The Guns of August (51 page)

On that day Samsonov’s XVth Corps commanded by General Martos came up against the German XXth Corps of General Scholtz. Combat was opened. The Germans, not yet reinforced, retreated. About ten miles inside the frontier General Martos captured Soldau and Neidenburg which until a few hours before had been General Scholtz’s headquarters. When Cossack patrols entering Neidenburg reported German civilians firing on them from the windows, General Martos ordered a bombardment of the town which destroyed most of the main square. A “small, gray man,” he personally felt uncomfortable that night when he found himself billetted in a house whose German owners had departed, leaving behind their family photographs staring at him from the mantelpiece. It was the mayor’s house, and General Martos ate a dinner prepared for the mayor and served by his maid.

On August 23, the day Ludendorff and Hindenburg arrived in the East, the Russian VIth and XIIIth corps on the right of General Martos captured more villages; General Scholtz, still alone except for some support from the Vistula garrison behind him, backed up a little farther. Ignoring Rennenkampf’s inactivity in the north, Jilinsky continued to rain orders on Samsonov. The Germans on his front were hastily retreating, he told Samsonov, “leaving only insignificant forces facing you. You are therefore to execute a most energetic offensive .… You are to attack and intercept the enemy retiring before General Rennenkampf’s army in order to cut off his retreat from the Vistula.”

This was, of course, the original design, but it was predicated on Rennenkampf’s holding the Germans occupied in the north. In fact, on that date Rennenkampf was no longer in
contact with the enemy. He began to advance again on August 23 but in the wrong direction. Instead of moving crabwise to the south to link up with Samsonov in front of the lakes, he moved straight west to mask Königsberg, fearful that François would attack his flank if he turned south. Although it was a movement with no relevance at all to the original design, Jilinsky did nothing to alter it. Operating like Rennenkampf in a complete fog as to the German movements, he assumed they were doing what the Russians had planned on their doing—retreating to the Vistula. Accordingly, he continued to push Samsonov forward.

On the evening of August 23, General Martos’ Corps, encouraged by the feel of the enemy falling back, moved on from Neidenburg and reached positions within 700 yards of the German lines. Scholtz’s Corps was entrenched between the villages of Orlau and Frankenau. The Russians were under orders to take the trenches at all costs. They lay all night in position and crept forward another hundred yards before dawn. When the signal for attack came they took the last 600 yards in three rushes, throwing themselves to the ground under the fire of the German machine guns, surging forward again—and down and up again. As the wave of white-bloused figures with their glistening bayonets closed in, the Germans scrambled from the trenches, abandoned their machine guns, and fled. Elsewhere along the line German superiority in artillery punished the attackers. The Russian XIIIth Corps on Martos’ right, owing to a blunder in communications or poor generalship, or both, failed to come to his support, and no great advantage was gained from the engagement. By the end of the day the Germans were in retreat but not routed. The Russians captured two field guns and some prisoners, but their own losses were high, a total of 4,000. One regiment lost 9 out of 16 company commanders. One company lost 120 out of 190 men and all its officers.

Though German losses were less, Scholtz, facing overwhelming numbers, withdrew for some ten miles, establishing his headquarters for the night in the village of Tannenberg. Still harried by Jilinsky who insisted that he must move on to
the agreed line where he could cut off the enemy’s “retreat,” Samsonov issued orders to all his corps—the XXIIIrd on the left, the XVth and XIIIth in the center, the VIth on the right—giving their dispositions and lines of march for the following day. Beyond Neidenberg communications had become ever more feeble. One corps had run out of wire altogether and was relying on mounted orderlies. The VIth Corps did not possess the key to the cipher used by the XIIIth. Consequently, Samsonov’s orders were issued by wireless in clear.

Up to this moment, some twenty-four hours since the arrival of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Eighth Army had not yet decided whether to bring down Mackensen’s and von Below’s corps to oppose Samsonov’s right wing. Hindenburg and his staff came down to Tannenberg to consult Scholtz who was “grave but confident.” They returned to Headquarters. That evening, Hoffmann wrote later, “was the most difficult of the whole battle.” While the staff was debating, a signal corps officer brought in an intercept of Samsonov’s orders for the next day, August 25. Although this assistance from the enemy did not reveal Rennenkampf’s intentions which were the crucial question, it did show the Germans where they might expect to meet Samsonov’s forces. That helped. The Eighth Army made up its mind to throw all its strength into battle against Samsonov. Orders went out to Mackensen and von Below to turn their backs on Rennenkampf and march south at once.

H
AUNTED BY THE KNOWLEDGE
of Rennenkampf at his rear, Ludendorff was in a hurry to come to grips with Samsonov. He gave orders for the first stage of the battle to begin on August 25. It was to be an attack on Usdau by General von François Ist Corps with intent to envelop Samsonov’s left wing. François refused. His heavy artillery and some of his infantry were still detraining from the journey that had brought them the long way around from the Gumbinnen front and had not yet come up. To attack without full artillery support and a full supply of ammunition, he argued, would be to risk failure; if Samsonov’s path of retreat were left open he would escape the destruction planned for him. He was privately upheld by Hoffmann and by General Scholtz of the XXth Corps who, although he had been in battle against the Russians on the previous day, assured François over the field telephone that he could hold his ground without immediate support.

Confronted by insubordination on the second day of his new command, Ludendorff in a high temper drove down by car to François’ headquarters, bringing Hindenburg and Hoffmann with him. In reply to his insistence François said, “If the order is given, of course I shall attack but my troops will be obliged to fight with the bayonet.” To show who was in command Ludendorff brushed aside François’ reasons and reissued his orders unchanged. Hindenburg said nothing during the interview and when it was over dutifully drove off
with Ludendorff. Hoffmann in another car stopped at the railroad station at Montovo, the nearest place in telephone and telegraph communication with Headquarters. Here a signal corps officer handed him two intercepted Russian wireless messages, both sent in clear, one by Rennenkampf at 5:30 that morning and one by Samsonov at 6:00
A.M.
Rennenkampf’s orders, giving marching distances for the First Army, revealed that his objective line for the next day would not bring him far enough to threaten the German Army from the rear. Samsonov’s orders, following the previous day’s battle against General Scholtz, revealed that he had misinterpreted Scholtz’s backward wheel as full retreat and gave exact directions and times of movement for the pursuit of what he believed was a defeated foe.

No such boon had been granted a commander since a Greek traitor guided the Persians around the pass at Thermopylae. The very completeness of the messages made Major General Grünert, Hoffmann’s immediate superior, suspicious. As Hoffmann tells it, “He kept asking me anxiously over and over if we should believe them? Why shouldn’t we? … I myself believed every word of them on principle.” Hoffmann claimed to have personal knowledge of a private quarrel between Rennenkampf and Samsonov dating from the Russo-Japanese War, in which he had been Germany’s observer. He said that Samsonov’s Siberian Cossacks, after a brave fight, had been obliged to yield the Yentai coal mines because Rennenkampf’s cavalry division had remained inactive despite repeated orders and that Samsonov had then knocked Rennenkampf down in a heated quarrel on the platform of the Mukden railway station. Obviously, he demonstrated triumphantly, Rennenkampf would be in no hurry to come to Samsonov’s aid. As it was less a question of aiding Samsonov than of winning—or losing—the campaign, it is arguable whether Hoffmann believed his own tale or only pretended to; he always remained fond of telling the story.

Grasping the intercepted messages, he and Grünert hurried to their car, sped after Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and on overtaking them within a few miles, Hoffmann ordered
the chauffeur to draw level and handed over the messages while the cars were in motion. All came to a stop while the four officers studied the situation. It showed that the attack planned for next day in which Mackensen’s and Below’s corps were to attack Samsonov’s right wing could proceed without interference from Rennenkampf. According to differing interpretations by the disputants, it either did or did not show that François could afford to postpone his attack until all his men and material were up. Unwilling to yield an inch of authority, Ludendorff, on returning to Headquarters, reiterated his orders.

At the same time orders were given to carry out the general plan for double envelopment next day, August 26. On the German left Mackensen’s corps, supported by Below’s, was to attack Samsonov’s extreme right wing which had reached a position—at Bischofsburg with cavalry at Sensburg—in front of the lakes where it could have joined fronts with Rennenkampf if he had been there. His absence left open the flank which the Germans hoped to envelop. In the center Scholtz’s XXth Corps, now supported by a Landwehr division and General von Morgen’s 3rd Reserve Division, was to renew its battle of the day before. On the German right François as ordered was to open the attack that would envelop Samsonov’s left wing.

All orders went out before midnight of August 25. Next morning, the opening day of general battle, Ludendorff was attacked by a fit of nerves when a reconnaissance aviator reported movements by Rennenkampf in his direction. Although Hindenburg felt assured that the Eighth Army “need not have the least hesitation” in leaving only a screen against Rennenkampf, all Ludendorff’s anxiety returned. Rennenkampf’s “formidable host hung like a threatening thunder cloud to the northeast,” he wrote. “He need only have closed with us and we should have been beaten.” He began to feel the same fears that had assailed Prittwitz and to hesitate whether to commit all his forces against Samsonov or to abandon the offensive against the Russian Second Army and turn back against the First. The hero of Liège “seems to have lost his
nerve a little,” happily recorded Hoffmann, who of all military writers is the most prodigal in attributing this weakness to his colleagues. Even Hindenburg acknowledges that “grave doubts” afflicted his companion and at this moment, as he claims, it was he who stiffened his Chief of Staff. In his words, “We overcame the inward crisis.”

A different crisis erupted when Headquarters discovered that François, who was still waiting for his artillery, had not begun battle as ordered. Ludendorff imperatively demanded that the attack begin at noon. François replied that the preliminary ground which Headquarters supposed had been taken that morning had not been gained, provoking an explosion and what Hoffmann describes as a “probably unfriendly” reply from Ludendorff. Throughout the day François managed to balk and procrastinate and wait for his own moment.

Suddenly an extraordinary telephone call all the way from OHL in Coblenz broke in upon the argument with François. Worried enough, without trouble from Supreme Headquarters, Ludendorff picked up the receiver and ordered Hoffmann to listen in on another receiver to “what they want.” To his astonishment he heard Colonel Tappen, Chief of Operations at OHL, propose to send him reinforcements of three corps and a cavalry division. Fresh from the Western Front, Ludendorff, who had worked on the mobilization plans and knew to the last decimal the required density of manpower per mile of offensive, could hardly believe what he heard. Schlieffen’s plan depended on using every last man to strengthen the right wing. What could have persuaded OHL to weaken its line by three whole corps at the height of the offensive? Appalled, he told Tappen that the reinforcements were not “positively” needed in the East and would in any event arrive too late for the battle that was already beginning. Tappen said they could be spared.

The origin of this crucial decision was the panic at OHL when the Russians launched their offensive two weeks after mobilization instead of the six weeks on which the German plan was predicated. The saving factor, as Tappen reports it, was the “great victory” on the French frontiers which
“aroused in OHL the belief that the decisive battle in the West had been fought and won.” Under this impression Moltke decided, on August 25, “in spite of objections put to him,” to send reinforcements to save East Prussia from the Russians. The woes of the refugees, the Junker estates left to marauding Cossacks, the tearful pleas of well-born ladies to the Kaiserin to save family lands and fortunes were having their effect. In order to arouse feeling against the Russians, the German government had deliberately distributed the refugees in various cities and succeeded in frightening itself. The President of the East Prussian Bundesrat came to OHL to beg for aid to his homeland. A director of Krupp’s wrote in his diary on August 25: “People said on all sides, ‘Bah! the Russians will never come to the end of their mobilization .… We can remain on the defensive for a long time.’ But today everyone thinks quite differently and the talk is all of abandoning East Prussia.” The Kaiser was deeply affected. Moltke himself had always worried about the light defense in the East, for, as he wrote before the war, “all the success on the Western Front will be unavailing if the Russians arrive in Berlin.”