The Guns of August (50 page)

With the Eastern Front in danger of collapse, someone bold, strong, and decisive was needed at once to take over the command. How a commander will meet the crises of real war is never certain in advance, but OHL was fortunate in knowing of a staff officer who only a week ago had proved himself in action—Ludendorff, the hero of Liège. He would do for Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army. In the German system of
command exercised through a pair, the Chief of Staff was as important as the commanding officer and sometimes, depending on capacity and temperament, more so. Ludendorff was at that moment with von Bülow’s Second Army on the outskirts of Namur where, following his success at Liège, he was directing the storming of Belgium’s second great fortress. He was on the doorstep of France at a crucial moment—but the need of the Eastern Front was drastic. Moltke and von Stein agreed he must be called. A staff captain was instantly dispatched by motorcar with a letter which reached General Ludendorff at nine next morning, August 22.

“You may be able to save the situation in the East,” wrote von Stein. “I know no other man in whom I have such absolute trust.” He apologized for drawing Ludendorff away from the threshold of a decisive action “which, please God, will be conclusive,” but the sacrifice was “imperative.” “Of course, you will not be held responsible for what has already happened in the East but with your energy you can prevent the worst from happening.”

Ludendorff left within fifteen minutes in the staff captain’s car. Ten miles from Namur he drove through Wavre which “only the day before when I passed through it had been a peaceful town. Now it was in flames. Here also the populace fired on our troops.”

At six that evening Ludendorff arrived at Coblenz. Within three hours he was briefed on the situation in the East, was received by Moltke, “who was looking tired,” and by the Kaiser, who was “very calm” but deeply affected by the invasion of East Prussia. Ludendorff issued certain orders to the Eighth Army and departed at 9:00
P.M.
by special train for the Eastern Front. The orders he issued, besides directing Hoffmann and Grünert to meet him at Marienburg, were for François’ Corps to be sent by train to support Scholtz’s XXth Corps on the southern front. Mackensen’s and von Below’s two corps were to complete their disengagement and rest and refit through August 23. These were the same as Hoffmann’s orders, thus realizing the ideal of the German War College in which all students, given a problem, come up with the identical
solution. It is also possible that Ludendorff saw a telegraphed copy of Hoffmann’s orders.

During the drive through Belgium, Ludendorff was told by the staff captain that as new Commander of the Eighth Army OHL had selected a retired general but it was not yet known whether he would accept the post. His name was Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg. Ludendorff did not know him. Before leaving Coblenz later that night, he learned that General von Hindenburg had been located, had accepted the post, and would board the train at Hanover next morning at 4:00
A.M.

After deciding on a Chief of Staff, OHL had turned to the problem of finding a commanding officer. Ludendorff, everybody felt, was certainly a man of undeniable ability, but to complete the pair it would be well to have a regular “von.” The names of various retired corps commanders were considered. Von Stein remembered a letter he had received from a former comrade on the outbreak of war, saying, “Don’t forget me if, as things develop, a commanding officer is needed anywhere,” and promising that the writer was “still robust.” Just the man. He came from an old Junker family established in Prussia for centuries. He had served on the General Staff under Schlieffen and risen through all the proper steps to become a corps chief of staff and subsequently a corps commander before retiring at sixty-five in 1911. He would be sixty-eight in two months but he was no older than Kluck, Bülow, and Hausen, the three generals of the right wing. What was wanted in the East, especially after Prittwitz’s panic, was a man of no nerves, and Hindenburg, throughout a solid, dependable career had been known for his imperturbability. Moltke approved; the Kaiser gave his consent. A telegram was dispatched to the retired general.

Hindenburg was at home in Hanover when at 3:00
P.M.
he received a telegram asking if he would accept “immediate employment.” He replied, “I am ready.” A second telegram instructed him to leave for the East at once to take command of the Eighth Army. OHL did not bother to invite him to Coblenz for talks. He was instructed to board the train at
Hanover and informed that his Chief of Staff would be General Ludendorff who would meet him on the train en route. Hindenburg had just time to be fitted for one of the new field-gray uniforms before departing, much to his embarrassment, in the old blue uniform of a Prussian general.

When the recall of Prittwitz was made public a few days later, the invaluable diarist, Princess Blücher, noted, “A General Hindenburg, quite an old man, has taken his place.” Newspaper editors hurriedly scraped together material about the new commander, which was difficult to find since he appeared under “Beneckendorff” in the Army list. They were gratified to discover that he had fought at Sedan where he received the Iron Cross, Second Class, and was also a veteran of the earlier war against Austria in 1866. His Beneckendorff ancestors were among the Teutonic Knights who had settled East Prussia; the name Hindenburg was a product of marriage connections in the eighteenth century. He was a native of Posen in West Prussia, and early in his career, as staff officer to the Ist Corps at Königsberg, had studied the military problems of the Masurian Lake district, a fact that was soon to become the germ of the legend that depicted Hindenburg planning the Battle of Tannenberg thirty years in advance. He had been brought up on his grandparents’ estate in Neudeck in West Prussia and remembered having had talks as a boy with an old gardener who had once worked two weeks for Frederick the Great.

He was waiting at the station in Hanover when the train drew in at four in the morning. General Ludendorff whom he had never met “stepped briskly” to the platform to report himself. On the way east he explained the situation and the orders he had already issued. Hindenburg listened and approved. So was born, on the way to the battle that was to make them famous, the combination, the “marriage” expressed in the mystic monogram
that was to rule imperial Germany until the end. When sometime later he was made a Field Marshal, Hindenburg earned the nickname “Marshal
Was-sagst-du
” because of his habit, whenever asked for an opinion, of
turning to Ludendorff and asking,
“Was sagst du?”
(What do you say?)

Characteristically the first person OHL thought to inform of the change in the Eighth Army command was the Director of Railways on the Eastern Front, Major-General Kersten. On the afternoon of August 22, even before the special train had started on its way, this officer came into Hoffmann’s office wearing “a very startled expression” and showed him a telegram announcing the arrival next day at Marienburg of an extra train bringing a new Commander and new Chief of Staff. That was how Prittwitz and Waldersee learned of their dismissal. An hour later Prittwitz received a personal telegram placing him and Waldersee on the “unattached list.” “He took leave of us,” says Hoffmann, “without a single word of complaint of this treatment.”

Ludendorff’s methods were no more tactful. Although he knew Hoffmann well, having lived in the same house with him in Berlin for four years when both were serving on the General Staff, he nevertheless telegraphed his orders to each of the corps commanders individually instead of through the Eighth Army Staff. This was not necessarily a deliberate effort to be offensive; it was normal for General Staff officers to be offensive. Hoffman and Grünert promptly felt insulted. The reception they tendered the new commanders at Marienburg was, says Ludendorff, “anything but cheerful.”

The critical question on which the fate of the campaign hung now had to be faced. Should Mackensen’s and von Below’s corps remain where they were for defense against a further advance by Rennenkampf or should they be moved south in accordance with Hoffmann’s plan to oppose Samsonov’s right wing? There was no hope of defeating Samsonov’s army except by the whole of the Eighth Army. François’ Corps on that day, August 23, was finishing the intricate process of entrainment at five different stations between Insterberg and Königsberg and was now en route to the southern front. It would take another two days of switchings and sidings and equally intricate detrainment before it would be in position to fight. Von Morgen’s division was also on its
way by a different line. Mackensen’s and von Below’s corps were halted for the day. Cavalry reconnaissance reported continued “passivity” on the part of Rennenkampf’s army. He was only separated from Mackensen and von Below by some thirty to forty miles, and if they were moved south against the other Russian army he could still—if he moved—follow and fall upon their rear. Hoffmann wanted Mackensen and von Below to start on their way at once. Ludendorff, barely thirty-six hours out of Namur and newly arrived in a situation in which a decision either way might be fatal and for which he would be responsible, was uncertain. Hindenburg, barely twenty-four hours out of retirement, was relying on Ludendorff.

On the Russian side the task of timing the pincers to close simultaneously upon the enemy tormented the higher command. So many and various, intractable and obvious were the stumbling blocks that the military chiefs were ridden with pessimism from the start. General Jilinsky, commander of the Northwest Front, whose function was to coordinate the movements of Rennenkampf’s and Samsonov’s armies, could think of no better way to perform it than by continued instructions to hurry. As Rennenkampf had started first and gone into action first, Jilinsky addressed all his hurry-up orders to Samsonov. At the same time Jilinsky himself was on the receiving end of a chain of ever more urgent pleas from the French. To relieve the pressure upon them in the West the French instructed their ambassador to “insist” upon the “necessity of the Russian armies prosecuting their offensive
à outrance
toward Berlin.” From Joffre to Paris, from Paris to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to “Stavka” (Russian General Headquarters at Baranovichi), from Stavka to Jilinsky the demands passed, and Jilinsky passed them all on to General Samsonov, struggling forward foot by foot through sand.

Since commanding a cavalry division in the Russo-Japanese War, this “simple and kindly man,” as the British liaison officer with the Second Army called him, had had no experience fitting him to command an army of thirteen divisions. He was working through a staff and divisional commanders unfamiliar
to him. Because the Russian Army was not organized on a regional basis, the newly reported reservists, numbering in some cases up to two-thirds of a regiment, were complete strangers to their NCOs and officers. The shortage of officers and the low, often nonexistent, level of literacy among the men did not ease the process of communicating orders down the line. Almost the worst confusion was in the signal corps. At the telegraph office in Warsaw a staff officer discovered to his horror a pile of telegrams addressed to the Second Army lying unopened and unforwarded because no communication had been established with field headquarters. The officer gathered them up and delivered them by car. Corps headquarters had only enough wire to connect with the divisional commands but not enough to connect with Army Headquarters or with neighboring corps. Hence the resort to wireless.

Because of the insistence on haste four days had been cut out of the period of concentration, leaving the organization of the rear services incomplete. One corps had to dole out its shells to another whose supply train had not come up, thus upsetting its own calculations. Bakery wagons were missing. To enable an army to live off the country in hostile territory, requisitioning parties were required to be sent ahead under cavalry escort, but no arrangements for this had been made. Single-horse power proved inadequate to pull wagons and gun carriages over the sandy roads. In some places the horses had to be unharnessed from half the wagons, hitched up in double harness to the other half, moved forward a certain distance, unhitched, brought back, harnessed up to the stranded wagons, and the process begun all over again.

“Hurry up the advance of the Second Army and hasten your operations as energetically as possible,” Jilinsky wired on August 19. “The delay in the advance of the Second Army is putting the First Army in a difficult position.” This was not true. Samsonov on the 19th was crossing the frontier on schedule, but Jilinsky was so sure it was going to be true that he was anticipating.

“Advancing according to timetable, without halting, covering
marches of more than 12 miles over sand. I cannot go more quickly,” Samsonov replied. He reported that his men were on the move for ten or twelve hours a day without halts. “I must have immediate and decisive operations,” Jilinsky telegraphed three days later. “Great weariness” of his men made greater speed impossible, Samsonov answered. “The country is devastated, the horses have long been without oats, there is no bread.”