The Guns of August (54 page)

Almost with awe they realized the extent of their victory. The haul of enemy dead and prisoners and captured guns was enormous: 92,000 prisoners were taken, and according to some claims the count was higher. Sixty trains were required to bring them to the rear during the week after the battle. Captured guns were counted variously between 300 and 500 out of the Second Army’s total of some 600. Captured horses were driven in herds to corrals hurriedly built to hold them. Although no agreed casualty figure for the dead and missing exists, it was estimated at over 30,000. The XVth and XIIIth Corps by capture or death were wiped out of existence; 50 officers and 2,100 men of these two corps were all that escaped. Survivors of the two flank corps, the VIth and Ist, which retreated earliest, amounted to about a division each, and of the XXIIIrd Corps, to about a brigade.

The victors, too, suffered heavily; after the fatigue and suspense of a six-day battle their nerves were raw. When Neidenberg, which changed hands four times, was retaken by the Germans on August 31, a nervous military policeman shouted “Halt!” at a car driving at high speed across the main square. When the car, which contained General von Morgen, ignored his order, he yelled “Stop! Russians!” and fired. Instantly a volley of fire covered the car, killing the chauffeur and wounding an officer sitting beside the General. The same night, after barely escaping being shot by his own men, von Morgen was awakened by his valet who, crying “The Russians have come back!”
ran off clutching the General’s clothes. To his “extreme vexation” von Morgen was forced to emerge in the street strapping his revolver over his underclothes.

For all but a few officers it had been their first experience under fire, and out of the excited fancy produced by the fears and exhaustion and panic and violence of a great battle a legend grew—a legend of thousands of Russians drowning in the swamps or sinking up to their necks in bogs and quicksands, men whom the Germans were forced to slaughter with machine guns. “I will hear their cries to my dying day,” one officer told an awestruck audience of friends in Germany. “The widely circulated report of Russians driven into the marshes and perishing there is a myth,” Ludendorff wrote; “no marsh was to be found anywhere near.”

As the extent of the enemy’s defeat became clear, the German commanders began to consider that they had won, as Hoffmann wrote in his diary, “one of the great victories in history.” It was decided—according to Hoffmann at his suggestion, according to Ludendorff at “my suggestion”—to name the battle Tannenberg in delayed compensation for the ancient defeat suffered there by the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians. In spite of this second triumph even greater than Liège, Ludendorff could not rejoice “because the strain imposed on my nerves by the uncertainty about Rennenkampf’s Army had been too great.” He was now able, however, to turn with greater confidence against Rennenkampf with the addition of the two new corps that Moltke was sending from the West.

His triumph owed much to others: to Hoffmann who, though right for the wrong reasons, had been firm in the conviction that Rennenkampf would not pursue and had conceived the plan and drawn up the orders for bringing the Eighth Army down to face Samsonov; to François who by defying Ludendorff’s orders ensured the envelopment of Samsonov’s left wing; to Hindenburg who steadied Ludendorff’s nerves at a critical moment; finally and above all to a factor that never figured in the careful German planning—the Russian wireless. Ludendorff came to depend on the intercepts
which his staff regularly collected during the day, decoded or translated and sent to him every night at 11:00
P.M.
If by chance they were late, he would worry and appear personally in the signal corps room to inquire what was the matter. Hoffmann acknowledged the intercepts as the real victor of Tannenberg. “We had an ally,” he said, “the enemy. We knew all the enemy’s plans.”

To the public the savior of East Prussia was the nominal commander, Hindenburg. The elderly general dragged from retirement in his old blue uniform was transformed into a titan by the victory. The triumph in East Prussia, lauded and heralded even beyond its true proportions, fastened the Hindenburg myth upon Germany. Not even Hoffmann’s sly malice could penetrate it. When, as Chief of Staff on the Eastern Front later in the war, he would take visitors over the field of Tannenberg, Hoffmann would tell them, “This is where the Field Marshal slept before the battle; here is where he slept after the battle; here is where he slept during the battle.”

In Russia the disaster did not penetrate the public mind at once, being blotted out by a great victory won at the same time over the Austrians on the Galician front. In numbers an even greater victory than the Germans won at Tannenberg, it had equal effect on the enemy. In a series of engagements fought from August 26 to September 10 and culminating in the Battle of Lemberg, the Russians inflicted 250,000 casualties, took 100,000 prisoners, forced the Austrians into a retreat lasting eighteen days and covering 150 miles, and accomplished a mutilation of the Austro-Hungarian Army, especially in trained officers, from which it was never to recover. It crippled Austria but could not restore the losses or heal the effects of Tannenberg. The Russian Second Army had ceased to exist, General Samsonov was dead, and of his five corps commanders two were captured and three cashiered for incompetence. General Rennenkampf in the ensuing battle of the Masurian Lakes was chased out of East Prussia, “lost his nerve”—in this case the customary formula was applied by Jilinsky—deserted his army, and drove back across the frontier in a motorcar, thus completing the ruin of his reputation
and bringing about his discharge in disgrace and incidentally that of Jilinsky. In a telegram to the Grand Duke, Jilinsky accused Rennenkampf of having decamped in panic. This infuriated the Grand Duke, who considered the primary failure to have been Jilinsky’s. He thereupon reported to the Czar that it was Jilinsky “who has lost his head and is incapable of controlling operations,” with the result that another actor in the Battle of Tannenberg became a casualty.

The inadequacy of training and materials, the incompetence of generals, the inefficiency of organization were laid bare by the battle. Alexander Guchkov, a subsequent Minister of War, testified that he “reached the firm conviction that the war was lost” after Tannenberg. The defeat gave new vigor to the pro-German groups who began openly to agitate for withdrawal from the war. Count Witte was convinced the war would ruin Russia, Rasputin that it would destroy the regime. The Ministers of Justice and of Interior drew up a Memorandum for the Czar urging peace with Germany as soon as possible on the ground that continuing alliance with democracies would be fatal. The opportunity was offered. German proposals to Russia for a separate peace began shortly afterward and continued through 1915 and 1916. Whether out of loyalty to the Allies and the Pact of London or fear of making terms with the Germans, or insensibility to the lapping tide of Revolution or simple paralysis of authority, the Russians never accepted them. In mounting chaos and dwindling ammunition their war effort went on.

At the time of the disaster General Marquis de Laguiche, the French military attaché, came to express his condolences to the Commander in Chief. “We are happy to have made such sacrifices for our Allies,” the Grand Duke replied gallantly. Equanimity in the face of catastrophe was his code, and Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm. The Russian steam roller in which the Western Allies placed such hopes, which after their debacle on the Western Front was awaited even more anxiously, had fallen apart on the road as if it had been put together with
pins. In its premature start and early demise it had been, just as the Grand Duke said, a sacrifice for an ally. Whatever it cost the Russians, the sacrifice accomplished what the French wanted: withdrawal of German strength from the Western Front. The two corps that came too late for Tannenberg were to be absent from the Marne.

I
N
1915 a book about the invasion of his country was published in exile by Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914 had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that were then believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with this dedication: “He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly a pacifist .… For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomes diminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.”

Of all that has been written, Verhaeren’s is the most poignant testimony of what war and invasion did to the mind of his time. When the Battle of the Frontiers ended, the war had been in progress for twenty days and during that time had created passions, attitudes, ideas, and issues, both among belligerents and watching neutrals, which determined its future course and the course of history since. The world that used to be and the ideas that shaped it disappeared too, like the wraith of Verhaeren’s former self, down the corridors of August and the months that followed. Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war
impossible failed to function when the time came. Nationhood, like a wild gust of wind, arose and swept them aside.

People entered the war with varying sentiments and sets of ideas. Among the belligerents some, pacifists and socialists, opposed the war in their hearts; some, like Rupert Brooke, welcomed it. “Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,” wrote Brooke, conscious of no blasphemy, in his poem “1914.” To him it seemed a time

Germans felt similar emotions. The war was to be, wrote Thomas Mann, “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul,” he explained, “is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization for is not peace an element of civil corruption?” This concept, a mirror image of the essential German militarist theory that war is ennobling, was not very far from the raptures of Rupert Brooke and was widely held at the time by numbers of respectable people, among them, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1914, except for Balkan wars on the fringe, there had been no war on the European continent for more than a generation, and in the opinion of one observer the welcoming attitude toward war owed something to the “unconscious boredom of peace.”

Where Brooke was embracing cleanness and nobleness, Mann saw a more positive goal. Germans being, he said, the most educated, law-abiding, peace-loving of all peoples, deserved to be the most powerful, to dominate, to establish a “German peace” out of “what is being called with every possible justification the German war.” Though writing in 1917, Mann was reflecting 1914, the year that was to be the German 1789, the establishment of the German idea in history,
the enthronement of
Kultur,
the fulfillment of Germany’s historic mission. In August, sitting at a café in Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: “We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe. Russia stands for reaction, England for selfishness and perfidy, France for decadence, Germany for progress. German
Kultur
will enlighten the world and after this war there will never be another.”

A German businessman sitting with them had more specific aims. Russia was to be so humbled that never again could the Slav peril threaten Europe; Great Britain was to be utterly crushed and deprived of her navy, India, and Egypt; France was to pay an indemnity from which she would never recover; Belgium was to yield her seacoast because Germany needed ports on the English Channel; Japan was to be punished in due time. An alliance of “all the Teutonic and Scandinavian races in Europe, including Bulgaria, will hold absolute dominion from the North Sea to the Black Sea. Europe will have a new map and Germany will be at the center of it.”

Talk of this kind for years before the war had not increased friendliness for Germany. “We often got on the world’s nerves,” admitted Bethmann-Hollweg, by frequently proclaiming Germany’s right to lead the world. This, he explained, was interpreted as lust for world dominion but was really a “boyish and unbalanced ebullience.”

The world somehow failed to see it that way. There was a stridency in the German tone that conveyed more menace than ebullience. The world became “sore-headed and fed-up,” wrote Mr. George Bernard Shaw in 1914, with Germany’s clattering of the sword. “We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we just rose at it and went for it.”