Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (51 page)

The Prussian formations had been savagely mauled. They were rallied by their officers only with difficulty during the ensuing night. Next day, the German high command experienced a rapid series of mood changes. Some senior officers believed there was a chance to roll up Rennenkampf’s army by renewing the action, exploiting the previous day’s successes on the flanks. But Prittwitz, badly shaken by his losses, flinched from taking such a risk. Moltke had told him that his prime responsibility was to keep the army intact. Thus, the commander-in-chief made a drastic decision: to disengage and undertake a strategic retreat, more than a hundred miles west towards the Vistula.

This order enraged Max Hoffmann and many of his comrades, who considered the withdrawal wholly unnecessary. It also precipitated chaos
in the rear areas of the army. On 22 August the military authorities ordered that all cattle and corn must be shipped west across the Vistula, beyond reach of the Russians. Then refugees began hastening the same way. Westbound movements of livestock, produce and people collided headlong with reinforcements and supplies heading east. For some days, panic prevailed among civilians behind the German front. Almost a million East Prussians left their homes in the face of the Russian threat – around a quarter of the entire population – most with only such possessions as they could carry on their backs.

The flood of refugees surging into the border town of Schneidemühl persuaded many of its own inhabitants to flee westwards. Carts laden with household possessions, creaking towards the station, became a familiar sight in the streets. The newcomers brought shocking tales of destruction, alleged rape and murder, causing the Kuhr family’s nervous housekeeper Marie to threaten to decamp. The townspeople debated what to do with a refugee boy who had lost his parents. A mother wept, because she had mislaid her children on the road from the east. A farmer’s wife asserted bleakly that ‘not a stone was left standing’ in the community from which she had fled: ‘everything was burning … we could take away only our clothes and a little bit of money’. Elsewhere along the East Prussian frontier, at Elbing station local authorities posted a despairing sign: ‘This town is completely full of refugees. Please keep moving.’ Germany’s pre-war planning to meet a Russian invasion included measures to dam the Nogat river. Inundations along its course would block the path to central Prussia, at the cost of flooding large tracts of farmland and many villages. Prittwitz’s staff repeatedly changed their minds about whether to initiate this drastic step. In the end, no flooding took place, because it was bound to provoke a huge new refugee migration.

On the Russian side, success at Gumbinnen prompted a wave of euphoria which swept back to St Petersburg and thereafter across the Tsar’s empire. The Russians deluded themselves that the Germans were in full retreat towards the coastal fortress of Königsberg. Rennenkampf made one of the decisive mistakes of the campaign. Complacent in the wake of his little victory, he was also short of supplies, especially ammunition. He decided to give his men a rest and refill his limbers before advancing further. He made no attempt to pursue the retreating enemy. If, instead, he had immediately exploited southwards, momentous consequences might have ensued for Germany. As it was, Rennenkampf simply sat down upon the battlefield.

Meanwhile Samsonov, informed of Gumbinnen, saw an opportunity to cut off Prittwitz’s beaten forces and achieve a historic triumph. His army hastened forward to garner the spoils of Rennenkampf’s success, an initiative which represented a calamitous misreading of the Germans’ condition and intentions. In the days after Gumbinnen, Prittwitz’s brilliant chief of operations persuaded his general to reverse the earlier decision to make for the Vistula. Max Hoffmann argued that great opportunities still beckoned. Reconnaissance showed that Rennenkampf was going nowhere fast. The colonel urged that if a weak screen was left behind to watch the Russian First Army, Prittwitz could exploit the Germans’ excellent rail network to shift two corps southwards to meet Samsonov, and with luck deal him a crippling blow. As Second Army pushed forward, it looked amazingly vulnerable, especially on the flanks.

The Germans had often wargamed just such a scenario for defeating a Russian invasion force, but it is remarkable that Prittwitz agreed to the bold new plan, given his shaken state. One of the critical manoeuvres of the war thus began. And even as troops boarded trains taking them southwards, the high command intervened. In Coblenz, a disbelieving Moltke had learned of Gumbinnen, and of Prittwitz’s planned retreat to the Vistula. He exploded into furious and indeed tearful rage, then telephoned each of the corps commanders in East Prussia to invite their opinions. In turn they asserted that Prittwitz’s order was mistaken and unnecessary. On the afternoon of 22 August, Eighth Army’s headquarters at Marienburg on the western border of East Prussia received a terse message: Prittwitz was dismissed. Old Gen. Paul von Hindenburg had been summoned out of retirement to relieve him; he would be accompanied into the field by a new army chief of staff, the bleak, moody Erich Ludendorff, fresh from his heroics at Liège.

Hindenburg, a stolid sixty-six-year-old, had served as an infantry officer in Prussia’s wars against Austria in 1866, and against France four years later. He retired from the army in 1911, and thereafter devoted himself to his pipe, daily readings of newspapers, and a little Italian tourism. When Germany mobilised, to his disappointment he was not at first recalled to the colours. The corpulent Hindenburg growled crossly, ‘I sit like an old woman in front of the stove.’ But on the afternoon of 22 August a telegram reached his flat in Hanover: was he available for immediate service? He responded instantly and tersely: ‘Am ready.’ At 4 a.m. next day a special train, already carrying his chief of staff, stopped briefly to collect him from a darkened platform at Hanover station; it then hastened onwards to East Prussia.

Hindenburg’s appointment represented window-dressing. He was not even the first choice for the job – merely an officer of appropriate seniority to command Eighth Army, whose home happened to be situated on the line that his chief of staff must travel to reach East Prussia. The latter was the man Berlin expected to transform the campaign, selected before Moltke gave a thought to identifying a figurehead commander-in-chief. Ludendorff was a commoner, forty-nine years old, who had risen by sheer ability through the ranks of an army dominated by aristocrats. A dour professional warrior to every last extremity of his being, he considered war the natural business of mankind. He had served on the General Staff under Schlieffen, who remained his idol. For a decade he had enthusiastically endorsed the core principle of German planning – that East Prussia should be lightly held while France was disposed of.

A man of chilly rationality though highly nervous temperament, in 1904 he indulged the sole romantic gesture of his life by falling in love with a married mother of four children, Frau Margarethe Pernet. They met in the street in a rainstorm, when he gallantly offered her the shelter of his umbrella. She divorced her husband, married Ludendorff, and the two achieved a notably successful partnership. Now, Moltke wrote to him: ‘You have before you a new and difficult task … I know no other man in whom I have such absolute trust. You may yet be able to save the situation in the east. You must not be angry with me for calling you away from a post in which you are, perhaps, on the threshold of a decisive action which, please God, will be conclusive … The Kaiser, too, has confidence in you.’ This last assertion was untrue. Ludendorff collected his Pour le Mérite for Liège from Wilhelm an hour before his train departed for the East. But the Kaiser was furious that Moltke had not consulted him about either appointment to Eighth Army, and considered the new chief of staff a vulgar and ambitious adventurer.

The two generals, who would establish one of the most famous military double acts in history, reached Marienburg on 23 August. They received a gloomy, icily formal reception from Prittwitz’s dejected staff. Max Hoffmann certainly harboured doubts about the newcomers: both were unknown quantities, and Ludendorff bore the air of a man who knew that he had everything to prove. Hoffmann’s plan to concentrate against Samsonov had already been set in motion, and thereafter events evolved with stunning speed. Moltke made a momentous decision, to shift six corps to strengthen Eighth Army. Ludendorff said he had neither wish nor need for the proposed reinforcements, which would weaken the Western
Front at a critical moment. He was told they were coming anyway, and he should plan to use them. In the end, Moltke sent just two corps, which arrived after the momentous clash with Samsonov had taken place. But German critics ever thereafter cited this redeployment as evidence of the chief of staff’s tottering judgement, cracking nerve.

At Marienburg, less than twenty-four hours after Hindenburg assumed command, two enemy plain-language radio signals were intercepted. These revealed that the forces of Rennenkampf and Samsonov had drifted so far apart that they could not support each other. The morse of First Army’s obliging commander also informed the Germans of the lines of march of each of Samsonov’s corps. In the new wireless age, all the belligerents had much to learn about security of the ether – on the Western Front, the French intercepted important enemy signals
en clair
, and broke several German ciphers – but the consequences of this Russian lapse were especially significant. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were surveying the operational area, driving towards a hill south of Montowo, when the messages reached Max Hoffmann at army headquarters. He immediately set off by car in pursuit of his chiefs, clutching the texts. His driver raced alongside the generals’ open motor; the colonel leaned across and thrust the flimsies into Ludendorff’s hand. After he had read them, both cars halted. The Germans conferred about the significance of the news.

Hoffmannn was now Ludendorff’s deputy. He was the brilliant, bullet-headed Prussian staff officer of caricature, a Russian specialist who had for years studied the Tsarist army, not least as a German observer of the Russo-Japanese war. He knew that effective coordination between Rennenkampf and Samsonov was implausible. The Russians’ indiscretion offered their enemies a chance to smash them in detail. Hoffmann could claim credit for having inspired the German concentration in the south, but it was Ludendorff who now presided over its implementation. The Germans’ 1891, 1898 and 1899 manoeuvres had addressed just such a scenario in East Prussia, and proposed precisely the response Eighth Army now adopted. Ludendorff concentrated his formations slightly further south and east than his subordinate had intended. As for the slow, stolid Hindenburg’s role, years later Hoffmann conducted a party of army cadets around the field of Tannenberg. ‘Here,’ he told them scornfully, ‘is where Hindenburg slept before the battle; here is where he slept after the battle; and here is where he slept during it.’

The approaching encounter would represent a collision between the most professional army in Europe and the most careless. The Russians’
neglect of reconnaissance, logistics, medical facilities, concentration of force and common prudence could not be adequately redeemed by mass, good artillery and peasant courage. Aleksandr Samsonov was fifty-four, a jovially uxorious figure who had been on leave in the Caucasus with his wife when summoned to take up war duties. In East Prussia, he often expressed concern that he heard no news from home – any more than his men did. He chaffed the soldiers: ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Well, your wife won’t know you when you get back. Look at the beard you have grown!’ ‘Have you any children? When I went to war in 1904 I left a daughter one and a half years old, and when I came back she ran away from me.’

Samsonov’s chief of staff, Postovsky, was unflatteringly nicknamed by comrades ‘the mad mullah’. He characterised the advance of Second Army as an ‘adventure’, an unfortunate word for an offensive on which his nation’s fortunes in large measure turned. Samsonov was dependent for communication with Rennenkampf and with his own rear headquarters upon couriers travelling by car to a distant wireless transmitter, and sometimes even as far as Warsaw. In the last week of August, the general fooled himself that the Germans were fleeing, and that his task was merely to exploit Rennenkampf’s victory. The army intelligence staff was so weak that they could not even read captured documents, for lack of a German-speaker to translate them. In Samsonov’s haste to cross the supposed enemy line of retreat, he left behind one corps on his right among the Masurian Lakes, another on his left. Three corps proceeded northwards, dispersed across a front of almost sixty miles, with no effective cavalry screen to warn of enemy movements.

Hindenburg’s formations were meanwhile tramping south, hampered by heat exhaustion and long columns of refugees, fleeing before the Russians. Soldiers displayed impenitent ruthlessness in driving civilians off the roads, overturning carts to make way for artillery; cavalry columns and baggage wagons trampled cherished household possessions into the dust. The fact that many of the German troops were themselves local residents prompted some painful incidents during the campaign. A certain L/Cpl. Schwald found his artillery battery called upon to destroy Eydtkuhnen, his home town, when it was occupied by the Russians, and Col. Emil Hell had to shell his own house in Gross-Grieben.

Hindenburg’s Eighth Army was poised to strike one of the great military blows of history, at a moment when Russia’s western allies were both utterly ignorant of and amazingly complacent about events. On 24 August, the military correspondent of
The Times
told the British people: ‘In the East all continues to go well.’ An editorial asserted: ‘before very long there will be hosts of Russians within German territory, as the Germans will discover to their cost’. Yet that same day brought the first encounter of what became known as the Battle of Tannenberg, though the critical actions were fought some miles distant from the village. At first, a single Russian and German corps clashed head to head. Ludendorff, visiting the local headquarters, told its commander histrionically that his formations must ‘hold to the last man’ to buy time for Hindenburg’s left wing to come up. Thus all day Russians and Germans ravaged each other, as Samsonov’s men advanced again and again across open ground, striving for a breakthrough.