Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)
Page 35
As his men’s confidence soared, Scholtz briefly considered concentrating against the 2nd Army’s left and attacking it without waiting for support. Scouting reports soon forced him to abandon the idea. The Russians were too strong; it was impossible to mass against part of their front without risking being enveloped by the rest of the army. Instead Scholtz withdrew his forward units gradually; by August 22, his force was in position on an east-west line from Gilgenburg to Lahna. Scholtz’s headquarters were in Mühlen, behind the center of his line. On the right, around Gilgenburg, were stationed ten battalions of fortress troops drawn from the Vistula garrisons. Next to them came the 41st Division, reinforced by a regiment of the 70th Landwehr Brigade. The corps’s left flank, from Frankenau and Lahna to Orlau, was held by the other half of the Landwehr brigade and the active troops of the 37th Division. It was in this sector that the Russians, the 8th Division of XV Corps, struck on August 23 the forward positions of the 37th Division around the villages of Lahna and Orlau.9
For a little while it was war the way schoolbooks and pulp novels described it. “We’ll have another game after this little bit,” a lieutenant laughed as he tossed away a skat hand. An hour later he and his partners lay dead, victims of the furious seesaw fighting as Germans and Russians, galvanized by the valor of inexperience, swept back and forth across the high ground in front of Orlau. Instead of waiting for the Russians to come to them, the Germans charged with bands playing and colors flying. Postwar memories credited some formations with singing the Deutschland-lied as they stormed forward. A battalion commander too badly wounded to walk had himself carried by two of his men—whose opinions on the assignment remain unrecorded. Another major cheered his men forward until a shrapnel ball smashed his skull like a watermelon and spattered brain tissue over his horrified staff. A lieutenant of the 1st Jäger jumped into a Russian trench, sword in hand. A Russian officer rushed forward with his own sword ready. Steel clashed on steel in a scene reminiscent of the eighteenth century. A quick thrust and the Russian sank gurgling to the bottom of the trench. At the same moment the German took a bullet through his head. “Like friends who have fallen asleep after a day’s outing,” the two young men lay side by side as those still alive climbed over their comrades’ corpses in their eagerness to kill each other.
An added horror was provided by a field of lupines that stretched across part of the front. Even in the midst of battle the bright colors and sweet fragrance attracted notice. But those who fell wounded there found the lupines so tall and thick that stretcher-bearers often failed to see their huddled bodies. Days after the battle, dead men were being recovered from among the flowers.
Hysteria mixed with low comedy. A sergeant shouted at a hobbling comrade to take cover. The private replied, “But I’ve been wounded already.” Not until reminded that this fact did not confer permanent immunity did he seek the nearest trench. A machine gunner had to be forcibly restrained from firing on a company of his own regiment whom he insisted were retreating Russians. An even uglier incident was narrowly averted as a detachment of the 151st Infantry rounded up and disarmed prisoners. A German Feldwebel stalked purposefully towards the group, shortening his grip on his bayonetted rifle. “You murdered my father,” he shouted, “and I’m going to pay you for it!” The Russo-German frontier was a semipermeable barrier. Smugglers, poachers, line-crossers of every type, made such posts as gamekeeper and customs guard high-risk assignments. The Feldwebe’s father, a forester, had recently been slain by parties unknown. The son, battle madness on him, wanted blood in return, and was only dissuaded when soberer comrades reminded him that he would be butchering helpless men in cold blood. As an added irony, the prisoners were not Russians, but Poles. The bereaved NCO was named Kontratowitz.
Like murderous schoolboys, Germans and Russians on another part of the field fought for possession of the 29th Russian Regiment’s battle flag. At the end rifle butts, fists and teeth settled the issue. The staff fell into German hands; the colors, torn away in the melee, disappeared. A German burial party later discovered them wound around the body of a Russian officer, who had saved his flag before crawling away to die of his wounds.10
At Orlau the point-blank dogfight continued into the evening. German staff officers were exchanging their binoculars for rifles by the time a final desperate German rush drove the Russians out of the village. Around Lahna the fighting was even grimmer and dirtier. If glory can ever be found in battle, the riflemen of the 1st East Prussian Jäger Battalion “Yorek von Wartenburg” trod its blood-stained road that day. The Jäger of the line were the closest thing to an elite infantry the kaiser’s army possessed. They were recruited from professional hunters and foresters, from men whose civil occupations involved an open-air life, and from “suitable” volunteers—which usually meant twenty-year-olds bemused by the shakos, the green tunics, and the mystique surrounding these dashing warriors. Since 1871 Jäger worth as separate formations had been sharply questioned. Their relationship with public and private forest agencies, who valued the Jäger as a steady source of employees, had as much to do with their continued existence as any perceived operational utility. But the riflemen continued to go their own way, cherishing their image as crack shots and bold adventurers, using hunters’ calls like “Horrido” or “Waidmannsheil” in place of conventional commands, and putting in extra hours on the rifles ranges while bemoaning the growth of impersonal means of killing enemies en masse.
Two companies of these green-coats, five hundred men, were under orders to hold the village of Lahna. Like most of its counterparts in that part of East Prussia, Lahna’s origins went back to the final wave of German colonization in the fourteenth century. Its three hundred inhabitants were German to the marrow; the 1920 plebiscite would result in unanimous rejection of the new state of Poland. Its layout was equally German. Most of Lahna’s houses fronted on the two or three main streets, giving the village a straggling, extended character and making the organization of a coherent defense correspondingly difficult. Each house with its sheds and outbuildings was on its own, to stand or fall with its handful of riflemen.
The Jäger profited, at least temporarily, by the Russians’ attempt to carry Lahna in one quick rush—mass over finesse. Against the best marksmen in Germany, attack after attack collapsed. The officers and NCOs who led the charges were the first to fall; their surviving privates massed in knots the rawest recruit could hardly miss. The Jäger kept up their fire as the Russians closed to seventy-five, then to fifty yards, until there were too many Russians to shoot and they began pouring into the village from all sides. Captain Bergmann, the senior surviving officer, rallied fifteen or twenty men for a counterattack. He got as far along the main street as the village smithy before being mortally wounded. His last words were, “Don’t worry about me! Hold Lahna!” By then the fighting had come down to bayonets and rifle butts, fists and furniture. A knot of Russians waved white flags. It may have been an offer to surrender. More likely it was a request to negotiate a German capitulation. In either case the few Jäger foolish enough to respond by standing up became targets for every belligerent or opportunistic Russian within range.
Were their deaths a misunderstanding, or a signal of “no quarter”? No one wanted to find out. By this time much of the village was in flames. Breathless, his tunic singed and torn, the 2nd Company’s Feldwebel ran from group to group of riflemen, looking for an officer. Among a half-dozen dead men he found someone able to point out his platoon leader’s position. It was occupied by a corpse already beginning to stiffen. Whatever the original orders might have been, remaining in Lahna could serve no useful purpose. In a twilight deepening into darkness, the Feldwebel collected all the survivors he could find. With twenty or thirty men, many of them wounded, he made his way back to the main German line, while behind him the Russians mopped up stragglers and shot each other in mutual confusion.11
As small arms and artillery fire died down the first thing that struck the Germans of XX Corps was
the eerie silence. But it was a relative silence. Instead of bursting shells and rattling machine guns came calls for stretcher-bearers; orders and warnings shouted in delirium; screams for a mercy shot as the torment of wounds untended finally grew too much to bear in silence. In the years before the war, medical and military experts had projected a coming era of clean wounds made by high-velocity, small-caliber rounds punching such neat holes on entry and exit that the victims might well feel next to nothing. Theoretical wisdom paled before the realities of bullets that fishhooked on striking bone, tearing holes that made an earlier century’s thumb-sized musket balls look almost humane. It vanished entirely when confronted with the effects of artillery fire on unprotected bodies. The opposing guns had fired mostly shrapnel on August 23, and the balls of a shrapnel round could shred a man into raw meat yet leave him alive.
Unwounded Germans were little less disoriented. Losses had been high, particularly among company officers and NCOs. Individually and in small groups men straggled back through the darkness, looking for their parent formations, for someone to tell them what to do next, for hot food and coffee. Here and there searchlights were brought forward to illuminate the scene in hopes of preventing a panic. One enterprising lieutenant had his bugler sound “Das Ganze Halt” Others took up the call. As the familiar notes sounded over the battlefield, men remembered the war games of peacetime, where that call meant a night’s sleep, a singsong around the bivouac fire, perhaps a rendezvous with a willing or curious local woman. It seemed years away instead of weeks. Officers who had spent years training a company, who knew almost every man in its ranks by name and reputation, counted losses of 60 or 70 percent. Friends and brothers had fallen, been carried away by stretcher-bearers, or just disappeared. Surviving officers of the 1st Jäger sat in the dining room of an abandoned farmhouse, observing the burning down of the candles “as though it was an experiment of indescribable importance.” A captain of another regiment shared with one of his sergeants his fear that Lahna and Orlau would go down in history with Jena and Auerstädt as a German disaster.12
Scholtz too was a worried man. As late as 7:00 p.m. he had proposed to counterattack the Russians at dawn. But in the hours before midnight his subordinates made plain that their units were so disorganized that it would be well into the next morning before they would be sorted out. Then at midnight Scholtz received a message from army headquarters: since I Corps would not be able to reach his sector until noon on the August 26. Scholtz was instructed to conserve his strength. After two hours’ deliberation, he and his staff decided that the best course was to withdraw at least the left flank of the corps, the units engaged at Orlau and Lahna, before the Russians could attack again.
Colonel Hell for one seriously doubted if retreat was possible. Dawn was at best two hours away and a daylight withdrawal in face of a superior enemy was a dangerous undertaking. Hell was overruled; the order was issued. Implementation was more difficult. Companies remained unaccounted for throughout the night. Orders vanished with messengers lost in the confusion or shot by Russian stragglers and infiltrators. During the short hours of darkness the Russians worked closer and closer to the German positions. Around 3:45 a.m. they opened fire everywhere along the line, less by intention than by imitation. The popping of individual rifles gave way to a steady roar of small arms fire, joined within minutes by artillery. Some batteries fired blindly into the fog. Others engaged targets located the previous day. From the perspective of hindsight it was little more than a waste of ammunition. For the Germans it seemed to prefigure another Russian attack—one that this time would catch XX Corps off balance.
The 150th Infantry Regiment’s first and second battalions were particularly exposed. Not until 5:20 a.m. did orders to retreat finally reach these men, who had spent the night preparing for a fight to the finish. In one machine gun position alone, an enterprising Feldwebel had brought up 300,000 rounds of ammunition. Now they had to withdraw, with Russians on top of the forward trenches and swarming through the rear areas in fog so thick that it was impossible to see more than twenty paces in any direction. As the riflemen fell back they masked the fire of the two machine guns supporting the 2nd Battalion. The Russians closed in. Lieutenant Höhne stood up with a Lüger in each hand, emptying them into the Russians as they rushed his gun pits. His one-man stand could not prevent the capture of both guns.13
The nighttime activity of the Russians on his front did nothing to restore Scholtz’s peace of mind. Around 5:00 a.m. he ordered Morgen’s 3rd Reserve Division forward to Hohenstein, where it would be able to cover the 37th Division’s retreat. Shortly afterwards he moved his corps headquarters northward to the village of Tannenberg, the better to deal directly with any Russian threat to his now exposed left wing. The wisdom of the decision seemed confirmed when around 8:00 a.m. the Königsberg radio station intercepted another Russian dispatch ordering XIII Corps to advance north and west in order to envelop the German left flank.14 But Martos’s corps had been hammered too badly to encourage another frontal attack. The Russians failed to pursue their advantage.
The 37th Division was able to spend most of August 24 sorting itself out in its new positions. Morale, so badly shaken the previous evening, took a sharp upswing. Regimental histories of all the armies of World War I frequently stress the rapid recuperative powers of youth as yet unshaken by the drawn-out horrors of the trenches. A more pragmatic explanation involves the return to the ranks of large numbers of men—including not a few officers—shaken loose in the course of the day’s fighting. The II/ 150th Infantry, for example, listed in its report 106 dead, only 21 wounded, and 507 missing. Two hundred of these lost sheep were collected by staff officers and military police, placed under the senior officer, a regular first lieutenant, and sent posthaste after their parent regiment. Instead they were commandeered by another colonel, who insisted his regiment needed every rifle. As in XVII Corps, those who did manage to find their own colors and campfires within the next two or three days found few majors or Feldwebels in a mood to ask awkward questions. Even the sternest of superiors was often humanly glad to see familiar faces he had written off as lost.15
II
Around noon Scholtz received visitors. Eighth Army Headquarters had moved east from Marienburg, arriving at Rastenburg on the morning of August 24th. Hindenburg and Ludendorff promptly went forward by auto for a conference with Scholtz and Hell. These officers, their outlooks none the better for a lost night’s sleep, described their situation as serious. The XX Corps was outnumbered on its front and threatened on its left. Scholtz proposed that his entire force withdraw further to Gilgenburg-Mühlen. Should the Russians try to flank this line, they must extend themselves far enough to the north to expose their own flank and rear to Below’s and Mackensen’s corps marching south.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff were aware, as Scholtz was not, that under the best of circumstances these latter troops could not arrive in the battle area for several days. They accepted Scholtz’s opinion that a general Russian attack along the front front of XX corps was imminent. But any further withdrawal by Scholtz meant that neither François nor Mackensen would have the maneuvering room they needed to deploy against the 2nd Army.
Hindenburg, the imperturbable, liked what he saw at Scholtz’s headquarters. The commander and his staff seemed in control of the situation; the spirit of the troops seemed good. Ludendorff was less sanguine. He promised reinforcements from I Corps as soon as possible, but he insisted to Hell that XX Corps must hold its position “to the last man.”16
Ludendorff’s melodramatic rhetoric was in good part a product of railway timetables and march schedules. François had arrived in Deutsch-Eylau by auto about 5:00 p.m. on the 24th, but he was well ahead of most of his men. The German railway system was not friction-proof. Most of the rolling stock needed to move I Corps had to come from beyond the Vistula. Troops had been kept waiting until 1:00 p.m. on the 23rd because a minor flood delayed the arrival of trains from Danzig. Some station personne
l had been withdrawn to Königsberg; some had simply fled in the aftermath of Gumbinnen. As a result units suffered up to four-hour delays in loading. Moving at right angles to the 8th Army’s main east-west lines of communication, troop trains were frequently slowed or sidetracked by other traffic. Ludendorff had hoped to complete the detraining of I Corps by the evening of August 25. Now even the hard-driving François argued that his corps would not be ready for action as a unit before noon of August 26.17
Ludendorff had received equally disquieting news from the other end of his newly forming front. Civilians, using the intact telephone lines in their village post offices, were reporting a Russian advance in force northward from Ortelsburg. Eighth Army headquarters interpreted this as a movement designed to link up with Rennenkampf. It was also, however, an opportunity: for once the Germans had a chance to achieve local superiority against an apparently isolated enemy. The nearest German unit, I Reserve Corps, was ordered to push south and attack the Russians where it found them. The XVII Corps would support Below’s men, at the same time keeping an eye cocked over one shoulder for a sudden advance by Rennenkampf in the German rear.18
The influence of Schlieffen’s turn-of-the-century studies of the classic battle of Cannae on German military thinking can easily be exaggerated. A double envelopment may be theoretically among the most decisive battlefield maneuvers, but the risks of setting the stage can also resemble a boxer’s attempt to punch his adversary on both ears simultaneously while leaving his own torso exposed. Ludendorff’s concern that Scholtz’s corps hold its position as far forward as possible, and his belief that its retreat would be the same as a defeat, were far cries from Hannibal’s deliberate refusing of his center to draw the Roman legions deeper into his tactical ambush. Ludendorff’s hopes may have been high on the night of August 24. His expectations probably did not extend beyond successful operations against the Russian flanks. He certainly made no promises in his evening telephone report to OHL. The mood of the army, he declared, was determined, but a bad outcome of events could not be excluded.19