Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  Before she could respond the whistle blew, and Walter kissed her and boarded the train.

  Walter felt the sting of personal responsibility for the German reverses on the eastern front. He was one of the intelligence experts who had forecast that the Russians could not attack so soon after ordering mobilization. He was mortified with shame whenever he thought of it. But he suspected he had not been entirely wrong, and the Russians were sending ill-prepared troops forward with inadequate supplies.

  This suspicion was reinforced, when he arrived in East Prussia later that Sunday with Ludendorff’s entourage, by reports that the Russian First Army, in the north, had halted. They were only a few miles inside German territory, and military logic dictated that they should press forward. What were they waiting for? Walter guessed they were running out of food.

  But the southern arm of the pincer was still advancing, and Ludendorff’s priority was to stop it.

  The following morning, Monday, August 24, Walter brought Ludendorff two priceless reports. Both were Russian wireless messages, intercepted and translated by German intelligence.

  The first, sent at five thirty that morning by General Rennenkampf, gave marching orders for the Russian First Army. At last Rennenkampf was on the move again—but instead of turning south to close the pincers by meeting up with the Second Army, he was inexplicably heading west on a line that did not threaten any German forces.

  The second message had been sent half an hour later by General Samsonov, the commander of the Russian Second Army. He ordered his 13 and 15 Corps to go after the German XX Corps, which he believed to be in retreat.

  “This is astonishing!” said Ludendorff. “How did we get this information?” He looked suspicious, as if Walter might have been deceiving him. Walter had a feeling Ludendorff mistrusted him as a member of the old military aristocracy. “Do we know their codes?” Ludendorff demanded.

  “They don’t use codes,” Walter told him.

  “They send orders in clear? For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “Russian soldiers aren’t sufficiently educated to deal with codes,” Walter explained. “Our prewar intelligence estimates suggested that there are hardly enough literate men to operate the wireless transmitters.”

  “Then why don’t they use field telephones? A phone call can’t be intercepted.”

  “I think they have probably run out of telephone wire.”

  Ludendorff had a downturned mouth and a thrusting chin, and he always looked as if he were frowning aggressively. “This couldn’t be a trick, could it?”

  Walter shook his head. “The idea is inconceivable, sir. The Russians are barely able to organize normal communications. The use of phony wireless signals to deceive the enemy is as far beyond them as flying to the moon.”

  Ludendorff bent his balding head over the map on the table in front of him. He was a tireless worker, but he was often afflicted by terrible doubts, and Walter guessed he was driven by fear of failure. Ludendorff put his finger on the map. “Samsonov’s 13 and 15 Corps form the center of the Russian line,” he said. “If they move forward . . . ”

  Walter saw immediately what Ludendorff was thinking: the Russians could be drawn into an envelope trap, surrounded on three sides.

  Ludendorff said: “On our right we have von François and his I Corps. At our center, Scholtz and the XX Corps, who have fallen back but are not on the run, contrary to what the Russians seem to think. And on our left, but fifty kilometers to the north, we have Mackensen and the XVII Corps. Mackensen is keeping an eye on the northern arm of the Russian pincer, but if those Russians are heading the wrong way perhaps we can ignore them, for the moment, and turn Mackensen south.”

  “A classic maneuver,” Walter said. It was simple, but he himself had not seen it until Ludendorff pointed it out. That, he thought admiringly, was why Ludendorff was the general.

  Ludendorff said: “But it will work only if Rennenkampf and the Russian First Army continue in the wrong direction.”

  “You saw the intercept, sir. The Russian orders have gone out.”

  “Let’s hope Rennenkampf doesn’t change his mind.”

  { V }

  Grigori’s battalion had no food, but a wagonload of spades had arrived, so they dug a trench. The men dug in shifts, relieving one another after half an hour, so it did not take long. The result was not very neat, but it would serve.

  Earlier that day, Grigori and Isaak and their comrades had overrun a deserted German position, and Grigori had noticed that their trenches had a kind of zigzag at regular intervals, so that you could not see very far along. Lieutenant Tomchak said the zigzag was called a traverse, but he did not know what it was for. He did not order his men to copy the German design. But Grigori felt sure it must have a purpose.

  Grigori had not yet fired his rifle. He had heard shooting, rifles and machine guns and artillery, and his unit had taken a good deal of German territory, but so far he had shot at no one, and no one had shot at him. Everywhere 13 Corps went, they found that the Germans had just left.

  There was no logic to this. Everything in war was confusion, he was realizing. No one was quite sure where they were or where the enemy was. Two men from Grigori’s platoon had been killed, but not by Germans: one had accidentally shot himself in the thigh with his own rifle and bled to death astonishingly quickly, and the other had been trampled by a runaway horse and never recovered consciousness.

  They had not seen a cook wagon for days. They had finished their emergency rations, and even the hardtack had run out. None of them had eaten since yesterday morning. After digging the trench, they slept hungry. Fortunately it was summer, so at least they were not cold.

  The shooting began at dawn the next day.

  It started some distance away to Grigori’s left, but he could see clouds of shrapnel burst in the air, and loose earth erupt suddenly where shells landed. He knew he ought to be scared, but he was not. He was hungry, thirsty, tired, aching, and bored, but he was not frightened. He wondered if the Germans felt the same.

  There was heavy gunfire on his right, too, some miles to the north, but here it was quiet. “Like the eye of the storm,” said David, the Jewish bucket salesman.

  Soon enough, orders came to advance. Wearily, they climbed out of their trench and walked forward. “I suppose we should be grateful,” Grigori said.

  “For what?” Isaak demanded.

  “Marching is better than fighting. We’ve got blisters, but we’re alive.”

  In the afternoon they approached a town that Lieutenant Tomchak said was called Allenstein. They assembled in marching order on the outskirts, and entered the center in formation.

  To their surprise, Allenstein was full of well-dressed German citizens going about their normal Thursday afternoon business, posting letters and buying groceries and walking babies in perambulators. Grigori’s unit halted in a small park where the men sat in the shade of tall trees. Tomchak went into a nearby barbershop and came out shaved and with his hair cut. Isaak went to buy vodka, but returned saying the army had posted sentries outside all the wine shops with orders to keep soldiers out.

  At last a horse and cart appeared with a barrel of fresh water. The men lined up to fill their canteens. As the afternoon cooled into evening, more carts arrived with loaves of bread, bought or requisitioned from the town’s bakers. Night fell, and they slept under the trees.

  At dawn there was no breakfast. Leaving a battalion behind to hold the town, Grigori and the rest of 13 Corps were marched out of Allenstein, heading southwest on the road to Tannenberg.

  Although they had seen no action, Grigori noticed a change of mood among the officers. They cantered up and down the line and conferred in fretful huddles. Voices were raised in argument, with a major pointing one way and a captain gesturing in the opposite direction. Grigori continued to hear heavy artillery to the north and south, though it seemed to be moving eastward while 13 Corps went west. “Whose artillery is that?” said Sergeant Gavrik. “Ours
or theirs? And why is it moving east when we’re going west?” The fact that he used no profanity suggested to Grigori that he was seriously worried.

  A few kilometers out of Allenstein, a battalion was left to guard the rear, which surprised Grigori, since he assumed the enemy was ahead, not behind. The 13 Corps was being stretched thin, he thought with a frown.

  Around the middle of the day, his battalion was detached from the main march. While their comrades continued southwest, they were directed southeast, on a broad path through a forest.

  There, at last, Grigori encountered the enemy.

  They stopped for a rest by a stream, and the men filled their bottles. Grigori walked off into the trees to answer a call of nature. He was standing behind a thick pine trunk when he heard a noise off to his left and was astonished to see, a few meters away, a German officer, complete with spiked helmet, on a fine black horse. The German was looking through a telescope toward the place where the battalion had stopped. Grigori wondered what he was looking at: the man could not see far through the trees. Perhaps he was trying to make out whether the uniforms were Russian or German. He sat as motionless as a monument in a St. Petersburg square, but his horse was not so still, and it shifted and repeated the noise that had alerted Grigori.

  Grigori carefully buttoned his trousers, picked up his rifle, and backed away, keeping the tree between himself and the German.

  Suddenly the man moved. Grigori suffered a moment of fear, thinking he had been seen; but the German expertly turned his horse and headed west, breaking into a trot.

  Grigori ran back to Sergeant Gavrik. “I saw a German!” he said.

  “Where?”

  Grigori pointed. “Over there—I was taking a leak.”

  “Are you sure it was a German?”

  “He had a spiked helmet.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Sitting on his horse, looking at us through a telescope.”

  “A scout!” said Gavrik. “Did you shoot at him?”

  Only then did Grigori remember that he was supposed to kill German soldiers, not run away from them. “I thought I should tell you,” he said feebly.

  “You great fairy, why do you think we gave you a fucking gun?” Gavrik yelled.

  Grigori looked at the loaded rifle in his hand, with its vicious-looking bayonet. Of course he should have fired it. What was he thinking? “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Now that you’ve let him get away, the enemy know where we are!”

  Grigori was humiliated. This situation had never been mentioned during his time as a reservist, but he should have been able to work it out himself.

  “Which way did he go?” Gavrik demanded.

  At least Grigori could answer that. “West.”

  Gavrik turned and walked quickly to Lieutenant Tomchak, who was leaning against a tree, smoking. A moment later Tomchak threw down his cigarette and ran to Major Bobrov, a handsome older officer with flowing silver hair.

  After that everything happened quickly. They had no artillery, but the machine-gun section unloaded its weapons. The six hundred men of the battalion were spread out in a ragged north-south line a thousand yards long. A few men were chosen to go ahead. Then the rest moved slowly west, toward the afternoon sun slanting through the leaves.

  Minutes later the first shell landed. It made a screaming noise in the air, then crashed through the forest canopy, and finally hit the ground some distance behind Grigori and exploded with a deep bang that shook the ground.

  “That scout gave them the range,” said Tomchak. “They’re firing at where we were. Good thing we moved.”

  But the Germans were logical, too, and they appeared to discover their mistake, for the next shell landed slightly in front of the advancing Russian line.

  The men around Grigori became jumpy. They looked around them constantly, held their rifles at the ready, and cursed one another at the least provocation. David kept looking up as if he might be able to see a shell coming and dodge it. Isaak wore an aggressive expression, as he did on the soccer pitch when the other side started to play dirty. The knowledge that someone was trying his best to kill you was overwhelmingly oppressive, Grigori found. He felt as if he had received dreadfully bad news but could not quite remember what it was. He had a foolish fantasy of digging a hole in the ground and hiding in it.

  He wondered what the gunners could see. Was there an observer stationed on a hill, raking the woods with powerful German binoculars? You couldn’t see one man in a forest, but perhaps you could see six hundred moving through the trees in a group.

  Someone had decided the range was right, for in the next few seconds several shells landed, some of them dead on target. To both sides of Grigori there were deafening bangs, fountains of earth gushed up, men screamed, and parts of bodies flew through the air. Grigori shook with terror. There was nothing you could do, no way to protect yourself: either the shell got you or it missed. He quickened his pace, as if moving faster might help. The other men must have had the same thought because, without an order, they all broke into a jog-trot.

  Grigori gripped his rifle with sweaty hands and tried not to panic. More shells fell, behind him and in front, to left and right. He ran faster.

  The artillery fire became so heavy that he could no longer distinguish individual shells: there was just one continuous noise like a hundred express trains. Then the battalion seemed to get inside the gunners’ range, for the shells began to land behind them. Soon the shelling petered out. A few moments later, Grigori realized why. Ahead of him a machine gun opened up, and he knew with a sickening feeling of dread that he was close to the enemy line.

  Machine-gun rounds sprayed the forest, tearing up the foliage and splintering the pines. Grigori heard a scream beside him and saw Tomchak fall. Kneeling beside the lieutenant, he saw blood on his face and on the breast of his tunic. With horror, he saw that one eye had been destroyed. Tomchak tried to move, then screamed in pain. Grigori said: “What do I do? What do I do?” He could have bandaged a flesh wound, but how could he help a man who had been shot through the eye?

  He felt a blow to his head and looked up to see Gavrik run past him, shouting: “Keep moving, Peshkov, you stupid cunt!”

  He stared at Tomchak a moment longer. It seemed to him the officer was no longer breathing. He could not be sure, but all the same he stood up and ran forward.

  The firing intensified. Grigori’s fear turned to anger. The enemy’s bullets produced a feeling of outrage. In the back of his mind he knew it was irrational, but he could not help it. Suddenly he wanted to kill those bastards. A couple of hundred yards ahead, across a clearing, he saw gray uniforms and spiked helmets. He dropped to one knee behind a tree, peeped around the trunk, raised his rifle, sighted on a German, and for the first time pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened, and he remembered the safety catch.

  It was not possible to release the catch on a Mosin-Nagant while it was shouldered. He lowered the gun, sat on the ground behind the tree, and cradled the stock in the crook of his elbow, then turned the large knurled knob that unlocked the bolt.

  He looked about him. His comrades had stopped running and taken cover as he had. Some were firing, some reloading, some writhing in the agony of wounds, some lying in the stillness of death.

  Grigori peered around the trunk, shouldered his weapon, and squinted along the barrel. He saw a rifle poking out of a bush and a spiked helmet above it. His heart was filled with hatred, and he pulled the trigger five times fast. The rifle he was aiming at was hastily withdrawn, but did not fall, and Grigori guessed he had missed. He felt disappointed and frustrated.

  The Mosin-Nagant held only five rounds. He opened his ammunition pack and reloaded. Now he wanted to kill Germans as fast as he could.

  Looking around the tree again, he spotted a German running across a gap in the woods. He emptied his magazine, but the man kept running and disappeared behind a clump of saplings.

  It was no good just shoot
ing, Grigori decided. Hitting the enemy was difficult—much more difficult in a real fight than in the small amount of target practise he had had in training. He would have to try harder.

  As he was reloading again, he heard a machine gun open up, and the vegetation around him was sprayed. He pressed his back against the tree and drew in his legs, making himself a smaller target. His hearing told him the gun must be a couple of hundred yards to his left.

  When it paused he heard Gavrik shout: “Target that machine gun, you dumb pricks! Shoot them while they’re reloading!” Grigori poked his head out and looked for the nest. He spotted the tripod standing between two large trees. He aimed his rifle, then paused. No good just shooting, he reminded himself. He breathed evenly, steadied the heavy barrel, and got a pointed helmet in his sight. He lowered the barrel slightly so that he could see the man’s chest. The uniform tunic was open at the neck: the man was hot from his exertions.

  Grigori pulled the trigger.

  He missed. The German appeared not to have noticed the shot. Grigori had no idea where the bullet might have gone.

  He fired again, emptying the magazine to no effect. It was maddening. Those pigs were trying to kill him and he was incapable of hitting even one of them. Perhaps he was too far away. Or perhaps he was just a lousy shot.

  The machine gun opened up again, and everyone froze.

  Major Bobrov appeared, crawling on hands and knees across the forest floor. “You men!” he yelled. “On my command, rush that machine gun!”

  You must be mad, Grigori thought. Well, I’m not.

  Sergeant Gavrik repeated the order. “Prepare to rush the machine-gun nest! Wait for the command!”

  Bobrov stood upright and ran, crouching, along the line. Grigori heard him shout the same order a bit farther away. You’re wasting your breath, Grigori thought. Do you imagine we’re all suicidal?