Bartenwerfer was also ordered to see that I Reserve Corps attacked that day. On his return flight at 4:30 p.m. he dropped a note to this effect on a column of the corps. The gesture was dashing but irrelevant. It was 8:30 in the evening before the message reached Below, and by then his corps had had a stomach full of fighting.6
Elements of the 36th Reserve Division marched into Allenstein to the cheers of a grateful populace. The Russians had already evacuated the town. The major challenge the victorious Germans faced involved removing a dud shell from the courtyard of the provincial mental hospital, where its effect on the staff apparently exceeded its impact on the patients. Once beyond Allenstein, however, the division was stopped in its tracks by Kluyev’s rear guard. The rhetoric of war is replete with accounts of heroic resistance to the last man. Most of them are best described as exaggerations, but the Russians in this sector made the boast good. The colonel of one regiment died sword in hand, leading the remnants of his men in a bayonet charge. Five hundred Russians were buried in a single mass grave after the battle. Four hundred more fell prisoners into German hands. A few desperate stragglers swam to a small island in the middle of one of the lakes dotting the region. Not until August 31 did they finally surrender.
The other half of Below’s corps, the 1st Reserve Division, began its afternoon more favorably by overrunning XIII Corps’s baggage. Kluyev had sent his wagon trains along the highway southeast from Allenstein. Outside the village of Sasdrosz the Germans caught up with them. Here too the Russian rear guards set a high price on victory. Riflemen climbed the trees of the Allenstein Municipal Forest to pick off anyone bearing such signs of leadership as field glasses or a map case. Not until 3:00 p.m. was Sasdrosz in German hands. By that time every road and path was thoroughly blocked by dead horses and overturned wagons abandoned by
August 28 Evening
panic-stricken drivers. Equipment ranging from camp beds to field telephones to ladies’ underwear looted in Allenstein lay strewn about the landscape. Amidst the lesser booty was Kluyev’s corps war chest, whose contents were duly shared out among its captors after the fashion of the Thirty Years’ War.
As the Germans cleared the highway and emptied the captured wagons, the Russians rallied around the villages of Darethen and Dorothowo. For Below’s infantry, working their way across sand hills and through woods with by now empty canteens was initially a greater torment than enemy bullets. Optimism in the ranks briefly grew when patrols of the 1st Reserve Uhlans reported only weak enemy forces ahead: stragglers and survivors of the rear guard so roughly handled by the 36th Reserve Division. But the troops sent forward on that information ran into a buzzsaw. No one knew where the enemy was. “Flanks” and “rear” became concepts from a training manual. Guns were brought forward, but remained silent for lack of targets. Nor were the Russians in this sector passive opponents. Their local counterattacks threw the German advance into confusion time after time. One battalion of the 3rd Reserve Infantry lost all four of its company commanders in less than two hours of fighting.
Below had ordered his divisions to advance “as far as possible,” and not until after midnight did the exhausted and hungry men of I Reserve Corps finally break contact. Kitchens were long since left behind. Emergency rations were long since consumed, with or without authorization. Men broke out of uneasy sleep to empty their rifles into the darkness. The cannoneers of at least one field battery spent the night under the partial protection of their gun shields, as spent and unspent bullets rang against the steel from all directions.7
XVII Corps had a no less trying afternoon and evening. Max Hoffmann supplemented his face-to-face conversation with Bartenwerfer by giving Major Schwerin of the corps staff a detailed briefing over the phone. Mackensen’s first response was a long-distance call to Frögenau in which he expressed his views on the need for even senior officers to make up their minds. He then turned to—and on—his division commanders, informing them XVII Corps was to use everything resembling a road to reach Jedwabno and Ortelsburg as fast as possible and at any necessary cost.8
Mackensen might not have been the army’s brightest intellectual light, but he was a driver and his men were ready to respond. Since midmorning rumors of great victories in the south had been spreading through the ranks of XVII Corps. Now staff officers rode from headquarters to headquarters with the information that the corps was marching in pursuit of a beaten enemy. Knapsacks were abandoned or thrown onto wagons. Infantry clung to gun carriages and stirrup leathers. But zeal was no substitute for system. The day was hot enough to produce mass sunstroke if everyone tried to march as long as he could move his legs. Infantry officers looked with speculative eyes on their supply trains. Typical was the experience of the 5th Grenadiers. Two companies and part of a third jammed themselves, their rifles and knapsacks into a mixture of army wagons and commandeered civilian vehicles. At the head of the column, burning with eagerness, Captain Lilie of the regiment’s fusilier battalion gave the order: “Forward!” But he started his convoy in the wrong direction, towards Allenstein. In the confusion someone had failed to pass the word that XVII Corps was now headed the opposite way! Finally the matter was sorted out, and Lilie’s task force moved south at a brisk trot. As long as the Germans remained on the high road all went well. But after a few kilometers their route led onto a sandy, rutted side road that seemed to go up and down the steepest part of every hill in East Prussia. Wagon after wagon got stuck or tipped over. The passengers spent so much time freeing or righting their transport that they were overtaken by the rest of the regiment and retransformed into workaday marching infantry.9
Local initiatives were supplemented by more orthodox flying columns—a squadron or two of cavalry, a battalion of artillery, and a hundred or so riflemen as local security, mounted on the gun limbers or riding in trucks commandeered from the supply trains. What these forces lacked in strength, they were expected to make up in speed. Horses dropped dead in their traces. Men collapsed from heat exhaustion beside them, or fell asleep on their feet, staggering forward until they collided with someone in the next rank. Unlimber and deploy, open fire, fall in, and push on until the cavalry reported another target, until a burst of Russian fire meant dispatching patrols to clear woods or farm buildings. Day gave way to a night that seemed bitterly cold to exhausted men drenched in sweat. But at 3:00 a.m. on August 29, a squadron of the 35th Division’s 4th Jäger zu Pferde rode into an Ortelsburg only recently abandoned by the Russians. An hour later a ragtag group of men on foot, led by a detachment of gunners whose horses had long since given out, stumbled in to reinforce the troopers. The XVII Corps was at last moving in the right direction.10
Events on the German side of the line on August 28 were a microcosm of the World War I—an often random, almost antic mixture of old and new, of modern technology and traditional histrionics, of orders disregarded as irrelevant and orders obeyed too well. A general pushing forward aggressively by auto had to be rescued by horse cavalry. An airplane became an instrument of direct command in a manner prefiguring Vietnam while whole divisions lost touch with higher headquarters. An army corps spent most of the day marching back and forth in a manner that would have guaranteed a spate of early retirements had it happened in a maneuver. Yet despite this series of fiascoes the 8th Army’s staff began to relax by the end of the afternoon. They did so with a certain relief at having avoided disaster—not all of it in the field.
Both Scholtz and Hermann Hoth, then a lieutenant on the army staff, described Ludendorff as receiving during the morning of August 28 an unsubstantiated report that Rennenkampf was advancing southward. He responded by proclaiming that the battle against Samsonov would have to be broken off and the 8th Army turned against Rennenkampf if anything was to be saved. Hindenburg took his chief of staff by the arm and led him behind a hedge. They talked for a few minutes. When they returned Hindenburg calmly said that operations would be carried out as planned.
For those officers unreassured by Hindenburg’s
confidence, at 4:10 p.m the governor of Königsberg reported that though “apparently” three Russian corps were marching westward, their main bodies were still well behind the Alle River. This meant the bulk of Rennenkampf’s army faced a seventy-kilometer march to the battle zone. As for Samsonov’s forces, according to the best information available to the 8th Army, their left flank, I Corps, was fleeing south. The 2nd Army’s center, two and a half corps, was pinned in the woods between Allenstein and Neidenburg. On the Russian right, VI Corps had retreated beyond Ortelsburg. The army staff nevertheless took discretion as valor’s better part, and decided to leave only I and XX Corps and the 3rd Reserve Division to continue the pursuit of the 2nd Army on August 29. Goltz’s Landwehr and Unger’s garrison troops, who had fought better than anyone expected, were ordered to move into reserve. The I Reserve Corps and XVII Corps would remain in the north, deployed behind Allenstein to meet the 1st Army should it appear unexpectedly. This proposed disposition contradicted the orders given Mackensen at 2:35 p.m. to drive south as fast as possible. But since no one at army headquarters had any real idea of the situation of either Bülow or Mackensen’s corps, the new orders were initially not sent to Ostgruppe.11
At 5:30 p.m. on August 28, Ludendorff started to dictate the text. He began, according to Hoffmann, with the words, “Frögenau—leave the exact time open.” Hoffmann instead suggested that Ludendorff should use as the place the name of the historic village in front of them—Tannenberg.12 Five centuries earlier, in 1410, a Polish-Lithuanian army had smashed the forces of the Teutonic Knights in a battle symbolizing the end of Germanic eastward expansion. As the history and mythology of the Teutonic Knights grew to be a major subject of study and popularization in the Second Empire the battle had become correspondingly familiar to Germans.13 For anyone who might have overlooked it, the five hundredth anniversary had been thoroughly observed, with suitable contemporary allusions, both in Russia and among Germany’s Polish community. Scholtz saw the connection as clearly as Hoffmann. Ludendorff, after a few moments’ reflection, decided it was a fine idea. The stain of an ancient defeat would be blotted out by a modern victory; the Teutonic Knights would be avenged.
After the christening Hindenburg felt cheerful enough to propose an excursion to the front lines, to the Mühlen sector. He wanted to thank and congratulate Scholtz’s men in person. But the headquarters cavalcade had driven scarcely three kilometers when it encountered a roadblock of ambulances and wagons, their drivers shouting that the Russians were coming. The staff officers quickly solved the problem; the teamsters had been frightened by the sight of Russian prisoners moving to the rear under escort. Ludendorff, never remarkable for his equaminity, grumbled at the unpleasant impression made by the spectacle of German soldiers in flight from rumors and shadows. By the time the panic had been explained and its victims turned back towards the front it was too dark to risk the drive to Mühlen. The staff returned to Osterode for dinner in high spirits, its mood almost certainly improved by the ephemeral nature of their earlier fright. For the first time in a week, and however temporarily, Rennenkampf was not an invisible guest at the meal.14
Whatever the Russians’ next moves, 8th Army would have additional troops to meet them. Reinforcements from the west were on the way. Prewar German planning had stressed the necessity for East Prussia to defend itself with its own resources. Gumbinnen, however, convinced Moltke that the Russian army had been badly, if not fatally, underestimated. A German force of seven divisions had apparently been so mauled in a single day of fighting that the commander, with as was naturally assumed the agreement of his principal staff officers, thought it necessary to retreat behind the Vistula. This suggested a need for complete revision of all calculations of the strength required to defend East Prussia. The effect of defeat on Austria also had to be considered. Given the delay of Conrad’s offensive, when the Austrians did attack it might be to relieve pressure on the Germans—a shift in roles likely to have uncomfortable postwar consequences.
Events in the west, on the other hand, were apparently proceeding better than expected. The attack through Belgium was proceeding on schedule. A French offensive on the other flank, in Lorraine, initially generated anxiety at OHL, but by August 23 the situation there had changed as well. Not only did the advance on Paris appear to be in full swing, the 6th and 7th German Armies on the German left had checked the French in a murderous three-day battle and were in hot pursuit of their beaten foe. For Moltke and his staff the war seemed over. The victory in Lorraine opened the door to the kind of decisive battle German officers had been for forty years conditioned to seek—a double envelopment instead of Schlieffen’s now apparently modest single version, a Cannae on a continental scale.
Moltke, not previously remarkable for optimism, began developing his own version of “victory disease.” Already some of his critics were suggesting that formations initially left behind in Germany to guard against a British amphibious attack would have been more useful in the east than brought forward to support the drive on Paris. According to Groener the kaiser received at least one message from a senior civil servant requesting help for beleaguered East Prussia. Moltke’s decision, however, was his own: to reinforce to the eastern front and seek a decision there corresponding to the one expected daily in the west.15
From what part of the front could troops best be spared? Groener favored drawing them from the German left wing. His often-expressed postwar fears for the consequences of diluting Schlieffen’s planned concentration by weakening the right were exaggerated by hindsight. Arguably at least as important to this railway expert in August, 1914, was the relative ease of moving troops eastward across Germany from Lorraine, instead of additionally straining the already crowded lines and junctions further north. But his recommendation to transfer XXI Corps and I Bavarian Corps found little echo at OHL. Both of these formations, Groener was told, had suffered heavy casualties in the recent fighting. Political considerations also made undesirable the drawing off of a Bavarian corps for service in a secondary theater. The tendency of Prussian officers to treat Bavarians as inferior troops in 1870/71 still rankled south of the Main. In operational terms, moreover, Moltke’s emerging hopes for a double envelopment could hardly have been fulfilled by a left wing deprived of two of its best fighting units.16
The chief of staff seems still to have been in the process of deciding whom to send when on August 25 the Belgian fortress of Namur surrendered, releasing the besieging force. Second Army Commander Colonel-General Karl von Bülow duly reported XI Corps and the Guard Reserve Corps available for other duties. OHL initially considered sending one corps to reinforce the right wing of the 3rd Army, the other to the left flank of the 2nd. But with the German envelopment growing tighter as it swung east of Paris, the front had contracted to the point where fresh corps-sized units could not be immediately deployed. Retaining them in local reserve was an obvious possibility, but for twenty years German doctrine had emphasized the necessity of shifting forces eastward after the initial, decisive victories in the west. Bülow expressed no sense of urgently requiring the services of the corps in question. At 3:10 a.m. on August 26, they were instructed to prepare for transport to the Eastern Front. The V Corps of the 5th Army was initially ordered to concentrate at Thionville for the same reasons. Moltke, however, subsequently decided against including a formation that had to be withdrawn from the fighting line. Instead he added to the troop list the 8th Cavalry Division from the 3rd Army.17
Whatever might be said about Moltke’s decision to relieve Prittwitz, his reinforcement of the eastern front was not a hasty measure. The chief of staff had a week to consider the possibilities and to change his mind. There is no evidence that he was under pressure from the kaiser or anyone else to save the property of East Elbian aristocrats. Indeed, according to one account, the kaiser found himself in the unexpected role of calming Moltke’s initial excitement at the news of civilian requests for help.18
Nor was supreme headquarters respon
ding to appeals from the 8th Army. Moltke’s decision came as a complete surprise to that formation. On the night of August 26, Ludendorff received a call from OHL. He asked Max Hoffmann to listen in on another phone, and for the first time the two officers learned of the proposed transfer of three corps and a cavalry division to East Prussia. Ludendorff said they were not essential and would arrive too late for the battle now in progress. He asked that they be sent only if they could easily be spared. If they were at all needed to gain a victory in the west, the 8th Army could manage easily on its own.
Two nights later Hoffmann was once more asked to monitor a phone call from OHL. This one confirmed the dispatch of reinforcements: two corps and a cavalry division, with V Corps now remaining in the west. Again Ludendorff said that they were not necessary and should be kept on the western front if needed there. Providing detraining areas for such a large force would be a particular problem. The only double-track lines into 8th Army’s zone of operations ended at Elbing and Allenstein-Osterode. No more than a few detachments of Landwehr were available to cover this area against Russian cavalry, which might well be tempted out of its inactivity if offered such a vulnerable target.19
Moltke’s determination to send troops eastward in the face of these conversations remains unexplained. Partly it reflected a negative: the 2nd and 3rd Armies’ commanders and staffs did not protest that they needed additional strength to accomplish their respective missions. On the other hand an intelligence report submitted to OHL on August 28 described a growing body of Russian military opinion as favoring maintaining the offensive against Germany, even at the price of going over to the defensive against Austria. To implement this strategy the Russians could concentrate in East Prussia up to thirteen corps, supported by eight reserve divisions. However, weaknesses in the Russian command should enable the 8th Army, once reinforced by the two corps from the west, to hold its ground until the Austrian offensive’s effect became noticeable.20
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History) Page 45