The Guns of August (47 page)

The Russians, whose quarrel with Austria had precipitated the war, were grateful to France for standing by the alliance and anxious to show equal loyalty by support of the French design. “Our proper objective,” the Czar was dutifully made to say with more bravado than he felt, “is the annihilation of the German army”; he assured the French that he considered operations against Austria as “secondary” and that he had ordered the Grand Duke “at all costs to open the way to Berlin at the earliest possible moment.”

The Grand Duke in the last days of the crisis had been named Commander in Chief despite the bitter rivalry of Sukhomlinov who wanted the post for himself. As between the two, even the Russian regime in the last days of the Romanovs
was not mad enough to choose the German-oriented Sukhomlinov to lead a war against Germany. He remained, however, as War Minister.

From the moment the war opened, the French, uncertain that Russia really would or could perform what she had promised, began exhorting their ally to hurry. “I entreat Your Majesty,” pleaded Ambassador Paléologue in audience with the Czar on August 5, “to order your armies to take an immediate offensive, otherwise there is risk of the French army being overwhelmed.” Not content with seeing the Czar, Paléologue also called upon the Grand Duke who assured the ambassador that he intended a vigorous offensive to begin on August 14, in keeping with the promise of the fifteenth day of mobilization, without waiting for all his army to be concentrated. Though famous for his uncompromising, not to say sometimes unprintable habits of speech, the Grand Duke composed on the spot a message of medieval chivalry to Joffre. “Firm in the conviction of victory,” he telegraphed, he would march against the enemy bearing alongside his own standard the flag of the French Republic which Joffre had given him at maneuvers in 1912.

That a gap existed between the promises given to the French and the preparations for performance was all too apparent and may have been cause for the tears the Grand Duke was reported to have shed when he was named Commander in Chief. According to a colleague, he “appeared entirely unequipped for the task and, to quote his own statement, on receipt of the imperial order spent much time crying because he did not know how to approach his duties.” Regarded by a leading Russian military historian as “eminently qualified” for his task, the Grand Duke may have wept less for himself than for Russia and the world. There was an aura about 1914 that caused those who sensed it to shiver for mankind. Tears came even to the most bold and resolute. Messimy opening a Cabinet meeting on August 5 with a speech full of valor and confidence, broke off midway, buried his head in his hands, and sobbed, unable to continue. Winston Churchill wishing godspeed and victory to the BEF, when taking leave of Henry
Wilson, “broke down and cried so that he could not finish the sentence.” Something of the same emotion could be felt in St. Petersburg.

The Grand Duke’s colleagues were not the firmest pillars of support. Chief of Staff in 1914 was General Yanushkevich, a young man of forty-four with black mustache and curly black hair who was chiefly notable for not wearing a beard and whom the War Minister referred to as “still a child.” More a courtier than a soldier, he had not fought in the Japanese War although he had served in the same regiment of Guards as Nicholas II, which was as good a reason as any for rapid promotion. He was a graduate of the Staff College and later its commandant, had served on the staff of the War Ministry, and when war broke out had been Chief of Staff for barely three months. Like the German Crown Prince, he was completely under the guidance of his Deputy Chief, the stern and silent General Danilov, a hard worker and strict disciplinarian who was the brains of the Staff. Yanushkevich’s predecessor as Chief of Staff, General Jilinsky, had preferred to be relieved of that post and had persuaded Sukhomlinov to appoint him commander of the Warsaw military district. He was now in over-all command, under the Grand Duke, of the Northwest Army Group on the front against Germany. In the Russo-Japanese War he had served with little distinction but no positive error as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, General Kuropatkin, and having survived that grave of reputations had managed to remain in the upper echelons without either personal popularity or military talent.

Russia had made no preparations to meet the advanced date for attack which she had promised to the French. Improvisations had to be arranged at the last moment. A scheme of “forward mobilization” was ordered which skipped certain preliminary stages to gain several days’ time. Streams of telegrams from Paris, delivered with personal eloquence by Paléologue, kept up the pressure. On August 6 the orders of the Russian General Staff said it was essential to prepare “for an energetic offensive against Germany at the earliest possible moment, in order to ease the situation of the French but,
of course, only when sufficient strength has been made available.” By August 10, however, the proviso for “sufficient strength” had been dropped. Orders of that date read, “Naturally it is our duty to support France in view of the great stroke prepared by Germany against her. This support must take the form of the quickest possible advance against Germany, by attacking those forces she has left behind in East Prussia.” The First and Second Armies were ordered to be “in position” to advance on M-14 (August 13), although they would have to start without their services of supply, which would not be fully concentrated until M-20 (August 19).

Difficulties of organization were immense; the essence of the problem, as the Grand Duke once confessed to Poincaré, was that in an empire as vast as Russia when an order was given no one was ever sure whether it had been delivered. Shortages of telephone wire and telegraph equipment and of trained signal corpsmen made sure or quick communication impossible. Shortage of motor transport also slowed down the Russian pace. In 1914 the army had 418 motor transport vehicles, 259 passenger cars, and two motor ambulances. (It had, however, 320 airplanes.) As a result, supplies after leaving the railhead had to depend on horse transport.

Supply was hazardous at best. Testimony in trials after the Japanese war revealed bribes and graft running like a network of moles’ tunnels beneath the army. When even the Governor of Moscow, General Reinbot, was convicted and imprisoned for venality in letting army contracts, he still wielded enough private influence to obtain not only a pardon but reappointment to a new post. Meeting his commissariat staff for the first time as Commander in Chief, the Grand Duke said to them, “Gentlemen, no stealing.”

Vodka, another traditional companion of war, was prohibited. In the last mobilization in 1904 when soldiers came reeling in and regimental depots were a mess of drunken slumbers and broken bottles, it had taken an extra week to straighten out the confusion. Now with the French calling every day’s delay a matter of life or death, Russia enacted prohibition as a temporary measure for the period of mobilization.
Nothing could have given more practical or more earnest proof of loyal intention to meet French pleas for haste, but with that characteristic touch of late-Romanov rashness, the government, by ukase of August 22, extended prohibition for the duration of the war. As the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, this act at one stroke cut off a third of the government’s income. It was well known, commented a bewildered member of the Duma, that governments waging war seek by a variety of taxes and levies to increase income, “but never since the dawn of history has a country in time of war renounced the principal source of its revenue.”

In the last hour of the fifteenth day at 11:00
P.M.
on a lovely summer evening, the Grand Duke left the capital for field headquarters at Baranovichi, a railroad junction on the Moscow-Warsaw line about midway between the German and Austrian fronts. He and his staff and their families gathered in subdued groups on the station platform in St. Petersburg waiting for the Czar to come to bid farewell to the Commander in Chief. However, the Czarina’s jealousy overrode courtesy, and Nicholas did not appear. Goodbyes and prayers were spoken in low voices; the men took their places in the train in silence and departed.

Behind the front the struggle to assemble armies was still in process. Russian cavalry on reconnaissance had been probing German territory since the first day of the war. Their forays succeeded less in penetrating the German screen than in providing an excuse for screaming headlines in German newspapers and wild tales of Cossack brutalities. As early as August 4 in Frankfort on the western edge of Germany an officer heard rumors that 30,000 refugees from East Prussia were coming to be accommodated in that city. Demands to save East Prussia from the Slavic hordes began to distract the German General Staff from the task of trying to concentrate all military effort against France.

At dawn on August 12 a detachment of General Rennenkampf’s First Army, consisting of a cavalry division under General Gourko supported by an infantry division, opened the invasion of East Prussia ahead of the main advance
and took the town of Marggrabowa five miles inside the frontier. Shooting as they rode through the outskirts and into the empty market square, the Russians found the town undefended and evacuated by German troops. Shops were closed, but the townspeople were watching from the windows. In the countryside the inhabitants fled precipitously ahead of the advancing squadrons before there was any fighting as if by prearrangement. On the first morning the Russians saw columns of black smoke rising along their line of march which, on approach, were discovered to be not farms and homes burned by their fleeing owners but dumps of straw burned as signals to show the direction of the invaders. Everywhere was evidence of the German’s systematic preparation. Wooden watchtowers had been built on hilltops. Bicycles were provided for local farm boys of twelve to fourteen who acted as messengers. German soldiers, posted as informers, were found dressed as peasants, even as peasant women. The latter were discovered, presumably in the course of nonmilitary action, by their government-issue underwear; but many were probably never caught, it being impossible, General Gourko regretfully admitted, to lift the skirts of every female in East Prussia.

Receiving General Gourko’s reports of evacuated towns and fleeing population and concluding that the Germans were not planning a serious resistance so far east of their base on the Vistula, General Rennenkampf was the more eager to dash forward and the less concerned about his incomplete services of supply. A trim, well-set-up officer of sixty-one with a direct glance and energetic mustache turned up at the corners, he had earned a reputation for boldness, decisiveness, and tactical skill during service in the Boxer Rebellion, as commander of a cavalry division in the Russo-Japanese War, and as leader of the punitive expedition to Chita which ruthlessly exterminated the remnants of the Revolution of 1905. His military prowess was slightly shadowed by German descent and by some unexplained imbroglio which according to General Gourko “left his moral reputation considerably damaged.” When in coming weeks his strange behavior
caused these factors to be recalled, his colleagues nevertheless remained convinced of his loyalty to Russia.

Disregarding the cautions of General Jilinsky, commander of the Northwest Army Group, who was pessimistic from the start, and hastening the concentration of his three army corps and five and a half cavalry divisions, Rennenkampf opened his offensive on August 17. His First Army of some 200,000 men crossed the frontier along a 35-mile front split by Rominten Forest. Its objective was the Insterburg Gap, a distance of 37 miles from the frontier, or about three days’ march at the Russian rate. The Gap was a stretch of open land about 30 miles wide lying between the fortified area of Königsberg to the north and the Masurian Lakes to the south. It was a country of small villages and large farms with unfenced fields and wide ranges of view from the occasional swells of high ground. Here the First Army would come through and engage the main German strength until Samsonov’s Second Army, turning the lake barrier from the south, would arrive to deliver the decisive blow upon the German flank and rear. The two Russian armies were expected to join in a common front in the area of Allenstein.

General Samsonov’s objective line, on a level with Allenstein, was 43 miles from the frontier, about three and a half or four days’ march if all went well. Between his starting point, however, and his goal were many opportunities for the unexpected hazards—what Clausewitz called the “frictions”—of war. Owing to the lack of an east-west railway across Russian Poland to East Prussia, Samsonov’s army could not cross the frontier until two days behind Rennenkampf’s and would already have been on the march for a week before reaching the frontier. Its line of march was along sandy roads through a waste of undeveloped country spotted with forests and marshes and inhabited by a few poor Polish peasants. Once inside hostile territory there would be few resources of food and forage.

General Samsonov, unlike Rennenkampf, was new to the region and unfamiliar with his troops and staff. In 1877, at the age of eighteen, he had fought against the Turks; he was a
general at forty-three; in the Russo-Japanese War he too had commanded a cavalry division; since 1909 he had been in semimilitary employment as governor of Turkestan. Aged fifty-five when the war broke out, he was on sick leave in the Caucasus and did not reach Warsaw and Second Army headquarters until August 12. Communication between his army and Rennenkampf’s, as well as to Jilinsky’s headquarters in the rear which was to coordinate the movements of both, was erratic. Precision in timing was not in any case a notable Russian virtue. Having played out the campaign in war games in April before the war with most of the same commanders and staff as were to take the field in August, the Russian General Staff was gloomily conscious of the difficulties. Although the war games, in which Sukhomlinov played the role of Commander in Chief, revealed that the First Army had started too soon, when war came the same schedule was adhered to without change. Counting two days for Rennenkampf’s head start and four days for Samsonov’s march, there would be a period of six days during which the German Army would have to face only one Russian army.