Recognizing that some of these men would from the beginning of mobilization be performing officers’ duties, the army created for them the rank of deputy officer (Offizierstellvertreter). The concept was not unique to Germany. During World War II the British army experimented with something similar, the warrant rank of platoon sergeant major, to remedy a shortage of lieutenants. More recently, the U.S. army spared itself the institutional and economic costs of a permanently expanded officer corps by deciding to have most of its helicopters flown by warrant officers.
In a short war the German compromise might have worked. Most of the OSV’s would have been returned to civilian life too quickly for serious friction to develop with the career officer corps. Discrepancies in benefits and status would have been obscured by common enthusiasm for the national cause. The actual result during World War I was to create a class of men whose status and problems were similar to enlisted pilots in the U.S. Navy or Britain’s Royal Air Force three decades later: neither fish nor fowl, with harmony depending so heavily on mutual good will and mutual common sense that both the latter services ultimately ended the anomaly by commissioning all their pilots. But if in August, 1914, a lieutenant of infantry would not lead his men across a bridge under fire, an Offizierstellvertreter of pioneers had two reasons for doing so: the honor of his rank and the honor of his branch of service.
The men of Company 3 rose to their leader’s whistle and charged. No one got more than halfway across. As bodies piled up on the road and the planking, even the fire-eating Benecke conceded that any more attempts with the resources at hand would be an irresponsible waste of life. With no reinforcements in sight more and more of the Germans in Waplitz abandoned the fighting line, seeking shelter from artillery and snipers in cellars or in the rubble of destroyed buildings. The explanation of being out of ammunition was so commonly offered and accepted that it suggests a more or less unconscious collusion. If no one had anything left to shoot, everyone was spared from making a heroic last stand. Around noon, as Russian patrols drew closer, the Germans smashed their rifles, broke their swords, and hoisted the white flag. A private committed suicide with one of the few remaining cartridges in Waplitz. Over three hundred of his comrades marched into Russian captivity.
The 148th and 152nd also began to dissolve. Men shouted that they were out of ammunition. Others sought the chance to assist slightly wounded comrades out of the line. One officer rallied a batch of stragglers, put them through a few minutes of close-order drill, then led them back to the front. Sontag, however, did not regard the situation as salvageable by Frederician heroics. Instead of shoving open the door to the Russian rear as intended, his battalions were being squeezed into a pocket. Russian company and battalion commanders were mounting increasingly aggressive local counterattacks into the gaps between Sontag’s units. The 41st Division seemed uncomfortably on the point of being trapped, faced with the task of turning about and cutting its way out. Rather than accept the risk, Sontag ordered his men back to their original lines of departure.41
This meant squeezing through a two-and-a-half-kilometer gap between the Mühlen Lake and the Russians—a gap that narrowed as more and more Russian infantry learned what was happening, a gap that threatened to become a killing ground. Before 1914 Europe’s artillerymen had hotly debated the relative advantages of covered and open firing positions. The British, responding to their experiences against Boer marksmen, tended to favor concealment. The French advocated seeking the best field of fire and silencing any opposition with rafales from Mademoiselle Soixante-Quinze. The Germans, as was so often the case, were somewhere in the middle. Germany’s artillery theorists recognized that dead gunners and knocked-out pieces could support nothing, but they also accepted the argument that at certain crucial points, even in a modern battle, the infantry needed tangible proof that it was not fighting alone. Whether to support the last stages of an attack, to screen the beginning of a retreat, or just to attract enemy attention, the guns would sometimes have to break cover.42
Now, as the Germans fell back from Waplitz, the batteries of Sontag’s 35th Field Artillery offered themselves as an alternative target. Taking positions in the open, they drew Russian fire while intimidating Russian infantry with their own shrapnel. Their sacrifice enabled the infantry to survive as a more or less organized force. In only three hours the 41st Division had lost over 2,400 men as casualties or stragglers.
At first neither XX Corps nor army headquarters knew anything about this defeat. The sounds of heavy firing from around Waplitz were not accompanied by the kind of movement in the Russian positions, suggesting a German breakthrough in the south. Sontag, however, was in no hurry to report the details of his embarrassing situation. Then at 8:00 a.m. Scholtz received an unexpected message. The Germans around Mühlen were attacking on their own initiative.43
Kurt von Morgen was another of 8th Army’s atypical generals. A picture taken four years later shows a thick-set, jowly man, the ribbon of the Iron Cross in his buttonhole and the Pour le Mérite at his throat, staring into the middle distance with an expression more determined than sympathetic. Born in 1858, his peacetime career suggested a taste for the exotic. He had varied routine garrison duty with a period as chief of a research expedition to the Cameroons, and also served briefly as a military attaché in Turkey. Ennobled only in 1904, he was eager for further honors and confident in the men he led—the equivalent by now of over two divisions. The 70th Landwehr Brigade was deployed east of Mühlen. Two active battalions of the 37th Division held the town itself; the 69th Garrison Brigade extended the line to the north. Morgen’s own 3rd Reserve Division was echeloned north and west behind the main front.
Since 4:00 a.m. the whole force had been standing to arms. Hours passed, yet no news arrived of Sontag’s advance. Morgen’s impatience was heightened by the rapid lifting of the fog he hoped would mask his attack. Finally he decided to go forward on his own. On his left the 6th Reserve Brigade was sent forward through the Jablonken forest to find the Russian right flank and roll it up. The other three brigades would attack the Russians frontally, holding them in place for the blow. It was a textbook solution, not particularly original or imaginative, but presumably well within the capacities of Morgen’s men and their recycled officers to execute. At 7:00 a.m., Morgen’s guns opened on the Russian positions; his infantry advanced thirty minutes later.
Morgen, aware that he was ignoring his orders, waited until the movement was well under way before notifying corps headquarters. Scholtz and his staff were unwilling to run the risk of disorganizing a sector they saw as threatened by calling Morgen back. But neither could they send troops to support him, and within an hour Morgen needed all the help he could get. His reservists were fighting from memories of active service during profound peace. They had none of the field howitzers whose fire was so useful in silencing Russian guns on other parts of the front. The 69th and 70th Brigades did little more than stab at their assigned objectives east of Mühlen. The 5th Reserve Brigade paid a stiff price to capture the village of Dröbnitz from Russian defenders that fought almost to the last man. One battalion lost all four of its company commanders and over two hundred men—casualties reflecting the reservists’ lack of skill at mopping-up operations. Under heavy fire from bypassed positions, the brigade was painfully slow to reorganize and continue advancing towards its next objectives.