by Max Hastings
The retreat from Mons cost the BEF 15,000 men killed, wounded and captured, together with forty-two guns lost, most of these losses being in II Corps. They were only a tiny fraction of French casualties, but profoundly shocking to their commanders. It seemed to them, as well as to the Kaiser’s generals, entirely plausible that German victory was at hand. It was fortunate for the allied cause that the spirit of France, far from being extinguished, was soon to achieve a historic redemption.
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Tannenberg: ‘Alas, How Many Thousands Lie There Bleeding!’
The peoples of Europe were awed by the scale of the forces unleashed across the continent. ‘Russian society had not experienced such emotions since the 1812 war,’ wrote Sergei Kondurashkin. ‘A great battle was to be fought on the threshold of one’s own home. Men who had been reservists for as long as seventeen years were called up – six million men … A sea of people against another sea of people … One’s imagination was unable to grasp the scale of the coming events.’ But once even the Russian hosts were dispersed across fronts of many hundreds of miles – three times the length of those contested in the west – suddenly they became much less impressive than when passing in review across parade grounds. A dominant theme of the campaigns of 1914 was the mismatch between the towering ambitions of Europe’s warlords, and the inadequate means with which they set about fulfilling them.
On the Eastern Front, reason should have told the Stavka – the Tsar’s high command – that Germany was the critical enemy: if Russia could achieve quick victories against the Kaiser’s relatively small army in East Prussia, the impact on the whole war would be dramatic, conceivably decisive. That is what the French government wanted, and implored the Russians to attempt. Contradictorily, however, Gen. Alexei Speyer, most respected of Russia’s strategic planners, urged smashing the Austrians before making any attempt to take on the Germans. The Stavka, which established itself in a pine forest beside a railway junction at Baranovichi in Belorussia, deliberated, wavered, then committed the mirror error of Conrad Hötzendorf’s. The Russians divided their armies, and attempted to attack both foes simultaneously. Two-thirds of their immediately available forces – 1.2 million men – were sent to fight the Austro-Hungarians in southern Poland, while half that number attacked the Germans in East Prussia.
Moltke had taken a large risk by deploying only a blocking force to hold the Russians in play, and now his gamble was to be put to the test. The Kaiser’s eastern subjects were acutely conscious of the proximity of a hated and feared enemy to their homes. Berlin’s Neue Preußische Zeitung was known as ‘the Cross newspaper’ – Kreuzzeitung – because its masthead bore an iron cross. On 6 August 1914 it spoke of the ‘cross of Prussia’s Teutonic Knights’ rising again to fight the barbarians from the east. During the first weeks of war, memories of the knights were often invoked. Fears ran deep that ‘Russian hordes’ might sweep forth towards Berlin, wrecking and pillaging.
In the late summer of 1914, from every corner of Nicholas II’s empire the armed might of Mother Russia converged upon its Polish colony, focus of operations against both Germany and Austria. The Tsar wanted to take personal command of his armies in the field, but was persuaded instead to appoint a figurehead commander-in-chief, his uncle Grand Duke Nicholas – often known as ‘Nicholas the tall’ to distinguish him from the Emperor, ‘Nicholas the short’. The Grand Duke’s personal train crawled slowly along the Vitebsk line towards the theatre of war. Three-course lunches and dinners were served, with plenty of claret and Madeira. The French military attaché, Gen. Marquis de Laguiche, expostulated in frustration, ‘Think of me – with thirty-eight years’ service, having dreamt so much of this moment, and now stuck here when the hour has come.’
Amid desultory time-passing conversation, the Grand Duke told British military attaché Maj. Gen. Alfred Knox of his impatience to get to England for some shooting once the war was disposed of – he was a passionate hunter. He spoke of his distaste for the Germans, and said that once they had been beaten the Kaiserreich must be broken up. As royal soldiers go, Nicholas commanded some respect, but he had always been a trainer of troops rather than a field commander. He lacked both the delegated authority and the force of personality effectively to coordinate the operations of Russia’s generals in Poland. When at last they reached Baranovichi on the morning of Sunday the 16th, flippancy was still to the fore. A Foreign Ministry official said to Knox, ‘you soldiers ought to be very pleased that we have arranged such a nice war for you’. He received a cautious response: ‘We must wait and see whether it will be such a nice war after all.’
Train after train bore to Warsaw and beyond horse, foot and guns of one of the most exotic military hosts the world has ever seen. Many infantry officers were of peasant stock, while most generals and cavalry leaders were aristocrats. Not all Russian commanders were incompetents, although in the early months of the war they displayed no more military genius than most of their French and Austrian counterparts. Especially in the early months, cavalry played a much larger role on the Eastern Front than in the west. Foreign observers never failed to be impressed by the exotic regiments of the Tsar – Don, Turkistan and Ural Cossacks, the latter ‘big, red-bearded, wild-looking men’. Officers carried their maps in their high hats; many enemies were killed with the lance. And there were astounding numbers of Russian horse: to conduct one raid, Gen. Novikov’s corps deployed 140 squadrons. As for the men, correspondent Alexei Ksyunin wrote: ‘The yellow and purple robes of the Turkmens appeared blindingly brilliant against the background of village houses. They wore enormous sheepskin hats, above dark features and wild hair which made them seem picturesque and majestic. Galloping on their horses they caused no less panic than armoured vehicles. I offered cigarettes and tried to talk to them. It was useless, for they didn’t speak any Russian. They could say only “Thank you, sir,” and nothing more.’
An American correspondent described a squadron of Kubanski Cossacks: ‘a hundred half-savage giants, dressed in the ancient panoply of that curious Slavic people whose main business is war, and who serve the Tsar in battle from their fifteenth to their sixtieth years; high fur hats, long caftans laced in at the waist and coloured dull pink or blue or green with slanting cartridge pockets on each breast, curved yataghans inlaid with gold and silver, daggers hilted with uncut gems, and boots with sharp toes turned up … They were like overgrown children.’ First Army’s cavalry were commanded by the old Khan of Nakhichevan, who was found weeping in his tent one morning because he was too crippled by haemorrhoids to mount his horse.
Some of the Tsar’s officers were conscientious professionals, but others behaved towards their men like country landlords among serfs. Foreigners were shocked by commanders who, when their regiments halted for the night, set off in search of women, leaving horses and men to shift for themselves. Cossacks were sometimes seen thrashing their whips to halt fleeing infantry. Provisioning arrangements were casual: the army was expected to subsist chiefly off the land, though every column carried supplies of sukhari, a dried black bread which substituted for biscuit, packed loose in sacks.
Poland was the Russian Empire’s critical salient: there the Tsar’s armies could grapple their foes, but were also threatened by counter-strokes. Russian soldiers newly arrived in the region were impressed by the living conditions of rural Poles, whose houses were adorned with such unfamiliar refinements as soft furniture and lace curtains. German settlers lived among the peasants, and in that polyglot region it was hard to guess what language might prove comprehensible to local people. When a Russian officer demanded first in Polish, then in Russian, whether a farming family had any produce to sell, he was met by blank stares. He fared better in German, but the old farmer, already embittered by experience, responded, ‘What produce?’ He shifted in his chair, looking scared. The officer said, ‘How come you didn’t store anything in the summer?’ ‘We sold everything.’
The Eastern theatre of war must be understood as a colonial regi
on, in which Russians, Austrians and Germans alike ruled minorities – Poles, Bosnians, Czechs, Serbs, Jews – whose loyalty to their respective empires was anything but assured. This reinforced paranoia about spies and saboteurs, even stronger here than on the Western Front, as the armies of three empires began to skirmish across their respective frontiers. Jews were considered the natural prey of any passing Russian patriot. The Belobeevsky infantry regiment’s train halted for two hours at the Polish station of Tłusz. Many men slipped away into the town, seizing goods for which they declined to pay Jewish shopkeepers. In response the traders put up their shutters, prompting the soldiers to break down doors and commence uninhibited looting, while their officers stood by and watched. The episode would have gone unremarked had not a passing general expressed outrage. The next day in Lublin, twenty Jewish stores were systematically pillaged by troops. Josh Samborn has written: ‘soldiers knew that their word would be honoured over that of a Jew, and even the murder of robbed Jews went largely unpunished’.
A Russian gendarme telegraphed to his superior, reporting that in Vyshov ‘in the guise of buying horses, two Germans arrived who stayed the night in the barn of the Jew Gurman and then went to Ostrolenka’. On 18 August in Tarchin, an outbreak of fires as Russian troops marched through the town was immediately blamed upon Jews ‘with the goal of letting the enemy know where our troops were moving’. Fourteen such hapless men were arrested. Unusually, they were later freed when the local police chief concluded that the fires had started accidentally, but their pillaged goods were not returned or compensated. Through the months that followed, a series of pogroms against Jewish communities was conducted chiefly, though not exclusively, by Cossacks. A considerable number of Jews took flight to Warsaw, from whence they were forcibly deported eastwards.
Lt. Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky was a twenty-two-year-old sapper, bookish, widely travelled, the son of an aristocratic diplomat. He described how in a small Polish town his unit of newly mobilised soldiers murdered eight Jews following an outbreak of spy fever. That afternoon, as the men prepared for mass they saw a partial eclipse of the sun; this caused the superstitious soldiers to become troubled about their deeds of the morning. But their consciences were quieted soon enough: Russian troops in Poland seized anything they could snatch on their line of march, heedless of the fact that the victims were supposedly their own compatriots. For the overwhelming majority of the Tsar’s subjects, foreigners began in the next village to their own. Though Gen. Paul Rennenkampf issued stern edicts against looting on Russian territory, and on 10 August announced that four men had been shot for robbing civilians, his subordinates made little or no attempt to enforce his orders. Pillage had a severe impact on local trade, harming both civilians and soldiers. Commissary officers, struggling to feed their men, found it hard to secure local produce, even where the army was willing to pay.
On the other side, in the first days of the war the Germans acted as savagely as in Belgium, destroying the Polish border towns of Kalitz and Częstochowa, taking hostages and murdering civilians. After occupying Kalitz on 2 August, the invaders became obsessed by reports of civilian snipers, and began firing at will on the inhabitants. Suspected ‘ringleaders of francs-tireurs’ were taken hostage along with civil and religious dignitaries: 750 people were soon in custody. There was widespread rape, pillage and arson. The Germans admitted to executing eleven civilians, but locals said the real total was much higher. When the invaders withdrew, from mere spite they unleashed an artillery bombardment on the town, obliging tens of thousands of Poles to flee.
The Russian Sumskoi Hussars, who detrained at Suvalki on 3 August, rode towards the East Prussian border through a contraflow of dusty, desperate refugees, trekking away from the front on foot, or driving carts laden with their scanty possessions. Mutual fears provoked civilian migrations alike in Poland, East Prussia and Galicia. A woman refugee at a Red Cross depot in Schneidemühl kept crying out, ‘Where can we go? Where can we go?’ She looked down at twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr and said, ‘A girl like you can have no idea what it’s like, can you?’ Elfriede wrote: ‘Tears ran down her chubby red cheeks.’ A few days later the child wrote with pathetic naïveté: ‘Gretel and I now play a game in the yard in which her old doll is a refugee child that has no more nappies. She has painted its behind red, to show that it is sore.’
In 1914, East Prussia had not experienced war for a century – a long respite, in the turbulent history of the region. Across its vast, open, underpopulated flatlands, at first each side’s lancers roamed at will, like naval privateers of bygone ages, engaging like-minded foes or attacking villages according to the whim of their commanders. Often the only means by which a patrol could discern the whereabouts of the enemy was by scanning the horizon for pillars of smoke, beacons of domestic tragedy. Cavalry officer Nikolai Gumilev grew accustomed to coming upon houses whose owners had just fled, sometimes leaving behind coffee on the stove, knitting on the table, open books. As he availed himself of such creature comforts, ‘I remembered the children’s story about the little girl who entered the house of the bear family, and I was constantly expecting to hear the angry demand: “Who ate my porridge? Who slept in my bed?”’
In the East Prussian border village of Popowen, south of Lyck, in the first days of August fearful peasants saw flames creeping rapidly closer, as neighbouring communities were torched. One day they glimpsed a lone Russian horseman looking down on them from a nearby hillside, rifle poised. He was soon followed by a troop of his comrades who departed after cutting the telegraph wire. Nobody could decide what to do for the best. Schoolteacher Johann Sczuka fled with his family and a cartload of possessions, only to return a few days later when all still seemed normal, save for thirsty and unmilked cows lowing on abandoned farms.
Back home, the Sczukas’ two young daughters were dispatched to scour the area for stray chickens and any other source of food. On their wanderings, the children chanced upon a man cycling from another village. As he spoke to them, they suddenly saw distant figures descending in their direction from the hills. The cyclist urged the girls to make themselves scarce. He himself rashly lingered, only to be shot down a few moments later, to the horror of the young spectators. The newcomers were Russians. The children dashed for home, heedless of nettles that stung their legs and rough ground on which ten-year-old Elisabeth lost her shoes. Exhausted, they took refuge in the family house and awaited the next act.
Through the days that followed, between 10 and 15 August, patrols of both armies drifted through the area. Local people warned a German cavalry troop that there were Russians in a nearby wood, but the men advanced anyway – and were fired upon. Dashing cavaliers learnt harsh lessons. Capt. Lazarev, a squadron commander of the Sumskoi Hussars, found his men reluctant to advance in the face of German fire. Seeking to inspire them by example, he galloped headlong towards the enemy – and was promptly shot out of his saddle. Another Russian officer expressed amazement at how quickly one adjusted to the horrors of war, especially the corpses. They rotted fast in the summer heat, skin darkening, mouths gaping and teeth gleaming so that they were readily visible at a distance. ‘But it is only the first impression that is ghastly,’ he said. ‘After that, one becomes almost indifferent.’
The Sumskoi Hussars dismounted to approach a German position, then were crestfallen to find themselves almost horseless: their mounts, terrified by artillery fire, broke free from their pickets and bolted. Many men were obliged to plod ignominiously towards the rear on foot, though one who still had his horse carried a wounded cornet slung across the saddle. A mile back the soldiers were relieved to meet their commanding officer, who had recaptured most of the animals. A day or two later, when Lt. Vladimir Littauer’s squadron found itself suddenly facing rifle fire, one of his troopers pointed towards a farm and shouted, ‘There they are – look!’ They spotted two figures disappearing behind some buildings. Littauer led twenty dismounted men up a convenient ditch, which he later realised marked the R
ussian frontier with East Prussia. On reaching the farm they found no one. ‘We didn’t know any better than to set it on fire,’ he wrote. ‘This was something our troops were always afterwards doing in similar circumstances.’
The farm they destroyed was on Russian soil, but the young hussar noted ‘something crazy was happening on the German side: houses, haystacks and sheds were ablaze everywhere’ – more wretched consequences of franc-tireur fever. Russian units were swept by rumours of a Cossack who asked an East Prussian woman for milk, and was shot dead; of a cavalry division commander who leant from his saddle to ask another woman if she had seen any German troops, only to be greeted by a revolver shot. Civilians on both sides of the border suffered in consequence of such fantasies.
Just eleven German infantry divisions and one of cavalry – 15 per cent of the Kaiser’s host – were deployed for the defence of East Prussia. The inhabitants of this rustic outpost of the Wilhelmine Empire, a flat, melancholy land of cattle, lakes, forests and pasture, had cause for resentment towards their rulers, who had knowingly exposed them to devastation by the rival hosts in order to fulfil their grand strategic vision in France. The role of the relatively small Eighth Army in the east commanded by Gen. Maximilian Prittwitz und Gaffron was not to destroy the Tsar’s forces, an impossible task, but merely to hold a line as best it could; to purchase time until the western legions had crushed the French and could shuttle east for a decisive settling of accounts. Prittwitz’s officers were very conscious of their orphan status. The formations allotted to them represented the left-overs from Germany’s vast deployment in the west. They had a makeshift staff, and their commander was confused by mixed messages from Berlin. Having been instructed before the war that his role was merely to keep the enemy in play, on 14 August Moltke urged him to manoeuvre aggressively in the event that he faced a full-scale thrust: ‘If the Russians come – simply no defence but attack, attack, attack.’ Lt. Col. Max Hoffmann, Prittwitz’s chief of operations, confided to his diary that he found the responsibilities he faced ‘gigantic, and more of a strain on the nerves than I expected’. He observed cynically that if the campaign went well, his general would be hailed as a great captain, while ‘if things do not go well, they will blame us’ – the army staff.
