The Guns of August (52 page)

Two of the corps he now withdrew from the Western Front had been in the fighting for Namur at the junction between the German Second and Third Armies and now, upon the fall of the Belgian fortress, were declared disposable by General von Bülow. With the 8th Cavalry Division they were detached on August 26 and marched—because of the destruction of Belgian railroads—to stations in Germany for transport “as quickly as possible” to the Eastern Front. Another corps had got as far as the railroad station in Thionville when cautionary voices at OHL persuaded Moltke to cancel its orders.

Eight hundred miles to the east General Samsonov was preparing for renewed battle on August 26. On his extreme right his VIth Corps under General Blagovestchensky had duly reached the planned rendezvous area in front of the lakes, but Samsonov had left this corps isolated and detached while he pushed the main body of his army in a more westerly direction. Although this drew it away from Rennenkampf, or from the place where Rennenkampf was supposed to be, it
was the right direction, Samsonov thought, to bring him between the Vistula and the Germans supposedly retreating to the west. Samsonov’s objective was the line Allenstein-Osterode where he could get astride the main German railway and from where, as he informed Jilinsky on August 23, “it would be easier to advance into the heart of Germany.”

It was already apparent that his exhausted and semistarved troops who had barely managed to stumble to the frontier were hardly fit for battle much less for the heart of Germany. Rations were not coming up, the soldiers had eaten up their reserve rations, villages were deserted, hay and oats in the fields were not yet cut, and little could be scraped off the land for men or horses. All the corps commanders were calling for a halt. A General Staff officer reported to Jilinsky’s Headquarters the “miserable” provisioning of the troops. “I don’t know how the men bear it any longer. It is essential to organize a proper requisitioning service.” At Volkovisk, 180 miles east of the battlefront as the crow flies and even farther by roundabout railway connections, Jilinsky was too remote to be disturbed by these reports. He insisted upon Samsonov continuing the offensive “to meet the enemy retreating in front of General Rennenkampf and cut off his retreat to the Vistula.”

This version of what the enemy was doing was based on Rennenkampf’s reports, and as Rennenkampf had kept no contact with the Germans after the Battle of Gumbinnen his reports of their movements were an amiable fantasy. By now, however, Samsonov realized from evidence of railroad movements and other bits of intelligence that he was facing not an army in full retreat but an army which had reorganized and was advancing toward him. Reports of the concentration of a new enemy force—this was François’ Corps—opposite his left flank were coming in. Recognizing the danger to his left, he sent an officer to urge upon Jilinsky the necessity of shifting his army westward instead of continuing north. With a rear commander’s contempt for a front commander’s caution, Jilinsky took this to be a desire to go on the defensive, and “rudely” replied to the officer: “To see the enemy where
he does not exist is cowardice. I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward. I insist that he continue the offensive.” His strategy, according to a colleague, seemed designed for
Poddavki,
a Russian form of checkers in which the object is to lose all one’s men.

On the night of August 25 at the same time as Ludendorff was issuing his orders, Samsonov disposed his forces. In the center the XVth and XIIth Corps under General Martos and General Kliouev with one division of the XXIIIrd Corps under General Kondratovitch were to carry the main advance to the line Allenstein-Osterode. The army’s left flank was to be held by General Artomonov’s Ist Corps supported by the other division of the XXIIIrd Corps. Fifty miles away the isolated VIth Corps held the right flank. The reconnaissance techniques of Russian cavalry being less than competent, Samsonov did not know that Mackensen’s Corps, last seen streaming in panic from the field of Gumbinnen, had reorganized and in forced marches, together with Below’s Corps, had reached his front and was now advancing upon his right. At first he ordered the VIth Corps to hold its position “with the object of protecting the right flank of the army,” and then changed his mind and told them to come down “with all speed” to support the advance of the center upon Allenstein. At the last minute on the morning of the 26th the order was changed to the original duty of remaining in position to protect the right flank. By that time the VIth Corps was already on the march toward the center.

Far to the rear a sense of disaster pervaded the Russian High Command. As early as August 24 Sukhomlinov, the War Minister who had not bothered to build arms factories because he did not believe in firepower, wrote General Yanushkevitch, the beardless Chief of Staff: “In God’s name, issue orders for gathering up the rifles. We have sent 150,000 to the Serbs, our reserves are nearly used up and factory production is feeble.” Despite the fervor of such gallant officers as the general who cantered to war shouting “William to St. Helena!” the mood of the army chiefs from the beginning was one of gloom. They entered the war without confidence
and remained in it without faith. Gossip of the pessimism at Headquarters reached the inevitable ear of the French ambassador in St. Petersburg. On August 26 he was told by Sazonov that Jilinsky “considers that an offensive in East Prussia is doomed to defeat.” Yanushkevitch was said to agree and to be protesting strongly against the offensive. General Danilov, Deputy Chief of the Staff, was insisting, however, that Russia could not disappoint France and would have to attack despite “indubitable risks.”

Danilov was stationed with the Grand Duke at Stavka, the General Staff Headquarters at Baranovichi. A quiet place in the woods where Stavka was to remain for a year, Baranovichi was chosen because it was the junction of a north-south railway line with the main line between Moscow and Warsaw. Both fronts, the German and Austrian, were superintended from here. The Grand Duke with his personal suite, the chief officers of the General Staff, and the Allied military attachés lived and ate in the railroad cars because it was discovered that the house intended for the Commander in Chief was too far from the stationmaster’s house used by the Operations and Intelligence staffs. Roofs were built over the cars to protect them from sun and rain, wooden sidewalks were laid out, and a marquee was erected in the station garden where meals were taken in summer. Pomp was absent and physical shortcomings ignored except for the low doorways against which the Grand Duke had an unfortunate tendency to bump his head. Fringes of white paper had to be fixed over all entrances to catch the Grand Duke’s eye and remind him to duck.

Danilov was disquieted by Rennenkampf’s obvious loss of contact with the enemy and by failing communications as a result of which Jilinsky appeared not to know where the armies were nor the armies each other. When news reached Stavka that Samsonov had engaged the enemy on August 24–25 and was about to renew the battle, anxiety about Rennenkampf’s failure to bring up the other arm of the pincers became acute. On August 26 the Grand Duke visited Jilinsky’s headquarters at Volkovisk to insist upon Rennenkampf being urged forward.
In his leisurely pursuit begun on August 23, Rennenkampf had passed through the former German positions on the Angerapp which the Eighth Army had abandoned in its great transfer to the south. Evidences of hurried departure confirmed his picture of a beaten enemy. According to the notes of one of his Staff officers, he believed it would be a mistake to push the Germans too rapidly. They might then fall back to the Vistula before they could be cut off by Samsonov. Rennenkampf made no effort to follow closely enough to confirm conjecture by eyesight nor did this omission appear to worry Jilinsky, who accepted Rennenkampf’s version without question.

The orders Jilinsky issued to Rennenkampf on the day after the Grand Duke’s visit were to pursue an enemy he still assumed to be retreating and to guard against a possible German sortie from the fortress of Königsberg upon his flank. It had been intended to mask Königsberg with six reserve divisions, but these had not yet come up. Now Jilinsky instructed Rennenkampf to blockade Königsberg with two corps until the reserve divisions arrived and with his other two corps to pursue “those enemy troops which do not take refuge in Königsberg and may be supposed to be retreating to the Vistula.” “Supposing” the enemy to be retreating, he did not conceive of him threatening Samsonov and did not urge Rennenkampf to hurry to close the junction with Samsonov’s right wing as originally planned. He merely told him that the “combined operations” of the First and Second Armies must aim at pressing the retreating Germans toward the sea and away from the Vistula. As the two Russian Armies were neither in contact nor moving toward each other, the word “combined” was hardly applicable.

When morning broke on August 26 Samsonov’s VIth Corps began its march toward the center in obedience to orders it did not know had been canceled. One division was under way when the other division received news that enemy forces had been sighted some six miles behind it to the north. Assuming these were troops retreating from Rennenkampf, the Russian divisional commander decided to turn around
and attack them. The force was in fact Mackensen’s Corps, itself moving forward to attack. It fell upon the Russians, and while they were fighting to save themselves, their fellow division, which had already marched eight miles, was desperately summoned. It marched back again and after covering nineteen miles came up at the end of the day against a second enemy corps, Below’s. Contact between the two Russian divisions was lost. The corps commander, General Blagovestchensky “lost his head” (in this case the formula is applied by a British military critic); the divisional commander, whose group had been in battle all day, suffering 5,000 casualties and the loss of sixteen field guns, ordered retreat on his own initiative. During the night orders and counterorders added to the confusion, units became mixed up on the roads, and by morning the VIth Corps was in a disorganized shambles and continuing to fall back. Samsonov’s right wing had been turned.

While this was happening, his center of two and a half corps took the offensive. General Martos was in the middle, heavily engaged. His neighbor on the left, a division of the XXIIIrd Corps, was repulsed and thrown back, exposing his flank. On his right General Kliouev’s XIIIth Corps took Allenstein but learning that Martos was in trouble moved to his support, leaving Allenstein to be occupied by the VIth Corps which Kliouev supposed to be on its way. The VIth of course never came, and a gap was left at Allenstein.

A few miles behind the front, at Second Army Headquarters in Neidenburg, General Samsonov was at dinner with his Chief of Staff, General Potovsky, and the British military attaché, Major Knox, when the beaten division of the XXIIIrd Corps poured into the streets. In the mood of fear any sound made them think themselves pursued; an ambulance wagon clattering up raised cries of “Uhlans coming!” Hearing the commotion Samsonov and Potovsky, a nervous individual who wore pince-nez and was known, for some now obscure reason, as the “Mad Mullah,” buckled on their swords and hurried out. They saw at firsthand the condition of the troops. The men were “terribly exhausted … they had been three days without bread or sugar.” “For two days my men received no rations and none of the supplies came up,” one regimental commander told them.

Although he had not yet received full news of the disaster to the VIth Corps on the right, Samsonov realized by the end of the day that it was no longer a question of enveloping the enemy but of saving himself from envelopment. He nevertheless decided not to break off battle but to renew it next day with his center corps in an effort to hold the Germans until Rennenkampf should come up to deal them the decisive blow. He sent orders to General Artomonov, commander of the Ist Corps holding the front opposite François on the Russians’ extreme left, “to protect the flank of the Army … at all costs.” He felt sure that “not even a greatly superior enemy can break the resistance of the famous Ist Corps,” and added that success of the battle depended on their holding firm.