François received this order at 2:30 p.m. Fifteen minutes later he started the 1st Division and Schmettau’s Force on the road to Neidenburg. Conta’s men were rested enough to be able to execute their mission with limited straggling—particularly when a corps staff officer drove along the column shouting that the Russians had been beaten and were on the run for the border. It was a textbook advance against light opposition, with artillery driving the Russians out of the few strong points they were able to organize before the infantry closed in. One battery even took thirty prisoners, who asked the gunners for an escort to protect them against further shelling! By midafternoon Conta’s 8th Uhlans had swung south of Neidenburg; the cavalry of the 2nd Division, the 10th Jäger zu Pferde, was advancing on the town from the west.
Around 4:00 p.m. François, hearing from one of his pilots that Neidenburg had been evacuated, drove forward with his staff to see for himself. Outside the town the caravan halted. Peering through his binoculars, François noticed “a few brown spots” in a nearby potato field. Then bullets started whistling past his ears. The officers took cover, but as the Russian fire grew heavier a passive defense seemed insufficient. Cars were ransacked for rifles. Majors and captains whose days on the small arms range were long behind them formed a skirmish line and tried to remember how to estimate ranges and set sights. Their world was turned right side up again when a cavalry detachment arrived on the scene, dismounted, and drove the Russians off. François, zeal undiminished, ordered his rescuers to bypass Neidenburg to the south and head for Willenburg and the Russian supply trains. He agreed to wait for his own infantry before entering the town.
The first foot soldiers on the scene were the men of Schmettau’s Force. His battalions had helped take Soldau early in the morning, then had covered the twenty-five kilometers to Neidenburg without a halt. But instead of allowing the East Prussians to spend the night in Neidenburg François told Schmettau to move through the city, bivouac at Muschaken, and advance on Willenberg as early as possible the next day.57 Around 7:00 p.m. the German vanguard entered Neidenburg after exchanging a few shots with Russian stragglers. Schmettau’s Landser turned their march into a victory parade, cheered to the echo by the civilians remaining in the town. During the day some unknown patriots had hoisted two huge German flags on the municipal fire house. When ordered to remove them Mayor Kuhn refused, saying that he had not put them there. Kuhn abandoned his schoolboy defiance in the face of a drawn pistol. He now had the satisfaction of seeing the erstwhile Russian town commandant a crestfallen prisoner. The 1st Jäger Battalion occupied the municipal hospital, one of the few principal buildings undamaged and unlooted. They found a large number of German wounded, including some of their own comrades captured at Orlau and Lahna. These men were loud in praise of the treatment they had received from the Russians. One young lieutenant, his face cruelly mutilated, had even had a sentry posted at the door of his room to ward off the curious and the ghoulish.
François, finally able to set up his corps headquarters at Neidenburg, received an unexpected reinforcement at 7:30 p.m. when I Corps’s own Lost Battalion, the II/4th Grenadiers, arrived on the last lap of its erratic odyssey and was put to work rounding up stragglers. Its commander faced the task of reporting and explaining himself to an unsympathetic François. About the same time, Mayor Kuhn, body and spirit alike tried by his recent experiences, stopped to rest in the hotel housing François’s staff when his eye was taken by a sight unseen for nine full days in Neidenburg: a keg of beer, prominently displayed at the bar. Kuhn promptly ordered a glass, and was just as promptly stopped from drinking it by a carmine-striped major. “How did you get the beer?” asked that gentleman. “The general staff brought it for itself. You’ll have to forego the pleasure.” The officer took the glass from Kuhn’s hand and walked into the hotel dining room. The incident tells more about the social dynamics of Imperial Germany than many a learned and footnoted volume—not only by itself, but because Andreas Kuhn described and recorded it with neither indignation nor irony.58
Meanwhile the war went on for other men to whom beer had long been a memory. Schmettau’s riflemen finally bivouacked at 3:00 a.m. on August 29 in and around the village of Muschaken. The 1st Division’s 2nd Brigade reached Neidenburg around midnight. The 1st Brigade halted south of the town, its men exhausted from up to eight hours of stop-and-go marching on secondary roads and tracks.
Falk’s 2nd Division had spent a day less spectacular and less successful. It was opposed only by the Keksgolmski Regiment of the 3rd Russian Guard Division, three batteries, and a depleted brigade of the 6th Cavalry Division. But for once the Russian cavalry provided an effective screen, keeping the Germans from discovering how weak the enemy in front of them really was. The Keksgolmski Regiment, which had been detached from its parent formation to support the hard-hammered 2nd Division, put up a stout fight against superior numbers in its first action of the war. The guardsmen had dug individual foxholes and small rifle pits instead of trenches. Their officers knew enough to ensure the positions were well-sited for mutual support. The 2nd Division emptied its cartridge pouches firing at shadows, neither reaching its assigned objective of Grünfliess nor making contact with the 41st Division.59
Russian resistance in Falk’s sector was facilitated by German inactivity further north. The army order issued at 1:30 p.m. ordered XX Corps to attack “in the direction of Lahna-Kurken.” Seven minutes later Scholtz instructed the 41st Division to advance on Orlau and the 3rd Reserve Division on Kurken. The Goltz Division and the 37th were to secure the corps left flank against the Russians presumably coming from Allenstein. Sontag demurred. He informed the staff officer who deliverd Scholtz’s order that his troops were physically and emotionally exhausted, that the Russians in his sector were well dug in, and that he had no intention of ordering or leading another attack that day. Everywhere his men lay asleep, rousing only to laugh skeptically at reports of victory in other sectors. The staff was more exhausted than the line. Too many nights spent redrafting orders had finally taken their toll. The 41st Division stayed in place until evening. Then, far from advancing, it withdrew to bivouacs up to five kilometers behind the front line.
In Scholtz’s center, Unger’s garrison troops and elements of the 3rd Reserve Division made slow but steady progress against Russian resistance that softened with the waning day. Martos’s corps was almost fought out. Not even local reserves remained to plug gaps in the fighting line. As water bottles, haversacks, and cartridge pouches emptied, hands went up. Almost two thousand Russians surrendered to the 70th Landwehr Brigade. Unger proudly looked on as his middle-aged warriors marched off their prisoners. The Russians on Morgen’s front were also showing signs of wavering. Galloping forward, Morgen grandiloquently informed a cavalry major that he was getting a true cavalryman’s mission. “Do you see those retreating Russians? Follow them!” The orders were worthy of a Murat, but the troops obeying them were saddle-sore peacetime soldiers, Landwehr men and ersatz reservists. The major in command was dubious at the prospects of achieving anything before nightfall. The cavalry boldly charged through one Russian bivouac area, then lost its way in the growing darkness and began stumbling into ambushes.