by John Keegan
FIVE
Victory and Defeat in the East
“IN MILITARY OPERATIONS, time is everything,” wrote Wellington, in 1800, and it was to his perfect judgement of timing that he owed, among his other victories, those of Salamanca and Waterloo.1 Time had also oppressed Schlieffen: time to mobilise, time to concentrate, time to deploy, time to march to the crucial objective. It was his calculations of timing that had persuaded him, and those who inherited his posthumous plans, to wager almost all the force Germany commanded in the west and to let the east wait upon victory over France. Russia’s known weaknesses had convinced Schlieffen and Moltke, his successor, that forty days would elapse before the Tsar’s armies could appear in strength on Germany’s eastern border and so to place their trust in gaining a victory against the clock.
Time is not the only dimension in which war is waged. Space is a strategic dimension also. It had served Russia well in the past, above all in 1812 when Napoleon had led the Grand Army on the long march to Moscow, but Schlieffen and the officers of the Great General Staff had argued themselves into believing in the first decade of the twentieth century that space in the east now worked on their side. The immense distances within the Russian empire, particularly those separating centres of population at which reservists must mobilise, and the relative sparsity of rail connections between such centres and the frontier, suggested to the military technocrats of Germany, and Austria, that tables of mobilisation measured in days by them would take weeks to complete by their Russian equivalents.2
It seemed that space might also be made to work for Germany on its side of the frontier. The division of territories between the three empires of Germany, Austria and Russia, the outcome of the partition of Poland a century earlier, might superficially be regarded to favour the latter in war, for Russian Poland, centred on Warsaw, thrust forward in a great salient between the Carpathian Mountains in Austria to the south and East Prussia to the north, threatening German Silesia and opposed by no serious water obstacle such as those of the River Vistula or the Pripet Marshes that protected Russia’s heartland from invasion. The Polish salient, however, might also be regarded as a region of operational exposure rather than of offensive opportunity, since its flanks were overlapped on either side by difficult terrain. The Carpathians form not only a defensive wall but a chain of dominating sally-ports against invaders from the north-east, while East Prussia, flat though it is as a collectivity, confronts any advancing army with a jumble of lakes and forest that defies the maintenance of order and easy intercommunication among its component units. The Masurian lakeland, home of the sprightly Mazurka, was a region of small communities largely isolated from the outside world, connecting with it by sandy tracks which threatened to reduce the progress of a marching army to a snail’s pace. Beyond Masuria, moreover, lay a chain of German fortresses protecting the populated regions of East Prussia, at Thorn, Graudenz and Marienburg on the River Vistula, matching the Austrian Carpathian fortresses at Cracow, Przemysl and Lemberg (Lvov).3 The Russian high command had long recognised the ambiguous strategic character of the Polish salient, where a bold offensive that threatened Berlin also risked catastrophe should the enemy co-ordinate a scissors movement in the rear, and it had accordingly starved the region of railway and road building that might aid an enemy counter-offensive. It had also cautiously designed two westward strategies, Plan G, that held a strong force in reserve, as well as Plan A, which thrust it forward.
Under French pressure, and out of a genuine desire to do its best by the western ally against the common German enemy, the Russian high command in 1914 was committed to Plan A. Two-fifths of the peacetime army was in any case stationed around the great military centre of Warsaw, from which its strategic deployment against East Prussia and the Carpathians and towards which its reinforcement by the reserves mobilised in the interior might easily be achieved.4 Common sense and intelligence alike dictated that the bulk of Russia’s western forces would have to go south, towards the Carpathians, for Austria-Hungary, unlike Germany, could count on waging a one-front war—the Serbian army appearing at the outset to be of no account—and so deploy its main strength there. Nevertheless, given Germany’s anticipated weakness in the east, sufficient force could be found, by Russian staff calculations, to mount an offensive on the East Prussian frontier that would, while leaving the Austrians with their hands full, assure a crisis for Berlin in its backyard. Since that backyard was also the historic homeland of the German officer corps, dominated as it was by East Elbian landowners, an attack through Masuria towards Königsberg and the other strongholds of the Teutonic Knights from which they sprang would be certain to create in the German high command both material and psychological anxiety in acute degree.
Germany had indeed little left over from the great western Aufsmarsch with which to hold the Prussian heartland. Its war plan allotted only one of its eight armies to the Eastern Front, the Eighth Army, commanded by General Max von Prittwitz und Gaffron, a Prussian of Prussians, and consisting of the I, XVII and XX Corps, the I Reserve Corps, and the 1st Cavalry Division. All were Prussian-based, the I and I Reserve at Königsberg, seat of the Teutonic Knights, the XVII at Danzig, the XX at Allenstein, the 1st Cavalry Division at Königsberg, Insterburg and Deutsche-Eylau. To the Eighth Army was added on mobilisation a collection of reserve, Ersatz and Landwehr formations, raised from younger and older reservists, which added to it perhaps the strength of a whole corps. The army’s soldiers, many of them recruits or reservists from the threatened area, could be counted upon to fight with tenacity against any invasion of their homeland.
They were, nevertheless, outnumbered by the force the Russian high command had earmarked to mount the East Prussian operations, the First and Second Armies of the North-Western Front. Together these opposed nine corps to Prittwitz’s four, and seven cavalry divisions, including two of the Imperial Guard, to his one. Rennenkampf, commanding First Army, and Samsonov, commanding Second, were moreover both veterans of the Russo-Japanese War, in which each had commanded a division, while Prittwitz had no experience of war at all. Their formations were very big, divisions having sixteen instead of twelve battalions, with large masses of—admittedly often untrained—men to make up losses.5 Though they were weaker in artillery, particularly heavy artillery, than their German equivalents, it is untrue that they were much less well provided with shells; all armies had grossly underestimated the expenditure that modern battle would demand and, at an allowance of 700 shells per gun, the Russians were not much worse off than the French fighting on the Marne.6 Moreover, the Russian munitions industry would respond to the requirements of war with remarkable success. Nevertheless, Russia’s forces were beset by serious defects. The proportion of cavalry, so much greater than that in any other army, laid a burden of need for fodder on the transport service, itself inferior to the German, which the value given by mounted troops could not justify; forty trains were needed to supply both the four thousand men of a cavalry division and the sixteen thousand of an infantry division.7
There were human defects also. Russian regimental officers were unmonied by definition and often poorly educated; any aspiring young officer whose parents could support the cost went to the staff academy and was lost to regimental duty, without necessarily becoming thereby efficient at staff work. As Tolstoy so memorably depicts in his account of Borodino, the Russian officer corps united two classes which scarcely knew each other, a broad mass of company and battalion commanders that took orders from a narrow upper crust of aristocratic placemen.8 The qualities of the peasant soldier—brave, loyal and obedient—had traditionally compensated for the mistakes and omissions of his superiors but, face to face with the armies of countries from which illiteracy had disappeared, as in Russia it was far from doing, the Russian infantryman was at an increasing disadvantage. He was easily disheartened by setback, particularly in the face of superior artillery, and would surrender easily and without shame, en masse, if he felt abandoned or betrayed.9 The trinity
of Tsar, Church, country still had power to evoke unthinking courage; but defeat, and drink, could rapidly rot devotion to the regiment’s colours and icons.
Still, they were splendid regiments that marched and rode out in mid-August to invade East Prussia—the Vladimir, Suzdal, Uglich and Kazan Regiments of the 16th Infantry Division, the Lithuanian, Volhynian and Grenadier Regiments of the 3rd Guard Division, the Guard Lancers and Hussars, the Cossacks of the Black Sea—with regimental singers at the head of the column and the regimental kitchens rolling at the rear.10 War had been a tearful wrench, few of the men on the march comprehended why they were marching westward, but the regiment was a sort of village, the officer a sort of squire, and while the decencies of mealtimes and Sunday mass were observed, with the chance of vodka and a village tryst thrown in—Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 captures unforgettably the mood of the Russian mobilisation—the Tsar’s soldiers moved with a will towards the threat of gunfire.11
They might well have felt confidence. The enormous preponderance of Russian strength—ninety-eight mobilised infantry divisions, thirty-seven cavalry divisions—should have ensured the Stavka, the Russian high command, an overwhelming majority over the German Eighth Army, even after provision had been made to match the forty Austro-Hungarian divisions to the south.12 Or it should have, had Rennenkampf and Samsonov been able to move together and keep together. The wings of their armies, aligned respectively to face westward towards Königsberg and northward towards Graudenz, should, with proper handling, have passed deftly inside those two fortress towns and completed a pincer movement that surrounded Eighth Army and secured either its destruction or its precipitate flight to the rear, thus opening West Prussia and Silesia to a deeper Russian invasion.
Geography was to disrupt the smooth onset of the Russian combined offensive in space. Less excusably, timidity and incompetence were to disjoint it in time. In short, the Russians repeated the mistake, so often made before by armies apparently enjoying an incontestable superiority in numbers, the mistake made by the Spartans at Leuctra, by Darius at Gaugamela, by Hooker at Chancellorsville, of exposing themselves to defeat in detail: that is, of allowing a weaker enemy to concentrate at first against one part of the army, then against the other, and so beat both. The way in which geography worked to favour the Germans’ detailed achievement is the more easily explained. Though eastern East Prussia does indeed offer a relatively level path of advance to an invader from Russia, the chain of lakes that feeds the River Angerapp also poses a significant barrier. There are ways through, particularly at Lötzen, but that place was fortified in 1914. As a result, a water barrier nearly fifty miles long from north to south confronted the inner wings of First and Second Army, so tending to drive them apart. Strategically, the easier option was to pass north and south of the Angerapp position rather than to force it frontally, and that was what the commander of the North-Western Front, General Y. Zhilinsky, decided to direct Rennenkampf and Samsonov to do.13
He was aware of the opportunity such a separation offered to the Germans and accordingly took care to provide for the protection of his two armies’ flanks. However, the measures taken enlarged the danger, since he allowed Rennenkampf to strengthen his flank on the Baltic coast, which was not at risk, and Samsonov to detach troops to protect his connections with Warsaw, equally not threatened, while arranging for one corps of Second Army to stand immobile in the gap separating it from First. The result of these dispositions was a diversion of effort which left both armies considerably weakened to undertake the main task.14 Having commenced the deployment with a superiority of nineteen divisions against nine, Rennenkampf and Samsonov actually marched to the attack with only sixteen between them.
The Eastern Front in outline, 1914–18
Worse, critically worse, the two armies arrived on their start lines five days apart in time. First Army crossed the East Prussian frontier on 15 August, a very creditable achievement given that the French and Germans were then still completing their concentration in the west, but Second not until 20 August. As the two were separated in space by fifty miles of lakeland, three days in marching time, neither would be able to come rapidly to the other’s assistance if it ran into trouble which, unbeknownst either to Rennenkampf or Samsonov, was the way they were heading.
The superiority of German over Russian intelligence-gathering clinched the issue. Though the Russians knew that they outnumbered the Germans, their means of identifying the enemy’s location were defective. The Russian cavalry, despite its large numbers, did not seek to penetrate deep into the enemy positions, but preferred to dismount and form a firing line when it encountered resistance; and, while the aviation service of the Russian army, with 244 aircraft, was the second largest in Europe, aerial reconnaissance failed to detect German movements altogether.15 The German 2nd Aircraft Battalion, however, and the two airships based at Posen and Königsberg, began to report both the strength and the march direction of the Russian columns as early as 9 August, a week before they began to cross the frontier.16 Aircraft and airships would continue to provide vital information throughout the campaign.17
It was the initial intelligence, however, that was decisive. Armed with the knowledge that Rennenkampf led Samsonov by several days—the interval would increase as Samsonov, struggling across the grain of the country and the many small tributaries feeding the Vistula, fell behind schedule—Prittwitz could decide to deploy the bulk of Eighth Army north of the Masurian Lakes without undue anxiety. When the Russians opened their offensive with a probing attack at Stallupönen on 17 August, they were driven back. When their main body arrived in strength, at Gumbinnen three days later, the German I Corps was actually advancing to attack them under cover of darkness. The commander, von François, one of the many German officers of Huguenot descent, was as aggressive as he looked, and his troops took their spirit from him. They belonged to some of the most famous of Prussian regiments, the 1st, 3rd and 4th Grenadiers, the 33rd Fusiliers, and fell fiercely on the Russians they found opposite. However, the enemy had prepared overnight trenches and fortified farm buildings and houses. The harder the Germans pressed forward, the higher rose their casualties. The Russian artillery, traditionally the best-trained arm of the Tsar’s army, was well positioned and, firing at close range, added to the carnage. To add to the slaughter, the German batteries of 2nd Division mistakenly but effectively fired on their own infantry. Many sought escape by precipitate retreat and, though eventually rallied, were too shaken to be sent back into the firing line. By mid-afternoon, I Corps had come to a halt. Its neighbouring corps, XVII, commanded by the famous Life Guard Hussar, von Mackensen, who was encouraged by early reports of its success, was meanwhile attacking north-eastward into the Russians’ flank. It did so without reconnaissance which would have revealed that, on its front as on that of von François, the Russians were entrenched. From their positions they poured a devastating fire into the advancing German infantry who, when also bombarded in error by their own artillery, broke and ran to the rear. By late afternoon the situation on the front of XVII Corps was even worse than that on the front of I Corps and the battle of Gumbinnen was threatening to turn from a tactical reverse to a strategic catastrophe. To the right of XVII Corps, I Reserve, under von Bülow, counter-attacked to protect Mackensen’s flank against a Russian advance. At Eighth Army headquarters, however, even the news of that success could not stay the onset of panic. There Prittwitz was yielding to the belief that East Prussia must be abandoned and the whole of his army retreat beyond the Vistula.
At OHL, Moltke was appalled by the reports of Eighth Army’s sudden predicament, which undermined the whole substance of belief in the possibility of postponing crisis in the east while victory was gained in the west. Only twenty of the vital forty days had elapsed, and Schlieffen’s timetable threatened to crumble before OHL’s eyes. Moreover, the apparent disaster in East Prussia aroused personal anxieties there. It was from its small estates that the army’s inner circle sprang, and Prittwitz�
��s loss of nerve exposed not just the nation at large but officers’ wives, children and old retainers to the mercies of the enemy. Prittwitz’s staff officers, Hoffman and von Waldersee, succeeded somewhat in stiffening his nerve on 21 August. Moltke, however, had lost confidence in him. Moltke decided first that a director of operations of the first quality must be sent instantly to the east to take charge. He chose Ludendorff, who had twice so brilliantly resolved crises in Belgium. He next determined to dispose of Prittwitz altogether, judging his declared intention to retire behind the Vistula, even if subsequently reconsidered, to be evidence of broken will. In his place he promoted Paul von Beneckendorf und Hindenburg, a retired officer noted for his steadiness of character if not brilliance of mind. As a lieutenant in the 3rd Foot Guards, Hindenburg had been wounded at Königgrätz in 1866 and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He claimed kinsmen among the Teutonic Knights who had won East Prussia from the heathen in the northern crusades, had served on the Great General Staff and eventually commanded a corps. He had left the army in 1911, aged sixty-four, but applied for reappointment at the war’s outbreak. When the call from Moltke came, he had been out of service so long that he was obliged to report for duty in the old blue uniform that had preceded the issue of field-grey. He and Ludendorff, unalike as they were, the one a backwoods worthy, the other a bourgeois technocrat, were to unite from the start in what Hindenburg himself called “a happy marriage.”18 Their qualities, natural authority in Hindenburg, ruthless intellect in Ludendorff, complemented each other’s perfectly and were to make them one of the most effective military partnerships in history.
