In anxiety for the center, Ludendorff and Hindenburg waited out the battle at Scholtz’s field headquarters in the village of Frögenau, about two miles from an even smaller village, Tannenberg. Orders were date-lined from Frögenau. Ludendorff was again tortured by apprehension about Rennenkampf. Worried about Scholtz’s Corps, angered at François, harassed by the “very ineffective field telephone” connecting him with that insubordinate commander and by the absence of any telephone communication at all with Mackensen and Below on his left wing, he was “far from satisfied.” Mackensen and Below, confused by conflicting orders to take first this direction and then that, sent a Staff officer by airplane to Headquarters to straighten matters out. He received a “far from friendly reception” because neither corps was in the location it was supposed to be. Toward afternoon, however, both were moving satisfactorily, Mackensen pushing after the broken Russian right wing and Below heading for the gap at Allenstein to attack the Russian center. Now François’ progress appeared more justified, and Ludendorff issued revised orders to him to pursue the direction he was already taking.
Just as the conviction of coming victory began to settle warmly over German Headquarters, news came in that Rennenkampf’s army was unmistakably on the march. But the day’s progress by now gave assurance that he would be too late. In fact, at that night’s bivouac, Rennenkampf’s nearest corps was still twenty miles from Bischofsburg where Samsonov’s VIth Corps had been defeated two days before. Making slow progress in hostile territory, Rennenkampf’s furthest advance by the end of the next day, August 29, was some ten miles farther west but no farther south and he had made no contact with Samsonov. None was ever to be made.
The collapse of the “famous Ist Corps” in whose resistance he had put such faith, on top of the collapse of the VIth Corps on his other wing, presaged the end to General Samsonov. Both his flanks were turned; his cavalry, the only arm in which he outnumbered the Germans, having been deployed too wide of the flanks, had played no useful part in the battle and was now isolated; supplies and communications were in complete chaos; only the steadfast XVth and XIIIth Corps were still fighting. At his headquarters in Neidenburg he could hear the sound of François’ approaching guns. There seemed to him to be only one thing to do. He telegraphed Jilinsky that he was leaving for the battlefront and then, ordering baggage and wireless apparatus to be sent back to Russia, cut his communications with the rear. The reasons for his decision, it has been said, “he took with him to his grave,” but they are not hard to understand. The army that had been given him to command was crumbling under him. He became again a cavalry officer and divisional general and did the thing he knew best. With seven of his Staff on horses commandeered from some Cossacks, he rode off to take personal command under fire, in the saddle where he felt at home.
Outside Neidenburg on August 28 he took farewell of Major Knox. Samsonov was sitting on the ground surrounded by his staff, studying some maps. He stood up, took Knox aside, and told him the situation was “critical.” He said his own place and duty were with the army, but as Knox’s duty was to report to his government he advised him to return “while there was time.” He mounted, turned in the saddle and said with a wistful smile, “The enemy has luck one day, we will have luck another,” as he rode away.
Later, General Martos, who was conducting the battle in his sector from a hilltop, had just ordered a column of German prisoners to be led out of the fighting line when to his astonishment the General of the Army came up on horseback with his Staff. Samsonov asked about the retiring column, and on being told they were prisoners he reined his horse close to Martos, leaned over to embrace him and said sadly, “You alone will save us.” But he knew better, and that night gave the order for a general retreat of what was left of the Second Army.
The retreat during the next two days, August 29 and 30, was a mounting and inexorable disaster. The two center corps which had fought longest and best, and had advanced the farthest and retreated last, had the least chance to escape and were the most completely netted in the German envelopment. General Kliouev’s Corps was still on the offensive when Below broke through the gap on his right at Allenstein and completed the cordon around the Russian center. His corps and that of General Martos thrashed about helplessly in the forests and marshes in futile marches and wrong turnings and vain attempts to regroup and make a stand as the cordon was drawn tighter. In the swampy area where the roads were causeways the Germans posted guards with machine guns at every crossing. The men of Martos’ Corps in their last four days were literally starving. Kliouev’s Corps covered forty-two miles in their last forty hours without rations of any kind; horses were unfed and unwatered.
On August 29 General Martos and a few of his Staff were attempting to find a way through the forest with an escort of five Cossacks. The enemy was firing all around. Major General Machagovsky, Martos’ Chief of Staff, was killed by machine-gun fire. Others in the group were picked off one by one until only one Staff officer and two of his escort remained with the general. Having left his haversack with an aide who was now missing, Martos had had nothing to eat, drink, or smoke since morning. One exhausted horse lay down and died; the men dismounted and led the others. Darkness fell. They tried to guide themselves by the stars but the skies clouded over. Troops were heard approaching and were thought to be friends because the horses pulled toward them. Suddenly a German searchlight blazed through the woods and swung back and forth, searching for them. Martos tried to mount and gallop off but his horse was hit. He fell and was seized by German soldiers.
Later, in a “dirty little hotel” in Osterode where Martos was taken as a prisoner, Ludendorff came into the room and, speaking perfect Russian, taunted him with defeat and boasted that the Russian frontier was now open to German invasion. Hindenburg followed and “seeing me disturbed he held my hands for a long time begging me to calm myself.” In awkward Russian with a heavy accent he promised to return Martos’ sword, and took his leave with a bow saying, “I wish you happier days.”
In the woods north of Neidenburg the debris of Martos’ Corps were slaughtered or surrendered. Only one officer of the XVth Corps escaped to return to Russia. About ten miles east of Neidenburg the last of the XIIIth Corps, whose commander, General Kliouev, had also been captured, entrenched themselves in a circle. With four guns captured from a German battery in the woods they held off the enemy all through the night of August 30 until they had no more ammunition left and most of them were dead. The remainder were taken prisoner.
A last Russian attack was made that day, mounted with great vigor by General Sirelius, successor to General Artomonov of the Ist Corps who had been dismissed. Collecting various scattered and still fresh regiments and artillery units which had not been in battle and aggregated about a division, he launched an offensive that broke through François’ lines and succeeded in retaking Neidenburg. It came too late and could not be sustained. This last act of the Russian Second Army had not been ordered by General Samsonov, for he was dead.
On the night of August 29 he too, like General Martos, was caught in the net, in a different part of the forest. Riding through the woods that fringed the railroad, he and his companions reached Willenburg, only seven miles from the Russian frontier, but the Germans had arrived there before them. The General and his group waited in the forest until nightfall and then, as it was impossible to proceed over the swampy ground in the dark on horseback, continued on foot. Matches gave out and they could no longer read their compass. Moving hand in hand to avoid losing each other in the dark, they stumbled on. Samsonov, who suffered from asthma, was visibly weakening. He kept repeating to Potovsky, his Chief of Staff: “The Czar trusted me. How can I face him after such a disaster?” After covering six miles, they stopped for a rest. It was then 1:00 A.M. Samsonov moved apart into the thicker darkness under the pines. A shot cracked the stillness of the night. Potovsky knew instantly what it meant. Earlier Samsonov had confided his intention of committing suicide but Potovsky th
ought he had argued him out of it. He was now sure the General was dead. The Staff officers tried to find the body in the darkness but failed. They decided to wait until dawn, but as the sky began to lighten, German troops were heard approaching. Forsaking their task, the Russians were forced to move on toward the frontier, where they fell in with a Cossack patrol and eventually made their way to safety. Samsonov’s body was found by the Germans, who buried it at Willenburg where in 1916, with the help of the Red Cross, his widow was able to retrieve it and bring it back for burial in Russia.
Silence had enveloped the Second Army. At Jilinsky’s Headquarters wireless contact was dead; nothing had been heard from Samsonov for two days. Now that it was too late, Jilinsky ordered Rennenkampf’s cavalry to break through the German lines at Allenstein and find out what had happened to the Second Army. The mission was never to be accomplished, for already the German Eighth Army, having destroyed one arm of the pincers that was to have crushed them, was turning to deal with the other.
Almost with awe they realized the extent of their victory. The haul of enemy dead and prisoners and captured guns was enormous: 92,000 prisoners were taken, and according to some claims the count was higher. Sixty trains were required to bring them to the rear during the week after the battle. Captured guns were counted variously between 300 and 500 out of the Second Army’s total of some 600. Captured horses were driven in herds to corrals hurriedly built to hold them. Although no agreed casualty figure for the dead and missing exists, it was estimated at over 30,000. The XVth and XIIIth Corps by capture or death were wiped out of existence; 50 officers and 2,100 men of these two corps were all that escaped. Survivors of the two flank corps, the VIth and Ist, which retreated earliest, amounted to about a division each, and of the XXIIIrd Corps, to about a brigade.
The victors, too, suffered heavily; after the fatigue and suspense of a six-day battle their nerves were raw. When Neidenberg, which changed hands four times, was retaken by the Germans on August 31, a nervous military policeman shouted “Halt!” at a car driving at high speed across the main square. When the car, which contained General von Morgen, ignored his order, he yelled “Stop! Russians!” and fired. Instantly a volley of fire covered the car, killing the chauffeur and wounding an officer sitting beside the General. The same night, after barely escaping being shot by his own men, von Morgen was awakened by his valet who, crying “The Russians have come back!” ran off clutching the General’s clothes. To his “extreme vexation” von Morgen was forced to emerge in the street strapping his revolver over his underclothes.
For all but a few officers it had been their first experience under fire, and out of the excited fancy produced by the fears and exhaustion and panic and violence of a great battle a legend grew—a legend of thousands of Russians drowning in the swamps or sinking up to their necks in bogs and quicksands, men whom the Germans were forced to slaughter with machine guns. “I will hear their cries to my dying day,” one officer told an awestruck audience of friends in Germany. “The widely circulated report of Russians driven into the marshes and perishing there is a myth,” Ludendorff wrote; “no marsh was to be found anywhere near.”
As the extent of the enemy’s defeat became clear, the German commanders began to consider that they had won, as Hoffmann wrote in his diary, “one of the great victories in history.” It was decided—according to Hoffmann at his suggestion, according to Ludendorff at “my suggestion”—to name the battle Tannenberg in delayed compensation for the ancient defeat suffered there by the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians. In spite of this second triumph even greater than Liège, Ludendorff could not rejoice “because the strain imposed on my nerves by the uncertainty about Rennenkampf’s Army had been too great.” He was now able, however, to turn with greater confidence against Rennenkampf with the addition of the two new corps that Moltke was sending from the West.
His triumph owed much to others: to Hoffmann who, though right for the wrong reasons, had been firm in the conviction that Rennenkampf would not pursue and had conceived the plan and drawn up the orders for bringing the Eighth Army down to face Samsonov; to François who by defying Ludendorff’s orders ensured the envelopment of Samsonov’s left wing; to Hindenburg who steadied Ludendorff’s nerves at a critical moment; finally and above all to a factor that never figured in the careful German planning—the Russian wireless. Ludendorff came to depend on the intercepts which his staff regularly collected during the day, decoded or translated and sent to him every night at 11:00 P.M. If by chance they were late, he would worry and appear personally in the signal corps room to inquire what was the matter. Hoffmann acknowledged the intercepts as the real victor of Tannenberg. “We had an ally,” he said, “the enemy. We knew all the enemy’s plans.”
To the public the savior of East Prussia was the nominal commander, Hindenburg. The elderly general dragged from retirement in his old blue uniform was transformed into a titan by the victory. The triumph in East Prussia, lauded and heralded even beyond its true proportions, fastened the Hindenburg myth upon Germany. Not even Hoffmann’s sly malice could penetrate it. When, as Chief of Staff on the Eastern Front later in the war, he would take visitors over the field of Tannenberg, Hoffmann would tell them, “This is where the Field Marshal slept before the battle; here is where he slept after the battle; here is where he slept during the battle.”
In Russia the disaster did not penetrate the public mind at once, being blotted out by a great victory won at the same time over the Austrians on the Galician front. In numbers an even greater victory than the Germans won at Tannenberg, it had equal effect on the enemy. In a series of engagements fought from August 26 to September 10 and culminating in the Battle of Lemberg, the Russians inflicted 250,000 casualties, took 100,000 prisoners, forced the Austrians into a retreat lasting eighteen days and covering 150 miles, and accomplished a mutilation of the Austro-Hungarian Army, especially in trained officers, from which it was never to recover. It crippled Austria but could not restore the losses or heal the effects of Tannenberg. The Russian Second Army had ceased to exist, General Samsonov was dead, and of his five corps commanders two were captured and three cashiered for incompetence. General Rennenkampf in the ensuing battle of the Masurian Lakes was chased out of East Prussia, “lost his nerve”—in this case the customary formula was applied by Jilinsky—deserted his army, and drove back across the frontier in a motorcar, thus completing the ruin of his reputation and bringing about his discharge in disgrace and incidentally that of Jilinsky. In a telegram to the Grand Duke, Jilinsky accused Rennenkampf of having decamped in panic. This infuriated the Grand Duke, who considered the primary failure to have been Jilinsky’s. He thereupon reported to the Czar that it was Jilinsky “who has lost his head and is incapable of controlling operations,” with the result that another actor in the Battle of Tannenberg became a casualty.
The inadequacy of training and materials, the incompetence of generals, the inefficiency of organization were laid bare by the battle. Alexander Guchkov, a subsequent Minister of War, testified that he “reached the firm conviction that the war was lost” after Tannenberg. The defeat gave new vigor to the pro-German groups who began openly to agitate for withdrawal from the war. Count Witte was convinced the war would ruin Russia, Rasputin that it would destroy the regime. The Ministers of Justice and of Interior drew up a Memorandum for the Czar urging peace with Germany as soon as possible on the ground that continuing alliance with democracies would be fatal. The opportunity was offered. German proposals to Russia for a separate peace began shortly afterward and continued through 1915 and 1916. Whether out of loyalty to the Allies and the Pact of London or fear of making terms with the Germans, or insensibility to the lapping tide of Revolution or simple paralysis of authority, the Russians never accepted them. In mounting chaos and dwindling ammunition their war effort went on.
At the time of the disaster General Marquis de Laguiche, the French military attaché, came to express his condolences to the Co
mmander in Chief. “We are happy to have made such sacrifices for our Allies,” the Grand Duke replied gallantly. Equanimity in the face of catastrophe was his code, and Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm. The Russian steam roller in which the Western Allies placed such hopes, which after their debacle on the Western Front was awaited even more anxiously, had fallen apart on the road as if it had been put together with pins. In its premature start and early demise it had been, just as the Grand Duke said, a sacrifice for an ally. Whatever it cost the Russians, the sacrifice accomplished what the French wanted: withdrawal of German strength from the Western Front. The two corps that came too late for Tannenberg were to be absent from the Marne.
17
The Flames of Louvain
IN 1915 a book about the invasion of his country was published in exile by Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914 had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that were then believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with this dedication: “He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly a pacifist .… For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomes diminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.”
Of all that has been written, Verhaeren’s is the most poignant testimony of what war and invasion did to the mind of his time. When the Battle of the Frontiers ended, the war had been in progress for twenty days and during that time had created passions, attitudes, ideas, and issues, both among belligerents and watching neutrals, which determined its future course and the course of history since. The world that used to be and the ideas that shaped it disappeared too, like the wraith of Verhaeren’s former self, down the corridors of August and the months that followed. Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside.