Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  At Marienburg, less than twenty-four hours after Hindenburg assumed command, two enemy plain-language radio signals were intercepted. These revealed that the forces of Rennenkampf and Samsonov had drifted so far apart that they could not support each other. The morse of First Army’s obliging commander also informed the Germans of the lines of march of each of Samsonov’s corps. In the new wireless age, all the belligerents had much to learn about security of the ether – on the Western Front, the French intercepted important enemy signals en clair, and broke several German ciphers – but the consequences of this Russian lapse were especially significant. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were surveying the operational area, driving towards a hill south of Montowo, when the messages reached Max Hoffmann at army headquarters. He immediately set off by car in pursuit of his chiefs, clutching the texts. His driver raced alongside the generals’ open motor; the colonel leaned across and thrust the flimsies into Ludendorff’s hand. After he had read them, both cars halted. The Germans conferred about the significance of the news.

  Hoffmannn was now Ludendorff’s deputy. He was the brilliant, bullet-headed Prussian staff officer of caricature, a Russian specialist who had for years studied the Tsarist army, not least as a German observer of the Russo-Japanese war. He knew that effective coordination between Rennenkampf and Samsonov was implausible. The Russians’ indiscretion offered their enemies a chance to smash them in detail. Hoffmann could claim credit for having inspired the German concentration in the south, but it was Ludendorff who now presided over its implementation. The Germans’ 1891, 1898 and 1899 manoeuvres had addressed just such a scenario in East Prussia, and proposed precisely the response Eighth Army now adopted. Ludendorff concentrated his formations slightly further south and east than his subordinate had intended. As for the slow, stolid Hindenburg’s role, years later Hoffmann conducted a party of army cadets around the field of Tannenberg. ‘Here,’ he told them scornfully, ‘is where Hindenburg slept before the battle; here is where he slept after the battle; and here is where he slept during it.’

  The approaching encounter would represent a collision between the most professional army in Europe and the most careless. The Russians’ neglect of reconnaissance, logistics, medical facilities, concentration of force and common prudence could not be adequately redeemed by mass, good artillery and peasant courage. Aleksandr Samsonov was fifty-four, a jovially uxorious figure who had been on leave in the Caucasus with his wife when summoned to take up war duties. In East Prussia, he often expressed concern that he heard no news from home – any more than his men did. He chaffed the soldiers: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Well, your wife won’t know you when you get back. Look at the beard you have grown!’ ‘Have you any children? When I went to war in 1904 I left a daughter one and a half years old, and when I came back she ran away from me.’

  Samsonov’s chief of staff, Postovsky, was unflatteringly nicknamed by comrades ‘the mad mullah’. He characterised the advance of Second Army as an ‘adventure’, an unfortunate word for an offensive on which his nation’s fortunes in large measure turned. Samsonov was dependent for communication with Rennenkampf and with his own rear headquarters upon couriers travelling by car to a distant wireless transmitter, and sometimes even as far as Warsaw. In the last week of August, the general fooled himself that the Germans were fleeing, and that his task was merely to exploit Rennenkampf’s victory. The army intelligence staff was so weak that they could not even read captured documents, for lack of a German-speaker to translate them. In Samsonov’s haste to cross the supposed enemy line of retreat, he left behind one corps on his right among the Masurian Lakes, another on his left. Three corps proceeded northwards, dispersed across a front of almost sixty miles, with no effective cavalry screen to warn of enemy movements.

  Hindenburg’s formations were meanwhile tramping south, hampered by heat exhaustion and long columns of refugees, fleeing before the Russians. Soldiers displayed impenitent ruthlessness in driving civilians off the roads, overturning carts to make way for artillery; cavalry columns and baggage wagons trampled cherished household possessions into the dust. The fact that many of the German troops were themselves local residents prompted some painful incidents during the campaign. A certain L/Cpl. Schwald found his artillery battery called upon to destroy Eydtkuhnen, his home town, when it was occupied by the Russians, and Col. Emil Hell had to shell his own house in Gross-Grieben.

  Hindenburg’s Eighth Army was poised to strike one of the great military blows of history, at a moment when Russia’s western allies were both utterly ignorant of and amazingly complacent about events. On 24 August, the military correspondent of The Times told the British people: ‘In the East all continues to go well.’ An editorial asserted: ‘before very long there will be hosts of Russians within German territory, as the Germans will discover to their cost’. Yet that same day brought the first encounter of what became known as the Battle of Tannenberg, though the critical actions were fought some miles distant from the village. At first, a single Russian and German corps clashed head to head. Ludendorff, visiting the local headquarters, told its commander histrionically that his formations must ‘hold to the last man’ to buy time for Hindenburg’s left wing to come up. Thus all day Russians and Germans ravaged each other, as Samsonov’s men advanced again and again across open ground, striving for a breakthrough.

  By evening, to men as yet unaccustomed to heavy loss, the bloodshed seemed very terrible: one Russian regiment had lost nine company commanders out of sixteen; a company of 190 men finished the day seventy strong, all its officers dead. Yet when evening came, the Germans fell back. Samsonov was exultant: once again, it seemed to him, the enemy was retreating before Russian might. Next morning, imbued with the highest hopes, he ordered his army to resume its advance, oblivious that the Germans had shifted their ground the previous night only to align neighbouring corps. When Samsonov’s soldiers advanced on the 25th, they met overwhelming firepower from three sides, smashing into their columns. By nightfall, the Germans knew that they were achieving important results, but also recognised that these were not yet conclusive. Hindenburg slumbered heavily, while Ludendorff’s nerves did not allow him to sleep at all.

  On 26 August, Samsonov’s right wing renewed its advance, to meet pounding artillery and raking small-arms fire from two German corps. Yet that night, dinner at Hindenburg’s staff mess was eaten in dead silence. An alarming report had come in: Rennenkampf’s army was said to be marching, moving to support Samsonov in a fashion that could transform the battle by falling on the German flank or rear. For some time Ludendorff furiously rolled his bread around the table. Then he suddenly demanded a private conference with Hindenburg. That night the old general played a useful role, calming his subordinate’s tormented spirit. At last word came that the report about Rennenkampf was false; First Army’s formations had not moved. Samsonov’s battered forces were on their own.

  The 27th brought another spasm of alarm to Eighth Army headquarters. Officials at the post office of Allenstein, deep in the German rear, telephoned to report that Russians had entered their city. Some Tsarist soldiers, awesomely ignorant of the world beyond their villages and impressed by Allenstein’s size, gazed around them in the belief that they had reached Berlin. They were granted little time for gawping. Hindenburg’s staff hastily diverted reinforcements whose trains were due to pass through Allenstein, then resumed the pounding of Samsonov’s army. That day, the 27th, it was the turn of the Russian left flank to endure terrible punishment.

  Tannenberg has sometimes been called an ‘accidental miracle’, because Gen. Hermann von François, ordered earlier by Ludendorff to attack the Russian left, was late taking up his appointed position because his men were exhausted by their long march to the battlefield. The consequence was that when his corps finally struck, it found itself behind Samsonov’s rear, poised to complete his envelopment. The Germans considered François among the foremost heroes of the battle. One of his regiments
massed its entire complement of automatic weapons in a battery of six Maxims, firing in unison on the bewildered and broken Russians. Soon the Germans saw white flags being waved on poles and rifles – the first of thousands of such symbols across the vast battlefield.

  At Usdau, the Prussian 41st Infantry stormed enemy positions across open ground, and after bitter hand-to-hand fighting, drove back the opposing forces. They found that they had vanquished Samsonov’s 85th Infantry – whose honorary colonel was the Kaiser. That day, the Russians experienced a new kind of harassment when their Polish rear base at Ostrołęka was bombed by a Zeppelin airship. Slow, ghastly realisation dawned on Samsonov that he was presiding over a catastrophe. Eighth Army headquarters, however, remained reluctant to believe the magnitude of its own good fortune: Ludendorff and his staff lapsed into renewed gloom on Friday, 28 August, when reports came in that some attacks had been thrown back by fierce Russian resistance, and that a few German units had even given themselves up. Only at 4 o’clock in the afternoon did news arrive that François’s corps was bursting through the Russian rear, provoking consternation and mass surrenders. At last, the German generals allowed themselves to exult, confident that a huge victory was unfolding.

  Samsonov’s chief of staff, Postovsky, dispatched the British military attaché to the rear. He told Alfred Knox: ‘The position is very serious and it is not right that a foreigner should see the state we’re in.’ Samsonov admitted to Knox that his army was falling back in chaos, adding enigmatically that he did not know what the future held, ‘but even if the worst happened, it would not affect the ultimate result of the war’. Soon afterwards, the Germans threw a final heavy punch at the Russian centre. The remnants of Second Army began to fall back in chaos towards the Polish frontier. Over half Samsonov’s 230,000 men were dead, wounded or captured; his three attacking corps were shattered. Corpses lay scattered for miles among the region’s profusion of wild lupins.

  Tens of thousands of bewildered Russians around Ortensburg and Neidenburg found themselves trapped against lakes, wandering lost in forests, or seeking places to ford rivers. The beaten army fell apart, each fragment desperately seeking its own path to escape the relentless Germans. Hindenburg sought, and received, the Kaiser’s consent to name his victorious battlefield Tannenberg. Though the village was some distance removed, its name possessed a powerful resonance. There, in 1410, the knights of the Teutonic Order had suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians. Now, that outcome was reversed.

  Max Hoffmann professed surprise at receiving an Iron Cross for his own role: ‘I had never imagined that one could earn this most beautiful military decoration sitting on the telephone.’ But then he preened himself: ‘I saw that there must be somebody who keeps a cool head and overcomes difficulties and crises with boundless ruthlessness and commitment to victory.’ On 31 August, Hoffmann toured the battlefield with Gen. Count Dohna. When they reached a railhead where thousands of Russian PoWs awaited transport to cages, Dohna asked Hoffmann, ‘Well, how many prisoners will it be?’ Hoffmann guessed 30–40,000; Dohna thought 20,000 at most. Hoffmann invited Dohna to wager him a mark for every prisoner over or under 20,000 the Germans counted. Dohna declined, but Hoffmann would have won a fortune – the final total of PoWs was 92,000, along with 350 Russian guns.

  To gain this critical victory, the Germans had suffered only 12,000 casualties out of the 150,000 men Hindenburg committed to battle. The Kaiser, with his accustomed felicity of judgement, suggested that the Russians captured at Tannenberg should be herded into the Courland peninsula on the Baltic and ‘starved to death’. The grandfatherly figure of Hindenburg achieved lasting heroic status in Germany. He was made a field marshal, and huge wooden images of him were erected in many towns, plated with metal nails bought by citizens to raise funds for the Red Cross. ‘Our Hindenburg’ achieved a stature and authority which soon alarmed the Kaiser and gnawed at Ludendorff, who knew his commander-in-chief for the heavy old bull he was.

  ‘Our hearts are full of gratitude,’ wrote schoolteacher Gertrud Schädla in Verden, on hearing news of Tannenberg, ‘and above all hope that the war will not last too long into the winter. But alas, how many thousands lie there bleeding!’ Samsonov himself escaped from the carnage, having lost everything including his maps. When darkness fell, he and his aides could read their compass only by striking matches; when these were gone, they stumbled wearily on a course set by guesswork. The general was asthmatic, and soon had to lean on the shoulders of his aides to keep going. On 31 August, when Alfred Knox enquired about the whereabouts of the beaten commander, a Russian mutely drew his hand across his throat. Samsonov had finally paused to address his little cluster of staff officers: ‘The Emperor trusted me. How can I face him after such a disaster?’ He then shot himself, leaving his men to escape into Poland as best they could.

  Many other Russian senior officers perished. One corps commander – the same Martos who had displayed such solicitude for local children – was wounded by a shell which hit his car. He was accompanied by Aleksandra Aleksandrovna, the wife of an officer of the Muromski Regiment, who spoke German and was acting as an interpreter. She was last seen fleeing into woodland. Russian survivors of Tannenberg asserted bitterly that their commanders acted as if they had at their disposal such millions of men ‘that it does not matter how many are thrown to their deaths’. Alfred Knox wrote: ‘It looks as if the Russians were too simple and good-natured to wage modern war.’ This was a kindly way of acknowledging the unfitness of Samsonov and his professional kin to enter the ring against Ludendorff and the German army. The Russian presented his troops to the enemy like successive courses of a banquet, to be devoured in detail. The Tsar’s forces almost invariably cracked in the face of flank attacks, while in the centre the Germans were able to fight a succession of defensive actions on the most favourable terms, before advancing to pursue their stricken foe.

  As in every battle, many factors had contributed to German victory: Hoffmann’s prescience, Ludendorff’s skill, Russian incompetence – and a dusting of luck. Hindenburg became overnight the idol of the German people, while almost every officer in the Kaiser’s uniform saluted the perceived genius of Ludendorff. Above all, the Germans knew that they had demonstrated the fundamental superiority of their soldiers to those of Russia. Their condescension, if not contempt, towards the Russian army persisted, with baleful consequences, into the Second World War.

  It was now the turn of Rennenkampf to suffer the same fate as Samsonov. During the first week of September, the schoolchildren of Schneidemühl, near Germany’s eastern frontier, watched fascinated as crowded troop trains passed through the town every half-hour, bound for the east: these were the two corps dispatched by Moltke from the Western Front to reinforce Hindenburg. On the morning of the 9th, the Germans attacked First Army amid the Masurian Lakes, which gave their name to the battle. First, the Russians’ left flank was turned; then their right and centre collapsed. Hindenburg’s triumph became complete. Within days, the Russians were withdrawing from East Prussia, pillaging the border villages with the cruel spite of defeat. Passing through Johannisberg, Tartars wanted to carry off a statue of Bismarck. Their general demurred, roaring that such an action ‘would cause an international incident’. The Tartars took the statue anyway, no doubt arguing that the war was already sufficient of an international incident.

  The Sczuka family watched the ebbing of the tide of Russian might which had swept over their community. Rennenkampf’s army, now heavily reduced, trudged past Popowen’s little houses for days. The villagers saw wounded men; others who had lost weapons and equipment; broken-down horses and carts which were thrust aside into roadside ditches when they lost a wheel or their hapless animals collapsed. Little Elisabeth Sczuka felt a surge of pity for an exhausted donkey, whipped along by its Russian master. Some of her neighbours suffered terribly from the rancour of the defeated. An elderly couple named Olschewski were driven from their cottage by a Russian officer wi
elding a knout, who then applied a match to the straw of their bed; flames devoured the building. But the Sczukas nonetheless rejoiced in victory. Loyal Germans all, they sat in the candlelit safety of their home, singing the Prussian anthem ‘Heil dir im Siegerkranz’ around the family piano, while Rennenkampf’s stragglers passed outside all night.

  The Russian First Army escaped total destruction only by the speed of its flight – twenty-five miles a day, which left its pursuers far behind. German cavalry proved no more effective than anybody else’s in fulfilling their traditional function of pursuing a beaten foe; the rifle fire of Russian rearguards prevented them from closing in. Rennenkampf’s formations were battered and beaten, but most survived to fight another day. The Germans had accomplished their immediate purpose, smashing the invasion of East Prussia. In the months that followed, the enemy maintained a threatening presence across the border, and indeed would again cross in force. But it no longer seemed plausible that a ‘Russian steamroller’ would thrust into Germany by that route.

  The Western allies were slow to grasp the severity of the disasters the Tsar’s armies had suffered at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Amidst the torrents of competing and mutually contradictory propaganda unleashed by all the belligerents, in London and Paris German reports of Hindenburg’s triumphs were disbelieved. The Russians strove to conceal from their allies the scale of their humiliation, and were in considerable degree successful. Good news from Galicia, further south, was allowed to mask sombre tidings from East Prussia. So vast were Russia’s human resources that the destruction of Samsonov’s army and the mauling of Rennenkampf’s seemed to represent no irreversible catastrophe for the Tsar’s military power – merely the collapse of his immediate and most dramatic hopes.