by Hew Strachan
Kut fell on 29 April 1916. Townshend and 13,000 men went into a captivity from which very few of them returned. Townshend was an exception, living in comfort overlooking the Bosphorus for the remainder of the war. Britain’s humiliation in the Middle East and Central Asia was complete. Its worst fear, that of resurgent Islam in the empire, seemed to be about to be realised. ‘For me’, von der Goltz had written home, ‘... the hallmark of the twentieth century must be the revolution of the coloured races against the colonial imperialism of Europe.’25 In 1916 the novelist John Buchan produced Greenmantle, one of the best-known of what he called his ‘shockers’. In some ways its plot seems far-fetched and unconvincing; in reality it was very close to the truth. At the time Buchan was working for the War Propaganda Bureau, the press arm of the British Foreign Office. In his novel, the hero, Richard Hannay, is briefed by Sir Walter Bullivant: ‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border.... We have laughed at the Holy War, the Jehad that old von der Goltz prophesied. But I believe that stupid old man with the big spectacles was right. There is a Jehad preparing.’26
Buchan’s novel concerns spies and skulduggery. So did German methods and British counters. Fiction and fact were closely intertwined. A German expedition crossed Persia to reach Kabul, in a bid to persuade the Emir to raise an army for the invasion of India. German consuls in the United States bought arms for shipment to Indian revolutionaries. Their agents penetrated nationalist movements throughout North Africa and Central Asia, and their propaganda was disseminated from locations in Constantinople and neutral Bern. And yet there was no holy war. The Muslim soldiers of India remained loyal to the British. Moreover, the defeats at Gallipoli and Kut overshadowed a far more significant albeit limited victory, the successful defence of the Suez Canal against Turkish attack in February 1915 and July 1916. The key waterway linking the British Empire to the east with that in the west was held, and the threat of revolution in Egypt was contained. Germany’s global strategy was checked.
Charles Townshend goes into captivity at Kut Unlike his men, few of whom survived prison, he spent the rest of the war in what he described as ‘a sort of country vicarage’ on an island in the sea of Marmara
One explanation for the Central Powers’ failure was that ideologies were on the cusp. The force of religion, on which holy war relied, was declining, while that of nationalism was not yet as developed or as powerful outside Europe as it was within. The Young Turks played both cards, as did the Germans, but in doing so they sent a message that was contradictory. Islam was universal in its appeal, while nationalism was particular. Moreover, the nationalism of the Young Turks translated into imperialism when carried beyond the frontiers of Anatolia. It therefore conflicted with the message of genuine independence that the Germans wished to convey. But Wilhelmine Germany was tied to the coat-tails of Turkey. It could never become a force to undermine overseas imperialism when it itself lacked the military clout to translate promises into deeds. The British, as well as the French and Russians, were right to take the danger seriously. In doing so, they warded it off - at least for the time being.
5
SHACKLED TO A CORPSE
EAST PRUSSIA
The religion of Muscovite imperialism is primitive and medieval, literally half barbaric. Its peasant and national culture belong overwhelmingly to the same inferior category - if they are not wholly and purely Asiatic ... Not only the perceptions of law, but also all morality and all social feeling belong to a backward west and central Asian type, not a European one ... Therefore France’s and Britain’s alliance with Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary is an alliance not only against Germany and Austria-Hungary, but also against the inseparable joint life interests of all Europe.1
These words, published in 1915, are those not of a German but of a Swede, not of a conservative but of a socialist. However, in 1914 they were sentiments which both rallied Germans of all political persuasions and convinced them that they were in the vanguard of civilisation. Socialists and trade unionists might feel beleaguered in Germany, but they knew that they would suffer far more under the heel of tsarist autocracy. The defence of what they had gained for the working class, both politically and materially, now required them to protect the nation. When the German Socialist Party met on 3 August 1914 to discuss its stance on the war, the time for prevarication was past. Germany was already at war with Russia and France. It resolved to vote in the Reichstag in favour of war credits. It hoped that, by opting for collusion rather than confrontation with the Reich, it would secure constitutional reform, but its decision was unconditional.
The plight of peasants in East Prussia justified the socialists’ stance. Although the Russian cavalry proved inept in its reconnaissance, in mid-August its leading formations pushed into German territory. One of its officers, Vladimir Littauer, later admitted, ‘The scene on the German side of the border was ... frightening. For miles, farms, haystacks, and barns were burning ... Like every army under the sun, we looted and destroyed, and later hated to admit it.’2 On 23 August Max Hoffmann, chief of operations with the German 8th Army, wrote in his diary: ‘There has never been such a war as this, and never will be again - waged with such bestial fury’.3 On the same day refugees arrived in Berlin with reports ‘of heads being cut off, children being burned, women raped’.4 As in the case of atrocities in Belgium, rumour and then propaganda ran ahead of reality, but the reports from East Prussia rested on less secure foundations. After the war the Germans’ official history claimed that within four weeks the Russians had killed 1,620 civilians, but in 1915 they themselves had put the figure as no higher than 101. Moreover, there is no evidence that, in this invasion, unlike those of Belgium and Serbia, the high command deliberately used terror in a pre-emptive strike against civilian resistance. ‘The wish of the Tsar of all the Russias’, the commander of the Russian 1st Army, Paul Rennenkampf, instructed, ‘is to take care of the peaceful inhabitants’. 5 However, the supply arrangements of the Russians had been neglected before the war and collapsed as soon as they started their advance. They subsisted by plundering, and what they could not take with them they destroyed. As elsewhere, mobile warfare generated its own horrors.
Call-up was more widely opposed in Russia than in any other country whose army was mobilised in 1914 Peasants worried about what would happen to their families and the land in their absence None the less, 96 per cent reported for duty
The Bosnian crisis of 1908-9 had convinced the Russians that the Austrians would not go to war without German support. But this belief did not resolve the issue of how to deploy their forces. When the Russians had first allied themselves with France, in 1890, they anticipated that the Germans would strike east first, before turning west. The French alliance would therefore guard Russia’s back while it dealt with Austria-Hungary. Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5 and the subsequent revolution had two effects. First, it encouraged Russia to concentrate its forces in the heart of the country, so that it could confront threats in Asia as well as in Europe: Poland, Russia’s westernmost territory and vulnerable to envelopment by Germany from the north and by Austria-Hungary from the south, was abandoned. Second, Russian weakness permitted the German general staff to plan on striking France before it turned east to face Russia. The result was that the boot was now on the other foot: France needed Russia to hit Germany from the east as soon as possible so as to relieve the pressure in the west.
In 1911 the French general staff had asked the Russian army to attack the German army by the fifteenth day of mobilisation. The request was problematic. Russia had insufficient railway track in relation to its vast size to complete its mobilisation so quickly, especially given its abandonment of Poland. Moreover, the war plan it had adopted in 1910, although it was certainly weighted towards Germany rather than Austria-Hungary, was primarily defensive in orientation. Between 1910 and 1914 Russia increased the number of trai
ns it could send westward from 250 a day to 360, but by the fifteenth day of the war only half the infantry was mobilised and no more than twenty-seven out of 114 divisions were concentrated. In 1912 the chief of staff of the Kiev military district, M. V Alekseyev, pointed out that the army of Austria-Hungary in Galicia was more beatable than that of Germany, and that Poland provided the opportunity to attack across the upper reaches of the Vistula against its flank and rear. But that assumed that the French would bear the strain against Germany. The result was compromise. The 1912 Russian war plan had two variants, Case A for Austria-Hungary using three armies (but in the event four) and Case G for Germany employing two armies. In 1914 both were implemented. Two more armies were kept in reserve, and in due course they gave rise to a third variant. Successes to the south against Austria-Hungary in Galicia and to the north against Germany in East Prussia would secure the flanks of Russia’s Polish salient. A thrust from Poland to Posen would open the most direct route to Berlin. This second stage was what would give unity to Case A and Case G, and it exerted a powerful pull on the Tsar’s lanky uncle, Grand Duke Nikolay, when he assumed the command of the armies on the outbreak of the war.
Geography intended the Russo-German frontier for defensive warfare, not offensive, and both sides had worked on that assumption. Russian defensive planning had deliberately left the area south of East Prussia devoid of roads and railways. But this was the way that the Russian 2nd Army now had to come as it aimed to envelop the German 8th Army and cut it off from its line of retreat across the lower Vistula. The Masurian lakes, which screened the central and south-eastern section of the frontier for over 100 km, separated the 2nd Army from its partner, the 1st Army, which was intended to fix the Germans frontally between the lakes and the fortified city of Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad). As the 2nd Army advanced, its front extended to left and right - the left reaching deep into Germany and towards the Vistula, egged on by the aspirations of Grand Duke Nikolay’s third variant, and the right bidding to make contact with the 1st Army. The latter fought the Germans in defensive positions at Gumbinnen on the River Angerapp on 20 August, but Rennenkampf then paused to consolidate and resupply. The German 8th Army was free to break contact; by 23 August only a single cavalry division faced the Russian 1st Army.
The Germans prepared positions to strengthen the natural defences which the Masurian lakes gave East Prussia But their victories here were the product of manoeuvre
As he was fighting the battle of Gumbinnen, the commander of the German 8th Army, Maximilian Prittwitz und Gaffron, received an aerial reconnaissance report saying that elements of the Russian 2nd Army were in Mlawa. Prittwitz’s first reaction was panic. At 7 p.m. on the 20th he ordered the 8th Army to fall back on the Vistula. His response was ill calculated. The Russians were already closer to the Vistula than he was; he could not save the situation by retreat. Moreover, the territory that he proposed to give up was German; it ill behoved the much-vaunted German army to abandon its own citizens to Russian occupation. Prittwitz’s superior, the chief of the general staff, Moltke, had told him: ‘When the Russians come, not defence only, but offensive, offensive, offensive’.6
These instructions were not as absurd as the raw balance of forces suggested. The Germans had 158 battalions of infantry, 78 squadrons of cavalry and 774 guns to face a Russian force of 354 battalions, 331 squadrons and 1,428 guns. In addition, thanks to Manchuria, the Russian army had the advantage in recent combat experience: this was the first time the German army had been to war for over forty years. But East Prussia was where the German general staff had learnt its craft in staff rides and manoeuvres. It knew the ground, and Schlieffen had taught it that in a defensive battle the Masurian lakes provided the opportunity for operations on interior lines. In other words, the lakes would separate the Russians, while the railway network would allow the Germans to redeploy behind the lakes along the short chord from north-east to south-west. Max Hoffmann and Colonel Grunert, the 8th Army’s quartermaster, set out to persuade Prittwitz that, ‘it was necessary to stop the advance of the Warsaw [2nd] Army, and that the best way of doing this would be through an offensive thrust against the left wing of that army’.7 I Corps on the left wing of the German front at Gumbinnen should move by train to the right wing of XX Corps, which faced the Russian 2nd Army’s left; the other two corps at Gumbinnen should march directly westwards to the 2nd Army’s right wing. Prittwitz was won over, but his conversion was too late to save his career. Moltke’s headquarters at Koblenz had taken soundings with all Prittwitz’s corps commanders, none of whom favoured the retreat to the Vistula. Moltke therefore dismissed Prittwitz and his chief of staff. In their stead he appointed a retired veteran of the 1866 war against Austria, Paul von Hindenburg, now aged sixty-seven, and, as Hindenburg’s chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been Moltke’s chief of operations, but had lost his job when his outspoken advocacy of full conscription had upset conservative sensibilities. He was bourgeois and careerist, and his allegiance was less to the Kaiser than to his own ambition. In Hoffmann’s estimation, ‘He is the right man for this business - ruthless and hard’.8
Ludendorff’s capacity for self-promotion had already secured him the credit for the fall of Liege. His own contribution had been the flamboyant seizure of the undefended citadel rather than of the forts that ringed it: the latter had ensured that Liege had held out five times longer than the forty-eight hours Ludendorff had predicted. Now luck favoured him once more. He inherited a manoeuvre which others had planned but which would bestow on Hindenburg and himself the victors’ laurels.
Not the least of Hindenburg’s functions — both now and throughout the war - was to settle the nerves of his anxious subordinate. Ludendorff was worried that Rennenkampf would resume his advance, and therefore delayed the departure of the two marching corps for a day. The effect was to lead the Russian 2nd Army on, broadening its front and deepening the sack into which it was plunging. General Aleksandr Samsonov, its commander, deprived of direct communication with Rennenkampf, and so unaware of his slowness, was buoyed by anticipation of success. On the evening of 26 August he invited the allies’ military attaches to dinner ‘and as we started sent back Postovski to get his sword, remarking that he was now in an enemy’s country and must be armed.... There was a dramatic incident in the middle of the meal. An officer brought in a telegram ... and said that the GOC 1st Corps wished to speak on the telephone with the Army Commander or the Chief of Staff. General Postovski put on his pince-nez, read the telegram, and he and General Samsonov buckled on their swords, said good-bye to the Commandant, and left at once.’9
Samsonov’s supper had been disturbed by reports of the arrival of the German I Corps on his left flank. Its commander had refused to obey Ludendorff’s order that he go into action on the morning of the 26th, so adding to the chief of staff’s vexation but deepening the envelopment when he did at last advance on the morning of the 27th. On Samsonov’s right flank the two German corps entered the battle at the same time as he was sitting down to dinner.
As we at the head of the column came out of the dreadful wood, a shower of infantry fire suddenly hailed down on us. Lieutenant-Colonel Schulz stopped a bullet in the temple and fell like a board, but he soon came to, swore frightfully and asked for a cigarette. Meanwhile we had brought up artillery from the wood, and the Russian rabble, leaving behind a number of rifles and packs, beat a hasty retreat, back into the darkness from which it had emerged. It was now fortunately midnight, pitch dark ... The greater part of the marching column was still stretched along the narrow road through the wood. In a word, there was no alternative than to fall out where we were . . . So we dozed in half-sleep till first light. Finally it cleared and it became apparent that the enemy was in full flight towards Ortelsburg.10
Although the Russians acknowledged that the situation was changing rapidly on the 27th, Samsonov continued to underestimate the strength of the Germans facing him and to order movements calculated to worsen the
predicament of the 2nd Army rather than extricate it. On 29 August, with his army losing cohesion in the woods and with his command collapsing through lack of intelligence and inadequate communications, Samsonov confronted the reality. He went off into the forest and shot himself. By 31 August the Germans had taken 92,000 prisoners and nearly 400 guns; 50,000 Russians were dead or wounded.
The Russian feeling of inferiority when confronted by German troops, as opposed to Austro-Hungarian, persisted for the rest of the war. The Germans vengefully named their victory after the village of Tannenberg, where the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in 1410. The symbolism of the battle was more important than its strategic effect. Victory where the Germans had not expected it (in the east) was used to cover over its absence where it was actually most needed (in the west). Hindenburg and Ludendorff were elevated as national heroes. The long-term political effects in a constitution as ill-developed as that of Germany were enormous: these men became to the domestic politics of Wilhelmine Germany what Napoleon Bonaparte was to Revolutionary France. And their success convinced them that the war would be won on the eastern front. It was twice the length of that in the west, and its force-to-space ratio made for lower troop densities, so creating more opportunities for manoeuvre. Hindenburg and Ludendorff saw Tannenberg as confirmation that Schlieffen’s teaching was right. The answer to the tactical imponderables of the modern battlefield was envelopment. What had been achieved at Tannenberg through pragmatism and an awareness of contingencies became enshrined as dogma.
