Around noon Mackensen had become aware that his battle plan was based on a series of singularly ill-favored guesses. Both of his divisions were stalled in front of a defense network no one could see, much less break. Any movement, whether to advance or to entrench, drew fire. A high proportion of the casualties were hit in the head or upper body—wounds demoralizingly likely to be fatal without prompt evacuation and treatment. Isolated rushes toward the Russian trenches continued throughout the early afternoon, motivated as much by junior leaders’ desperation or desire to die while attempting something as by any orders from higher headquarters. They were repulsed every time. One hard-charging lieutenant of the 128th Infantry entered the battle leading a platoon of seventy-two men. Three remained to follow him at day’s end.21
One hope remained: find a Russian flank and turn it. Mackensen still had one of his eight regiments uncommitted. The 36th Division’s 129th Infantry reached the field late in the morning. At 12:49 p.m. it received orders to go forward on the right of its parent division and roll up the Russian positions from the left. The 129th was well commanded and well trained, as good a regiment as any in the army. It had literally gone to war from the maneuver grounds, and had had ample time since then to integrate its reservists into their platoons and companies. Its fate on August 20 can stand as a case study of the tactical problems of the offensive in the early days of World War I.
Almost as soon as the Germans deployed they came under heavy rifle and artillery fire. The Russians seemed to have turned every farm and every copse into a fortress, and to have fortified every piece of high ground. The 129th’s attack broke down into a series of isolated struggles for buildings or clumps of trees. Once one was cleared, the ostensible victors promptly came under fire from two or three others which in their turn had to be masked or rushed. It was a platoon commanders’ battle that rapidly absorbed battalion, then regimental reserves in fights for tactical objectives that led nowhere. By late afternoon the 129th had dissolved into four separate, unconnected groups. The colonel and his staff had changed their positions so often that they had completely lost touch with all the higher headquarters. The Russian flank remained invisible and inviolate.22
As infantry attacks stalled all along Mackensen’s line, shouts went up: “Machine guns forward!” The evolution of the machine gun as the psychologically dominant weapon of World War I is usually taken for granted, presented as an inevitable consequence of its high firepower. Human factors were also involved in the process. The modern military rifle had become almost too easy to operate. Loading and firing it were such simple processes that they did not engage the infantryman’s attention in the way that the more complicated muzzle-loader had done. He had correspondingly greater opportunities to be aware of his surroundings. And on a modern battlefield, the results of that awareness could readily become some form of shock reaction. He might exhaust his ammunition blazing away at nothing. Or he might simply go to ground. Regulations proclaimed that a good field of fire was more important to the infantryman than shelter from enemy bullets. But these were mere words on a field where any movement seemed to make one a specific target.
The machine gun, on the other hand, involved for its crew total participation in specific tasks—tasks whose performance followed familiar paths. Unlike a rifle, a machine gun was complicated enough to absorb attention, particularly in situations where such absorption was psychologically welcome. The water jacket must be kept full. Cartridge belts must be checked for irregularities that might result in a jam. When the gun did cease firing it could be for any one of dozens of causes, each with its own prescribed remedy demanding precise execution. Machine gunners were no braver than their relatively isolated comrades in the rifle platoons. They were more distracted from their environments and more involved in their immediate jobs. The gunner was not necessarily firing on specific human targets. His usual task was to spray an area with lead, to contribute to creating a beaten zone in which movement was difficult or impossible. He was preoccupied with controlling the length of his bursts, lest the gun barrel overheat. He was preoccupied with controlling the gun’s arc of fire—what the British called the “two-inch tap.” Killing was a by-product of other, essentially technical responsibilities.23
German machine gunners also benefitted from administrative factors. Their companies were less than half the size of a rifle company, yet had almost the same complement of officers. The German army’s failure to adopt machine guns at a regimental level until 1913 meant that there had been no time to train many reserve officers on the weapons. The interchange of command personnel with reserve units, universal in the rifle companies, was far less common in the machine-gun companies simply because there were too few lieutenants or NCOs on the regimental rolls even nominally qualified to lead a machine-gun platoon. An active machine-gun company was likely to take most of its peacetime cadre into the field, with corresponding benefits to morale and stability.
By companies, platoons, and single guns, XVII Corps’s machine gunners worked their clumsy weapons forward to take Russian positions under fire. Even if they did no more than blast away at trench parapets, they were welcome enough that riflemen emptied their own ammunition pouches to keep the Maxims in action. But instead of supplementing infantry fire, the machine guns replaced it. They became an excuse for more and more riflemen to keep their heads down. In turn, with their bunched crews and bulky mounts, they became unchallenged targets for Russian sharpshooters and Russian artillery. One by one they fell silent, gunners dead or wounded, water jackets pierced, actions hopelessly jammed.
As for the artillery, Mackensen’s gunners proved consistently unable to find the range of the Russian positions. The flat-trajectory 77-millimeter pieces did little more than spray shrapnel over the enemy trenches. The field howitzers were more useful, but there were not enough of them to protect their own infantry by counterbattery fire, let alone prepare an attack. To the infantry it seemed that the artillery was simply shelling the landscape at random. The German gunners found it no easier to keep touch with the men they were supposed to support. Brigadier-General Hahndorff, commanding the 36th Division’s artillery, exploded in despair that if the infantry persisted in storming forward like madmen, they could hardly expect the guns to follow. Messengers were hit or got lost. The few forward observers who survived were as helpless as the infantry among whom they lay. Around 2:00 p.m., the corps’s heavy howitzers finally reached the field and took a hand on the 36th Division’s front. The first salvo of shells hit between the firing lines. Instead of “walking” forward towards the Russian trenches, the second and the third landed directly on the positions held by the 5th Grenadiers. In the still heat of an August afternoon, officers could hear clearly the sound of the guns to their rear and trace the flight of the shells overhead as they added the last, unbearable touch to the Germans’ plight.24
Desperate circumstances inspired desperate gestures. A battery of the 81st Field Artillery galloped into the open in a frantic attempt to support the infantry at close range. Within minutes it was shot to pieces, men and horses heaped in ghastly piles around the gun positions. The vaunted splinter-proof shields, fitted after much controversy to all German field guns before the war, were limited protection against high-powered, small-caliber bullets. The 2nd Battery, 36th Field Artillery, took position a few hundred yards away, only to have its range-finding equipment knocked out and its commander knocked senseless by Russian shrapnel. One caisson, then another, exploded. A reserve lieutenant and a cannoneer kept a single gun in action until its limber was empty. Crews of the other guns dropped so rapidly that the pieces could not be manned long enough to fire the few rounds left. Saving the guns was not an heroic option. Too few men remained in the firing positions to hitch them up, even had it not been suicidal to send the limbers forward.25
The sacrifice of these batteries was XVII Corps’s final gesture. Most of Mackensen’s infantry had gone over twenty hours without sleep. Ammunition was so low that some men wer
e using Russian rifles and cartridges. Water bottles were empty. Mangled comrades had screamed themselves into exhaustion and were beginning to die. Like all European armies, the Germans had carefully prepared for the evacuation of casualties. Wounded men were to receive first aid from their own stretcher-bearers, who would then carry the victims to the battalion aid station. After primary treatment by the battalion surgeon they would be evacuated by litter or ambulance to field hospitals out of artillery range, yet close enough to the front lines to keep the stretcher-bearers from exhausting themselves.26
In peacetime all had worked splendidly. The test of battle showed flaws in every step of the process. Company officers were not likely to detail their best men for a task which had seemed through years of maneuvers little more than an exercise in shadow-boxing. It was a job for mothers’ boys with hollow chests, for slow learners unable or unwilling to distinguish left from right, for misfits of all sorts. It was no accident that the German army’s 1914 equivalent of World War IPs Sad Sack was “Hospital Orderly Neumann”—a proverbial schlemiel, a well-intentioned maladroit, an antihero of bawdy songs and obscene jokes. It was not the kind of image making it a point of honor to answer at any risk the cry of “Sara,” “medic.”27 That came later.
Once out of the killing zone the plight of the wounded improved only marginally. Germany’s army surgeons, most of them reservists recalled from civilian life, were unprepared to cope with hundreds of major traumas simultaneously. Years of peacetime practice had conditioned them to regard serious injury cases as the exception to a routine of broken bones, tumors, and pregnancies. Even men with experience in a mining town or a big city emergency room were shocked by the effect of high explosives, shrapnel balls, and shell fragments on the human body. Triage, the sorting of casualties by the seriousness of their wounds and the prospects for their recovery, with those likely to die left to die, and those likely to live without medical assistance given no assistance, was still to most doctors a theoretical concept. True to their medical oaths and their peacetime experience, they sought to help all. Too often they ended by helping none, dashing aimlessly from stretcher to stretcher as the numbers mounted.28
At his headquarters Mackensen was finally beginning to doubt that his corps could break the Russian line unassisted when his men made the same decision. Flight in modern war is frequently an unfeasible option. Apart from the pressures of discipline and comradeship, the battlefield is swept by such a heavy volume of fire that staying put, even in an unfavorable position, may reasonably seem a lesser risk. Situations combining obvious danger and limited possibilities of escape encourage a kind of passivity that can become furious defense when the enemy shows itself.29 But the Russians, instead of obliging, stayed under cover and held their ground. Around 3:00 p.m. individual soldiers of XVII Corps began to stand up and run for the rear. Whether from indifference, humanity, or a sense of opportunity knocking, the Russians held their fire. Within minutes, rout began spreading along the firing lines of the hard-hammered 35th Division. Major-General Hennig’s orders to hold on at all costs went as unheeded as his promises that fresh troops were advancing on the flanks.
A major of the 5th Grenadiers carried his battalion’s flag forward against the tide, yelling that any man who abandoned his colors was a bastard. Two colonels went forward, collecting stragglers with a mixture of personality and official authority, organizing them into squads and platoons and sending them back into the line. An occasional captain kept most of his company in hand. An occasional ditch sheltered a line of men too exhausted or frightened to run any more. Two privates of the 141st Infantry stood back to back in a shallow trench, covering the retreat of a half-dozen of their comrades. German soldiers were not known for their marksmanship, but these men picked off so many Russians that finally none were willing to risk exposing themselves. Instead they thrust their rifles over the parapet and fired blindly. One German dropped, a bullet through his head. The other fixed his bayonet and waited. It took twenty Russians to bring him down, desperately wounded. He survived to become a prisoner of war and meet the lieutenant who witnessed and reported his valor in a camp north of Vladivostok.30
Courage born of desperation was not enough. German records are silent on the use of force to stop the rout, but the most eager lieutenant or the most liverish major might have entertained second thoughts about the probable personal consequences of emptying a Luger into his own men. By 4:00 p.m. the retreating infantry had reached the artillery positions. Batteries were overwhelmed by wounded begging for water, bandages, and above all a ride to the rear. With and without orders, the guns began limbering up. By 5:00 p.m., XVII Corps was in full flight. Mackensen left his command post to rally his troops, and promptly became just an elderly man borne along on a gray-green flood. Badly shaken physically and emotionally, he ordered a general retreat behind the Rominte River.31
Like many another general between 1914 and 1918, Mackensen attacked into a void, under a complete misconception of the situation, without attempting any kind of systematic reconnaissance to verify his hasty conclusions. He kept pressing his attack long after his mistake should have been apparent. Mackensen had learned a lesson, but his fighting men had paid the tuition. In round numbers, 30,000 men had gone into action that morning in the rifle companies and field batteries of XVII Corps. Over eight thousand had been killed or wounded, had surrendered to the Russians, or were wandering dazed through 8th Army’s rear areas. Temporarily at least, XVII Corps was finished as a fighting unit.
Some fugitives from the broken regiments just kept going; a few got as far as the Angerapp before being stopped by the military police. Once the initial shock passed, however, the vast majority of the runaways were in the position of Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming: they had nowhere to go. Desertion in the context of August, 1914, was an unfeasible option even if one briefly entertained the thought, and most of Mackensen’s men were still willing soldiers. They had been overmarched, underfed, and badly defeated—but tomorrow was another day.
Traditional symbols had not yet lost their power to move men. A sergeant of the 141st Infantry, badly wounded, staggered up to a section of the 71st Field Artillery and begged its officer to take care of the flag he had carried through the fighting. The lieutenant delivered the colors as requested.32 But neither the threat of being shot by military police nor the inspiration of regimental standards were as important in rallying XVII Corps as the humble field kitchen. The smells of cooking, the hearty stew of meat, vegetables, and potatoes that was the army’s staple evening meal, drew stragglers like moths to candle flames. Most company cooks had prepared full portions, unaware of the day’s casualties. A man, even one from another regiment, could count on two or three full mess tins, washed down with all the coffee he could drink. It was as good a way as most to prove he was still alive.33
On the 8th Army’s right, Otto von Below’s I Reserve Corps received the order to advance with a mixture of trepidation and enthusiasm. Its regiments had been stamped out of the ground since August 1, with no more than a week’s time to enroll, equip, and assign officers and men before being shipped towards the borders. Most of the officers had been trained by the regional regiments, but the rank and file of the infantry regiments seldom included more than half local residents. The rest were Berliners and Westphalians, Hanoverian farmers and industrial workers from the Ruhr. The 3rd Reserve Infantry even incorporated a large number of undergraduates from the University of Göttingen.
Like its active counterparts, I Reserve Corps went to war with jokes and slogans chalked on its boxcars: “If the weather is unfavorable, the war will be held indoors.” Colonels issued orders of the day in the best heroic style, urging their men to emulate the heroism of their forefathers and earn the admiration of their contemporaries. In practice the corps divided its first days of existence between digging trenches and refreshing more or less rusty martial skills. Nights were spent in uneasy anticipation of Russian surprise attacks. And, however eager the reservists
might have been to come to grips with the foe under the midday sun, their jittery sentries blazed away so much ammunition firing at shadows and each other that they were finally ordered to stand guard with empty rifles.34
Below was what the Germans call an alter Hase. A regimental soldier with minimal staff experience, he had served in every corner of Germany during a forty-year career culminating in assignment to I Corps’s 2nd Division. The army’s senior division commander in 1914, he found serving under François an experience trying enough to lead him to consider retiring rather than await the next selections for corps command.35 Now he had his first chance to show his skill in the field—but at the head of a formation hitherto unknown to the German army: a full corps of reservists.
Below had little notion of what he might expect from his officers and men. Himself anticipating a Russian attack, he was surprised on the afternoon of August 19 to receive Prittwitz’s orders to advance. His corps was to move forward towards Goldap and cover the right of Mackensen’s attack by engaging the Russians presumed to be in the area. On a map the idea was sound. In the field it meant a long night march with unseasoned troops, over unimproved roads, through mobs of refugees. As the columns struggled forward, old jokes about “knapsack sickness” seemed less and less funny. Around midnight bullets began whistling around the ears of the vanguard. Orders rang into the night: “Deploy at the double! Fix bayonets! Charge!” Then came the anticlimax: the shots had been fired by one of Mackensen’s outposts. There was no time to check for losses. The reservists fell back into ranks and pushed forward over roads that suddenly and ominously seemed almost empty. At 3:30 a.m. Below ordered a halt. With no concrete information on the nature or positions of the enemy he expected to face, it seemed the better part of wisdom to give his men a few hours’ sleep. Within minutes I Reserve Corps’s positions were marked by motionless blanket- or overcoat-wrapped knots of men snoring loudly enough to generate concern that any Russians in the area need only follow their ears to victory.
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 29