackensen’s sexual proclivities. The kaiser’s favor continued to bring tangible rewards: promotion to colonel, advancement to the ranks of the nobility, assignment in 1903 to command the 30th Division in Alsace. Five years later, as General der Kavallerie, he took over XVII Corps. In 1914 he was Prittwitz’s senior subordinate.6

  Mackensen was also part of one of the Edwardian era’s more intriguing legends. In 1903 British Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, a public hero of the empire’s little wars, committed suicide in a Paris hotel in the wake of charges of homosexual behavior with adolescent boys. The event generated a broad spectrum of rumors, including one that Macdonald had been a victim of blackmail by the German secret service. On the point of exposure, he and his employers staged a suicide. Macdonald defected to Germany and took the place of a senior officer dying of cancer. That officer was August von Mackensen.7

  The difficulties involved in making such a switch—not the least of them being the four inches’ difference in height between the two men—did not scotch the stories, which surfaced again as recently as 1962. Perhaps Mackensen’s subordinates might not have regarded the exchange as a dead loss. Macdonald was a combat-experienced infantryman. As for Mackensen, it was generally conceded that he was a hard driver and a fierce disciplinarian. His tactical abilities were more dubious, particularly among infantry generals critical on principle of cavalry officers in corps commands. In the 1910 maneuvers I Corps, then commanded by von Kluck, had made XVII Corps look ridiculous by erecting camouflage screens and dummy wood lots, so changing the appearance of the terrain that Mackensen’s officers lost confidence in their own maps. It was the kind of fiasco that terminated many a career. Though Mackensen’s imperial connections helped him to survive, the story remained good for a laugh over drinks in the Kasinos of eastern Germany—those, that is, outside the XVII Corps district.

  Whatever Mackensen’s professional shortcomings, he knew his subordinates well; he was proud of his corps and eager to show his mettle in the field. At sixty-five he was not likely to have many more chances. To him the war was a welcome alternative to imminent retirement in some sleepy garrison town. He received Prittwitz’s order to advance at 4:40 p.m. on the 19th. Fifty minutes later XVII Corps, less one regiment, was on the move.

  Mackensen’s men faced a twenty-five-kilometer night march from their original concentration area on the Angerapp before reaching the assigned line of departure on the Rominte River. The XVII Corps had had several days of rest; peacetime experience indicated that the march was well within the capacity of the active soldiers and young reservists who filled its ranks. Advancing to a first battle, however, imposed a different set of stresses than the most difficult peacetime exercises. The roads were crowded with civilians fleeing their homes in the face of lurid stories of Russian atrocities. Bellowing cattle and bleating sheep, lost children seeking their parents, women and old men seeking to save what they could in the absence of husbands and sons called to arms—it was a discouraging montage to the green German infantrymen. Rumors shot through the marching columns. Cossacks had occupied the Angerapp crossings. The Russian Guards were ready to enter the battle. The roads ahead were mined. By daylight gossip might have been laughed away. In the darkness men thrown on their own resources found it easy to take counsel of the little, formless fears that made Napoleon describe two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage as among the rarest of military commodities.8

  Circumstances tried nerves still further. Time and again the streams of refugees forced the marching columns to detour from main roads onto rough, unpaved tracks. Field kitchens and supply wagons tipped over in the fading light or bogged down in sand. Unexpected halts, a half-dozen in an hour, broke the marching rhythm. Muscles cramped and limbs stiffened during pauses too short to provide real rest. The German army put much store on singing in the ranks—not merely as a gesture of high morale to please the officers, but as a means of keeping men moving, providing a distraction from the boots and the knapsack of the man in front. By twilight the voices of XVII Corps were muted. The leading squads in a company might sustain a song out of respect for or fear of the captain riding at their head. No one else was feeling musical.

  As the sound of gunfire from François’s sector grew louder, anxious officers forced the pace. It began to rain—a cold, steady drizzle whose sharp contrast to the day’s heat enhanced the misery of the men in the ranks. Under all but the strictest discipline, any long marching column tends to suffer from an accordion effect: it stretches out until the men at the rear have to double-time to close the formation. Platoons and companies lost touch in the rain, attaching themselves to other formations and straggling back to their parent units as best they might. Mackensen’s regiments were playing crack-the-whip by the time they reached their bivouac areas.

  Another problem, one generally overlooked even in the biologically obsessed literature of a later era, involved calls of nature. In the German army men were expected to relieve themselves during the regulation halts of five or ten minutes in the hour. But the emotions accompanying a trying night march, with a battle certain to follow, had an inevitable effect on bowels and bladders. At least one company commander ordered that all short-taken privates be accompanied by a corporal who was responsible for seeing his charges back into the ranks by the next halt. The same captain detailed his senior lieutenant and the company Feldwebel to march in the rear and make certain that no one fell out of
ranks without permission.9 Other officers were less cautious. More and more stragglers exchanged relief for anxiety as they vainly sought their place in the ranks.

  It was almost dawn when XVII Corps finally halted. Artillery batteries pushed forward to their improvised gun lines. Staff officers galloped here and there seeking to avoid giving the impression of confusion. Infantrymen threw themselves down on the damp ground for whatever rest they could catch. Pitching shelter halves in the wet darkness seemed a useless exercise for the few hours remaining before dawn. There were no friendly farmers to provide bundles of straw to soften the ground. And why waste the hour necessary to unpack, then repack, heavily laden knapsacks? Here and there an ambitious Landser scraped a shallow hole to protect himself from the night winds. Most slept where they first dropped, knots of men along the road or scattered in the fields tossing and turning from cold and exhaustion, muttering in their uneasy sleep, giving at least one platoon commander a grisly shock when he awoke to a command that seemed to consist of corpses.10 Fortunate was the company whose field kitchens had kept pace with the march, and whose cooks could supply their comrades with a cup of hot coffee to ease the shock of the morning.

  Mackensen was almost as bewildered as his men. Initially he had been told that the Russians were advancing against I Corps, and that their left was open. At 8:00 p.m. a telephone message from I Corps informed him that only weak Russian forces were south of the corps’s sector. Reports sent later spoke of Russian advances in strength against I Corps’s positions. No orders arrived from army headquarters to coordinate the movements of I and XVII Corps.11

  Mackensen, thrown on his own, concluded from the available intelligence that the Russians were concentrating against I Corps, with XVII Corps facing no more than flank guards.

  Surprisingly, neither the old hussar nor his division commanders used their cavalry to reconnoiter ahead of the likely corps line of advance.12 The corps air detachment sent out patrols at first light, but the reports were only of abandoned camp sites and columns of supply wagons. Mackensen, convinced he had reached a favorable position unobserved, saw no reason to delay his attack. As the noise of battle from I Corps’s front grew ever louder, the commander of XVII Corps issued his orders. Both divisions would attack northeast. The 35th Division on the left was to go through the village of Todszühnen; the 36th would take Walterkehmen and secure the corps’s right flank.

  At 4:15 a.m., a message from army headquarters informed Mackensen that the corps’s detached regiment, the 129th Infantry, was on its way to reinforce him, and that I Reserve Corps would cover his southern flank. The dispatch confirmed Mackensen’s decision to attack at once. The XVII Corps deployed its seven available regiments side by side in line—a disposition reflecting the breadth of the corps sector and limiting the formation of all but local reserves. At 4:30 a.m. the forward battalions advanced. The rank and file had had at most an hour’s rest, but adrenalin kept them moving against light opposition. By 9:00 a.m. the 35th Division’s left brigade, the 87th, was just north of Todszühnen. And there its commandant received a visitor.

  At 8:30 a.m. François sent a liaison officer south with a message for Mackensen. It stated that I Corps had been successfully advancing since dawn, and it promised a great victory if XVII Corps would only swing north and take the enemy in the rear. Brigadier-General von Hahn responded by shifting the direction of his attack on his own responsibility. Mackensen was not pleased at this unauthorized adjustment of his front. He was even less pleased when the 87th Brigade came under fire on three sides from Russian artillery, and found itself pinned down. The 35th Division’s right brigade, the 70th, was similarly stopped in its tracks within a few minutes of its sister formation.13

  Mackensen’s other division, the 36th, was faring even worse. Like the 35th, it initially advanced into a vacuum. At 7:35 a.m. the division commander, Major General von Heineccius, reported optimistically that he expected to “block the retreat” of the Russians on his front. He was unaware that his men were facing two full Russian divisions, the 27th and 40th, well entrenched among a maze of hills and small woods offering poor observation at best. Mackensen and Heineccius might believe that the Russians were withdrawing. Mackensen’s airmen might continue to report the area clear of enemy formations. By 8:00 a.m., however, regimental officers, company and battalion commanders, were increasingly aware that they were facing the prospect of a breakthrough battle against an invisible enemy. One frustrated colonel assumed a subaltern’s role, riding ahead of his deployed battalions to see for himself where the Russians were. Five hundred meters north of Walterkehmen he found out. A burst of rifle fire at point-blank range sent him back to his own lines with undignified haste.14

  German tactical doctrine called for frontal attacks to be made by lines of skirmishers strong enough to keep the enemy pinned by their own fire action, yet flexible enough to work forward in small groups to within a half- or quarter-mile of the position. The skirmish line—perhaps better called an assault line—would establish fire superiority, then close to about a hundred yards and mount a final, all-in attack with the bayonet, drums beating and bugles sounding. The whole operation was to be prepared and supported by artillery.15 But this morning the officers of XVII Corps were unwilling to lose time by following the book. Reluctance to risk being considered laggards outweighed the years of training and the suggestions of common sense. Instead, three regiments of the 36th Division stormed heedlessly forward against everything the Russians could throw at them.

  Within minutes the Germans began learning that command from the front as practiced in the kaiser’s army had military disadvantages. In peacetime regimental messes, a familiar clichè was that a company officer’s duty was to lead his men forward at the double. What became of him afterwards was irrelevant. This attitude might have merit when applied to the climactic charge of a decisive battle. Modern war, however, offered few such high points. Everywhere on the front of XVII Corps’s attack, captains and lieutenants were among the first to drop. Some sacrificed their lives inspiring the men they were supposed to command. But where in earlier centuries a thousand men might be galvanized by a single act of courage, rapid-firing weapons tended to restrict the audience for such feats to a half-dozen or so—and they were more likely to curse the would-be hero for drawing fire than they were to emulate his self-immolation. Too often the successors to these casualties could not be found amid the growing confusion, or were themselves hit before learning of their changed status. Emotions also intervened. The German private, like his counterparts everywhere in Europe, was strictly forbidden to leave the ranks to tend casualties. The same principle applied to officers—but in practice it could prove difficult to abandon a comrade without the incentive of threats from an NCO. The result was a collection of suitably edifying death scenes eloquently recorded in letters or diaries, and a corresponding contribution to breakdown in the chain of command.16

  Live officers did not guarantee progress and control. Companies overran Russian trenches, then stood waiting for orders instead of pursuing or consolidating. A lieutenant of the 5th Grenadiers, sent to notify the artillery of his regiment’s position, encountered his division commander, who asked how things stood in the fighting line. When told of the confusion and casualties, the general shouted, “Dig in the way the Russians did!” But too many field and company officers shared the opinion of the Grenadier captain who insisted that “Prussian infantry does not entrench!” Doctrine and regulations accepted the desirability, even the necessity, of field fortifications.17 Every infantryman carried his own entrenching tool. In peacetime, however, few regiments taught their men to use these clumsy implements. The Germans dug like amateurs. Those who concentrated on deepening their foxholes risked the wrath of superiors who wanted to know why they were not firing on the Russians. At least one captain who asked that question had it promptly answered by a bullet through his head—an event duly reported to the next in command by the company Feldwebel, whose own sense of soldierly
honor did not prevent him from taking cover in a handy potato field.18

  Some riflemen took revenge for comrades struck down by enemies who seemed invisible until they stood up almost in the midst of their attackers and tried to surrender. A lieutenant of the 141st Infantry wrote of Russians shot down at point-blank range until he intervened to stop the slaughter. Far from being proud of his behavior, the officer described himself in a subsequent letter as a sentimental fool.19 But at least his men were still in ranks. Others ran for their lives, throwing away rifles, shedding helmets and belts in their single-minded desire to get away—anywhere that the bullets were not flying. A lieutenant of the 5th Grenadiers picked up a rifle and fired at a group of fugitives. A few stopped, throwing themselves to the ground in desperation. The rest kept running. A single marksman was nothing compared to what they had faced earlier in the day.20

  Those Germans who kept trying to move forward found confusion compounded by adherence to another peacetime cliche: building up the firing line. The experience of decades of maneuvers, long embalmed in various infantry drill regulations, dictated that when an advance stalled, fresh troops should be brought forward as quickly as possible to restore momentum. Regiment and battalion commanders committed their own reserves, then began commandeering other troops wherever they could be found. The too-frequent result was that, as at Stallupönen, detachments of different regiments found themselves next to each other in the same sector, fighting under leaders they did not know against a foe they could not see.