A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (30 page)

These problems were the work of General Yakov Zhilinski, commander of the Russian North-West Front and therefore in charge of the two invading armies. Two years earlier, while serving as chief of the Russian general staff, Zhilinski had promised the French that he could have his forces in the field fifteen days after mobilization. Now he was keeping his promise. Far to the rear—his headquarters were more than one hundred and fifty miles from the showdown that was now taking place—he thought he was masterminding a historic victory.

On August 26, fearing a possible sudden forward lunge by Rennenkampf and unsettled by rumors of substantial Russian forces arriving from Rennenkampf’s direction, a nervous Ludendorff tried to spring the trap on Samsonov. When he ordered an attack, however, the usually aggressive General Hermann von François (whose name derived from the fact that his ancestors had migrated to Prussia to escape France’s persecution of Protestants in the seventeenth century) curtly refused. His troops were still detraining. They did not yet have their ammunition, their heavy artillery, or all of their field artillery. If they attacked, he said, they would have to do so with bayonets. When Ludendorff repeated his order, François went through the motions of complying but limited himself to occupying an uncontested ridge. In yet another of the odd and unintended twists in this oddest of battles, his failure to strike worked to the Germans’ advantage. It allowed Samsonov to continue to believe that he was in contact with a weak enemy force and so to continue pushing forward into the trap. Both of his flanks were encountering German troops and being badly mauled, but his communications were so faulty and he had moved the divisions that formed those flanks so far out from his center that throughout most of the day he knew almost nothing of this. The Germans, meanwhile, were eager to engage him. Much of the Eighth Army was made up of East Prussians, men with personal reasons for wanting to clear the region of invaders. One officer, on August 26, found himself directing artillery fire on his own house after the Russians took possession of it.

Zhilinski continued to prod Samsonov to keep moving and to stay on his present course. When the scanty intelligence reaching Samsonov began to indicate that worrisome numbers of German troops were on his left, he sent a message to Zhilinski suggesting that perhaps he should confront this enemy force—whatever it was—by turning toward it. “I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward,” Zhilinski imperiously replied. “I insist that he continue the offensive.”

Samsonov followed orders, but by the end of the day he understood that he was in serious trouble. A cautious withdrawal would have been the right next step. But perhaps because of Zhilinski’s rebuke, he decided not to pull back, or even to stay where he was while watching the situation develop, but to continue moving forward. Though his flanks were in increasing disarray, and though his troops had no food and were low on ammunition, his center remained intact. That night he sent plaintive messages asking for confirmation that Rennenkampf was coming to join him. There was no answer.

Rennenkampf’s failure to move need not be attributed to any hatred for Samsonov. He had lost seventeen thousand men in the Gumbinnen fight, thousands more before that at Stallupönen. He still thought that much or even most of the Eighth Army was to his north, near Königsberg, and that if he moved westward it could fall on his flank. He feared also that a pursuit of the Germans might hurry them across the Vistula before Samsonov could cut them off. Within the limits of the information available, he was thinking rationally if too cautiously.

At this point Moltke, never having been informed that the situation of the Eighth Army was not nearly as alarming as he and Ludendorff had believed when they met in Koblenz, had his chief of staff telephone Ludendorff and announce that three infantry corps were being detached from the right wing in France and sent by rail to East Prussia. Ludendorff replied that reinforcements were not needed. He did not, however, state categorically that they should not be sent. Moltke ultimately decided to send two corps instead of three, and Ludendorff would find plenty of use for them after their arrival.

At four
A.M
. on August 27, ready for action at last, François opened an artillery barrage that devastated Samsonov’s left wing. Confused and starving Russian soldiers, exhausted after having marched ten and twelve hours daily for a week, broke and ran. François sent his troops forward in what he intended to be an encircling maneuver, but this was blocked. Samsonov, almost incredibly, then resumed the advance of his center. He advanced so aggressively that Ludendorff began to worry that the Russians were going to break through and out of the trap. He decided to call François’s corps back to reinforce the center—a move that would have made an encirclement impossible. Hindenburg gently overruled him.

At dawn on August 28 François again attacked and discovered that the Russian left had evaporated. Its troops had had enough and fled en masse into the nearby woods. Everything began to fall into place for the Germans. François, meeting almost no resistance, swung his corps around to the south and cut off Samsonov’s escape. Other elements of the Eighth Army converged from the nooks and crannies of the East Prussian landscape. A corps hit Samsonov from the west. A division emerged from the northwest and attacked the Russians there. When a corps that had been stationed to the northeast in case Rennenkampf showed up finally turned around and also marched toward Samsonov, the trap was complete. Samsonov, saying that he had failed the tsar and could not go home, walked off alone into the woods and shot himself.

It was now just a matter of mopping up. But still Ludendorff was tortured, his judgment distorted by his fears. When he learned that François had spread his corps in a thin line along thirty-five miles of road southeast of the encircled Russians, he ordered him to pull it together more compactly. François ignored him; he had witnessed the disintegration of Samsonov’s army and knew that the only remaining need was to intercept the bewildered and demoralized enemy soldiers as they came stumbling toward Poland. In the course of the next three days, François’s thin net hauled in sixty thousand prisoners. Overall the Germans captured ninety-two thousand Russians. Total casualties were two hundred and fifty thousand for the Russians, about thirty-seven thousand for the Germans. The Germans decided to call what had just happened the Battle of Tannenberg because a nearby town of that name had been the site of a terrible German defeat at the hands of the Poles hundreds of years before. Hindenburg’s ancestors had taken part in that battle.

On the same day that Samsonov’s left collapsed, a very different story was unfolding to the south. Conrad’s Austro-Hungarian armies, having launched an offensive against superior Russian forces in Galicia, were suffering a defeat even worse than the one inflicted on them earlier by the Serbs. Conrad never should have attacked (the Russians outnumbered him by an immense margin, and he had the Carpathian Mountains in which to stand on the defensive), but the fact that he did was not entirely his fault. Moltke, fearing that if Conrad did not engage the Russians they would send more of their armies into East Prussia, had demanded action. Promising to send help within six weeks, as soon as France had been defeated, he tried to ease Conrad’s reservations by assuring him that “the fate of Russia will be decided not on the Bug [a Galician river] but on the Seine.” In other words, defeating the Russians was for the moment less important than simply keeping them occupied.

In fact, Conrad’s offensive may have contributed to making Tannenberg possible. It not only kept Russia’s Galician forces in Galicia but drew out of Poland reserves that otherwise might have gone to East Prussia. But the long-term results would be disastrous. Austria’s ability to deal with the Russians, to provide Germany with a strong ally, was going up in flames.

And at that same time, almost within sight of Paris, the war in the west was suddenly and decisively changing. Across Europe a mixture of successes and failures was emerging on both sides, a balance so perfect as to seem almost mysterious. It would make victory impossible for either side and ensure that the terrible carnage of the war’s first month was barely the beginning.

Background

THE JUNKERS

IT IS PART OF THE STRANGE DARK POETRY OF THE GREAT
War that the Battle of Tannenberg, the most dramatic and complete victory achieved by either side in more than four years of bloody struggle, was fought in East Prussia.

This was sacred ground. Though the most remote and least developed region of the German federation—so remote that in 1914 it lay north of Russian Poland and today it is part of Poland—East Prussia was in a sense the heart of the Hohenzollern empire. It was the ancient home of a collection of families who were neither conspicuously wealthy nor particularly distinguished in any other way but regarded themselves as Germany’s rightful leaders and were regarded as such by their king.

Hindenburg himself was a son of one of those families, which for him made the victory exquisitely sweet. He had saved the tabernacle from violation, overnight turning himself into a national idol. He had kept alive not only Germany’s hopes of winning the war but his kinsmen’s hopes that their privileged place in the life of Germany would not be lost, and that the weaknesses and contradictions of that special place—its absurdities, even—could continue to be ignored.

The Germany that Hindenburg and his kind dominated had come a long way since the Franco-Prussian War. Long regarded as the land of musicians and dreamy philosophers and Black Forest elves, by 1914 it was the most modern, efficient, innovative, and powerful economy in Europe. Not only in industrial output but in science, even in the arts, Germany was a powerhouse. Militarily it was so strong that Britain, France, and Russia had good reason to fear that even in combination they might not be able to stand up against it.

Politically, though, Germany was a kind of Rube Goldberg device. Its system of government had not evolved like those of Britain and France, had not been passed down from time immemorial like Russia’s or gradually improvised like Vienna’s. Instead it was the creation of one man, Otto von Bismarck. He had designed it not so much to help Germany become a modern state as to keep modernity at bay—while, not incidentally, concentrating as much power as possible in his own hands. Its deficiencies had been serious from the start, and they grew more serious as the years passed, the world changed, and the Bismarckian system failed to keep pace. By the second decade of the twentieth century, with Bismarck long dead, those deficiencies had become dangerous. Ultimately they would render the system incapable of functioning under the strain of the Great War.

Otto von Bismarck Germany’s Iron Chancellor
“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

The root of the problem was that the empire, when it was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 1871, was completely dominated by Prussia, the most powerful of the German states and the one that had led the others to victory over France. Prussia’s king, Wilhelm I, was proclaimed the first kaiser by a jubilant crowd of sword-brandishing princes and generals. It is not possible to understand the peculiar nature of Prussia, or why Prussia would ultimately not only fail but pass out of existence, without understanding what Wilhelm meant when he said that the creation of the new empire felt like a kind of death—that the day it happened was the most miserable of his life.

What he feared was the disappearance of “the old Prussia,” a thing that since the Middle Ages had come to be holy not only to his Hohenzollern ancestors but to the kingdom’s landholding gentry. The old Prussia was a place like no other in Europe, and its people were like no other. It arose in what is now northern Poland, east of where the Vistula River runs northward into the Baltic Sea, and originally it was the homeland not of Germans but of Slavs. In the thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights, an order of religious warriors created to participate in the Crusades, were invited to help ambitious German nobles seize the territories around the Vistula. The area east of the river was taken from a Slavic tribe called the Prussians, who disappeared from history but left their name to be picked up by the early Hohenzollerns when they needed something to call the insignificant little quasi-kingdom that the Holy Roman emperor permitted them to establish on the outermost fringe of the German world.

Though the Teutonic Knights tried to recruit Germans to settle east of the Vistula, the soil was too poor and the climate too dank to be powerfully attractive. The Slavs were permitted to remain if they converted to Christianity. Gradually, as the generations passed, German and Slavic families intermarried and gave rise to an ethnically mixed local aristocracy that came to be known as the Junkers. The irony is that when Prussia became dominant in Germany and Prussia’s military might made Germany one of the great powers of Europe, the world saw this half-Slavic Junker elite as the most Germanic of Germans. Some of the most Prussian of the Prussians—for example, Karl von Clausewitz, who wrote the classic On War—bore names that were Slavic in origin.