by Max Hastings
Even as Moltke’s western legions approached Brussels, Prittwitz’s formations met cavalry patrols which were harbingers of two invading armies of almost four times the Germans’ numerical strength. The Russians committed to their northern offensive 480 battalions against the Germans’ 130; 5,800 Russian guns against 774. Sukhomlinov, the war minister, wrote complacently in his diary on 9 August: ‘it seems that the German wolf will quickly be brought to bay: all are against him’. The French, however, were much dismayed by the Russian division of forces. Before the war, the Stavka had professed to accept the importance of ensuring that its forces were concentrated and fully equipped before any advance into German territory began. But in the middle days of August, this prudent resolve crumbled in the face of the overriding imperative swiftly to divert the enemy’s strength and attention from the campaign in the West: the Russians started operations while still lacking 20 per cent of their infantry.
In the midst of East Prussia lay a necklace of large water features surrounded by swamps – the Masurian Lakes. The Russian First Army under Gen. Paul Rennenkampf advanced westwards from a startline north of the lakes, while a few days behind him Aleksandr Samsonov’s Second Army launched itself on a southern axis. The two commanders were thus separated by time, space and some mutual animosity, though the latter has probably been exaggerated. The invaders posted a grandiloquent proclamation: ‘To you Prussians, we the representatives of Russia present ourselves as harbingers of united Slavdom.’ Samsonov conducted himself with reckless braggadocio, dispatching his wireless transmitter back into Poland, then riding forward to reconnoitre without any means of rapid communication. Most telephone lines were cut.
Within hours, almost every Russian horseman screening the left flank of Rennenkampf’s army was riding with a cheese dangling from his saddle, after looting a cheese factory in the town of Mirunsken. ‘A cavalryman is used to many odours,’ wrote one, ‘but never before or after did we smell as we did then.’ For days, they feasted upon a diet of pillaged sausage, ham, pork, geese, chickens, such as few of the Tsar’s soldiers had ever known. If a Russian mount was shot or went lame, the rider exchanged it for a German one: farm horses grazed in the fields, and there were plenty of loose cavalry animals. When the Sumskoi Hussars passed a stud farm, they appropriated all the horses they could catch, muttering teasing words that became commonplace throughout the army, about ‘presents from the grateful local population’. Vladimir Littauer acquired a handsome four-year-old thoroughbred chestnut, but found it vile-tempered.
From the outset, cavalrymen were forced to recognise their vulnerability. Two Hussar squadrons advancing on a village were driven back by rifle fire from a handful of Germans. They retreated, having suffered significant casualties. Littauer struggled to lift a bleeding NCO into a saddle while bullets whipped up dust around them. He suddenly reflected, in a fashion typical of a Russian gentleman among peasants, ‘Why am I helping this man? I hardly know him. Why should I be helping him?’ Then another officer cried out, ‘Watch out for the civilians!’ As if in proof of his words, a shot rang out from a nearby wood, wounding a cornet. As usual, this was attributed to francs-tireurs.
The German inhabitants of East Prussia endured Russian looting with grim resignation, but recoiled in fury when they saw local members of the Polish minority joining the pillage of abandoned homes. Schoolteacher Johann Sczuka solemnly noted the names of all whom he recognised – especially his own pupils – with a view to future retribution. He rebuked a woman he met near his village, laden with booty, but she brushed him off and marched defiantly onwards, clutching her spoils. Some Russian officers showed themselves surprisingly humane and sensitive. Martos, one of Samsonov’s corps commanders, expressed embarrassment about being billeted in a house still adorned with the possessions and photographs of its German owners, now fugitives. One day when he encountered some children roaming unattended on the battlefield, he removed them to the rear in his own car.
The long columns plodding forward into German territory filled observers with wonder at their exotic character and mingling of modern and primitive equipment. Many of the infantry lacked high boots. Supply arrangements were chaotic and inadequate, hampered by poor roads and few railways in their rear. The Russian army rejected howitzers as a ‘cowards’ weapon’, because they could be fired by men beyond sight of their enemies; for artillery support, they relied exclusively upon field guns. Communications were hampered by a shortage of radios, and commanders were obliged to signal in plain language, because each corps used a different cipher. The invaders owned a total of just twenty-five telephones and eighty miles of wire. The cavalry were trained to act chiefly as mounted infantry, filling gaps between corps, and made little attempt to fulfil the vital reconnaissance role. Most of Russia’s few available aircraft had been sent to Galicia, and those in East Prussia were temporarily grounded for lack of fuel.
In 1910 German writer Heino von Basedow described his impressions of the Tsar’s army in terms which reflected widespread foreign opinion: ‘The Russian soldier is impulsive as a child. He is easily excited by rabble-rousers (towards revolt) but equally readily restored to submission.’ Basedow was amazed by the careless culture of the Tsar’s soldiers, symbolised by the rakish angle at which each man wore his cap. An NCO calling ‘ras-dwa’ at the front of a marching column in hopes of maintaining its step and precision could not prevent a man in the rear rank from casually munching an apple. Soldiers supposedly marching at attention would nonetheless raise an unfailing hand to cross themselves when they passed a church or roadside icon. Meanwhile a grenadier might seat himself on a roadside marker and hawk his platoon’s bread to all comers. Such a way of soldiering did not inspire German respect. Alfred Knox noted the same casualness on the battlefield, where he was astonished to see Russian artillerymen sleeping huddled against their gunshields, minutes before they were due to open fire.
Rennenkampf and Samsonov groped forward, sharing with the Germans uncertainty about each other’s whereabouts. The Russians occupied the town of Lyck, only to be almost immediately obliged to evacuate it. This news failed to reach a Tsarist officer who drove smartly up to the Königlicher Hof hotel and stepped out of his automobile to find himself a prisoner of war; it profited him nothing that his compatriots recaptured Lyck a few hours later. There were daily clashes between patrols of the rival armies, riding hither and thither between towns and villages, sometimes firing on their own side in the general confusion.
Many German and Russian soldiers were exhausted by epic marches before they even began to fight. Some of Samsonov’s men trudged 204 miles from Białystok in fifteen days. One of Prittwitz’s corps spent twelve days footslogging from Darkehmen – 186 miles – and then immediately engaged the enemy on the morning of 20 August. Its commander, Gen. August von Mackensen, ordered an assault on Rennenkampf’s army near the village and rail junction of Gumbinnen, some twenty miles inside East Prussia. The Germans drove in the Russian flanks with impressive ease. In the centre, however, they suffered a bloody repulse which made their other gains worthless. Advancing across open ground in extended lines – Schützenlinien – they met the fire of two entrenched divisions. Mackensen’s men had been marching twenty hours without sleep; their waterbottles were empty. Their tactics were no more subtle than those of the French army in Alsace-Lorraine, and were similarly rewarded.
One Russian regiment’s 3,000 rifles and eight machine-guns fired 800,000 rounds that day. Its supporting artillery did formidable execution: Russian gunnery showed an excellence it would reprise on future battlefields. Thousands of Germans were mown down – one man in four – while many of the survivors fled in panic, and kept running for hours. A Grenadier lieutenant sought to encourage his men by shouting defiantly that the Russians were hopeless marksmen, until he fell dead with a bullet in his breast. Thousands of wounded lay untended. Mackensen’s cavalry became separated from the infantry, and rejoined only days later, worn out. At nightfall, the Gumbinnen battlefield wa
s strewn with the casualties of both sides. When at last some of these were brought into field hospitals, a Russian officer noticed a German private soldier, prostrate on a stretcher, smoking a cigar. Though this stogie was no costly product of Cuba, the Hussar nonetheless marvelled at the wealth of an enemy society which permitted a humble rifleman access to such a luxury as no Russian ranker could dream of.
The Prussian formations had been savagely mauled. They were rallied by their officers only with difficulty during the ensuing night. Next day, the German high command experienced a rapid series of mood changes. Some senior officers believed there was a chance to roll up Rennenkampf’s army by renewing the action, exploiting the previous day’s successes on the flanks. But Prittwitz, badly shaken by his losses, flinched from taking such a risk. Moltke had told him that his prime responsibility was to keep the army intact. Thus, the commander-in-chief made a drastic decision: to disengage and undertake a strategic retreat, more than a hundred miles west towards the Vistula.
This order enraged Max Hoffmann and many of his comrades, who considered the withdrawal wholly unnecessary. It also precipitated chaos in the rear areas of the army. On 22 August the military authorities ordered that all cattle and corn must be shipped west across the Vistula, beyond reach of the Russians. Then refugees began hastening the same way. Westbound movements of livestock, produce and people collided headlong with reinforcements and supplies heading east. For some days, panic prevailed among civilians behind the German front. Almost a million East Prussians left their homes in the face of the Russian threat – around a quarter of the entire population – most with only such possessions as they could carry on their backs.
The flood of refugees surging into the border town of Schneidemühl persuaded many of its own inhabitants to flee westwards. Carts laden with household possessions, creaking towards the station, became a familiar sight in the streets. The newcomers brought shocking tales of destruction, alleged rape and murder, causing the Kuhr family’s nervous housekeeper Marie to threaten to decamp. The townspeople debated what to do with a refugee boy who had lost his parents. A mother wept, because she had mislaid her children on the road from the east. A farmer’s wife asserted bleakly that ‘not a stone was left standing’ in the community from which she had fled: ‘everything was burning … we could take away only our clothes and a little bit of money’. Elsewhere along the East Prussian frontier, at Elbing station local authorities posted a despairing sign: ‘This town is completely full of refugees. Please keep moving.’ Germany’s pre-war planning to meet a Russian invasion included measures to dam the Nogat river. Inundations along its course would block the path to central Prussia, at the cost of flooding large tracts of farmland and many villages. Prittwitz’s staff repeatedly changed their minds about whether to initiate this drastic step. In the end, no flooding took place, because it was bound to provoke a huge new refugee migration.
On the Russian side, success at Gumbinnen prompted a wave of euphoria which swept back to St Petersburg and thereafter across the Tsar’s empire. The Russians deluded themselves that the Germans were in full retreat towards the coastal fortress of Königsberg. Rennenkampf made one of the decisive mistakes of the campaign. Complacent in the wake of his little victory, he was also short of supplies, especially ammunition. He decided to give his men a rest and refill his limbers before advancing further. He made no attempt to pursue the retreating enemy. If, instead, he had immediately exploited southwards, momentous consequences might have ensued for Germany. As it was, Rennenkampf simply sat down upon the battlefield.
Meanwhile Samsonov, informed of Gumbinnen, saw an opportunity to cut off Prittwitz’s beaten forces and achieve a historic triumph. His army hastened forward to garner the spoils of Rennenkampf’s success, an initiative which represented a calamitous misreading of the Germans’ condition and intentions. In the days after Gumbinnen, Prittwitz’s brilliant chief of operations persuaded his general to reverse the earlier decision to make for the Vistula. Max Hoffmann argued that great opportunities still beckoned. Reconnaissance showed that Rennenkampf was going nowhere fast. The colonel urged that if a weak screen was left behind to watch the Russian First Army, Prittwitz could exploit the Germans’ excellent rail network to shift two corps southwards to meet Samsonov, and with luck deal him a crippling blow. As Second Army pushed forward, it looked amazingly vulnerable, especially on the flanks.
The Germans had often wargamed just such a scenario for defeating a Russian invasion force, but it is remarkable that Prittwitz agreed to the bold new plan, given his shaken state. One of the critical manoeuvres of the war thus began. And even as troops boarded trains taking them southwards, the high command intervened. In Coblenz, a disbelieving Moltke had learned of Gumbinnen, and of Prittwitz’s planned retreat to the Vistula. He exploded into furious and indeed tearful rage, then telephoned each of the corps commanders in East Prussia to invite their opinions. In turn they asserted that Prittwitz’s order was mistaken and unnecessary. On the afternoon of 22 August, Eighth Army’s headquarters at Marienburg on the western border of East Prussia received a terse message: Prittwitz was dismissed. Old Gen. Paul von Hindenburg had been summoned out of retirement to relieve him; he would be accompanied into the field by a new army chief of staff, the bleak, moody Erich Ludendorff, fresh from his heroics at Liège.
Hindenburg, a stolid sixty-six-year-old, had served as an infantry officer in Prussia’s wars against Austria in 1866, and against France four years later. He retired from the army in 1911, and thereafter devoted himself to his pipe, daily readings of newspapers, and a little Italian tourism. When Germany mobilised, to his disappointment he was not at first recalled to the colours. The corpulent Hindenburg growled crossly, ‘I sit like an old woman in front of the stove.’ But on the afternoon of 22 August a telegram reached his flat in Hanover: was he available for immediate service? He responded instantly and tersely: ‘Am ready.’ At 4 a.m. next day a special train, already carrying his chief of staff, stopped briefly to collect him from a darkened platform at Hanover station; it then hastened onwards to East Prussia.
Hindenburg’s appointment represented window-dressing. He was not even the first choice for the job – merely an officer of appropriate seniority to command Eighth Army, whose home happened to be situated on the line that his chief of staff must travel to reach East Prussia. The latter was the man Berlin expected to transform the campaign, selected before Moltke gave a thought to identifying a figurehead commander-in-chief. Ludendorff was a commoner, forty-nine years old, who had risen by sheer ability through the ranks of an army dominated by aristocrats. A dour professional warrior to every last extremity of his being, he considered war the natural business of mankind. He had served on the General Staff under Schlieffen, who remained his idol. For a decade he had enthusiastically endorsed the core principle of German planning – that East Prussia should be lightly held while France was disposed of.
A man of chilly rationality though highly nervous temperament, in 1904 he indulged the sole romantic gesture of his life by falling in love with a married mother of four children, Frau Margarethe Pernet. They met in the street in a rainstorm, when he gallantly offered her the shelter of his umbrella. She divorced her husband, married Ludendorff, and the two achieved a notably successful partnership. Now, Moltke wrote to him: ‘You have before you a new and difficult task … I know no other man in whom I have such absolute trust. You may yet be able to save the situation in the east. You must not be angry with me for calling you away from a post in which you are, perhaps, on the threshold of a decisive action which, please God, will be conclusive … The Kaiser, too, has confidence in you.’ This last assertion was untrue. Ludendorff collected his Pour le Mérite for Liège from Wilhelm an hour before his train departed for the East. But the Kaiser was furious that Moltke had not consulted him about either appointment to Eighth Army, and considered the new chief of staff a vulgar and ambitious adventurer.
The two generals, who would establish one of the mos
t famous military double acts in history, reached Marienburg on 23 August. They received a gloomy, icily formal reception from Prittwitz’s dejected staff. Max Hoffmann certainly harboured doubts about the newcomers: both were unknown quantities, and Ludendorff bore the air of a man who knew that he had everything to prove. Hoffmann’s plan to concentrate against Samsonov had already been set in motion, and thereafter events evolved with stunning speed. Moltke made a momentous decision, to shift six corps to strengthen Eighth Army. Ludendorff said he had neither wish nor need for the proposed reinforcements, which would weaken the Western Front at a critical moment. He was told they were coming anyway, and he should plan to use them. In the end, Moltke sent just two corps, which arrived after the momentous clash with Samsonov had taken place. But German critics ever thereafter cited this redeployment as evidence of the chief of staff’s tottering judgement, cracking nerve.
