At around 6:00 p.m. the infantry took over. With the 41st Division unwilling to move, Scholtz gave its assignment to Morgen. Instad of going east towards Kurken the 3rd Reserve Division was turned southeast towards Orlau. The 5th Reserve Brigade advanced almost without opposition, bivouacking for the night on the ground over which the 59th Infantry had fought in the morning and liberating around two hundred German wounded left behind in the 41st Division’s collapse. But in this sector the Germans had, in the final analysis, pushed their enemy back rather than broken through.60
The men of the 37th Division had spent most of the forenoon battling bad roads and leg weariness rather than Russians. Staabs had no idea where the enemy was—only vague orders to advance east against what was “probably” no more than a weak force. He took correspondingly few chances. Unlike Morgen, Staabs moved his brigades forward in deployed lines covered by unlimbered guns. Then at 11:20 a.m., a messenger arrived from Morgen stating that the 3rd Reserve Division was heavily engaged and the 37th Division’s line of advance was clear. Staabs suddenly became aware not only that he was missing a major battle, but that the brunt of the action was being borne by reservists. He shook his men into column and started them down the road to Hohenstein at the fastest pace they could sustain—or that their general assumed they could sustain. Men marched open-mouthed in the heat, gasping for air as their tongues swelled and their mouths filled with dust. At every halt men fought for a chance to drink the cloudy water of roadside ditches. Men asked each other, where were the water carts? Where were the rations? The German army was a citizen army, for all its vaunted iron discipline. As Staabs rode past the columns of the 150th Infantry he was greeted by shouts of “Kohldampf! Kohldampf!” (“We’re starving! We’re starving!”) from the ranks. He was soldier enough to know when to hear nothing.
The division’s vanguard reached the high ground west of Hohenstein around 3:00 p.m. The 37th Field Artillery Brigade formed a gun line and opened fire on the landscape to its front as the infantry struggled through the heat and dust, to deploy as skirmishers. Joined by two stray batteries from the 70th Landwehr Brigade and a battery of 150-millimeter howitzers, the German guns drew Russian fire from everywhere in the sector. Some infantrymen fell so sound asleep that their snoring seemed to drown out the sound of bursting shrapnel. Those still conscious began digging themselves in with an eagerness foreign to maneuvers. The 150th Infantry’s colonel was inspecting his forward positions when he was greeted by a salvo of 122-millimeter Russian shells. He seized a spade, shoveled like a badger after each series of explosions, and popped into his fast-deepening hole at the whistle of the next incoming rounds. Everyone else was too busy or too frightened to laugh.
Compared to the Russians, the German artillery’s target acquisition left much to be desired. Within minutes Goltz sent a staff officer to report that the 37th Division was firing on his Landwehr, and would Staabs please desist. Major-General von Staabs was one of the Imperial army’s educated soldiers, with extensive service in the general staff and in the war ministry. He had spent his life preparing for these days, only to see his division repeatedly split up and marched to exhaustion in response to threats that had proved mostly imaginary. Now he bade fair to miss the climactic battle of the campaign. By the time Goltz’s liaison officer reached him, Staabs was on the edge of explosion. The unfortunate captain compounded the problem because he was not wearing the staff officer’s uniform that lent weight to critical messages. Staabs “suggested” that the Landwehr was blocking the advance of his division, then demanded that Goltz move his men out of the way so the 37th could attack.
After the war Staabs professed not to remember the incident—a memory lapse perhaps assisted by his division’s failure to support the Goltz Division more effectively during the afternoon of August 28. Goltz had originally intended to attack south with the bulk of his force. Instead he found himself facing east as well, feeding companies and battalions into the Kämmerei-Wald to protect his flank against growing Russian pressure from the forward elements of XIII Corps.
Goltz, a cool head and a solid professional, kept at least his staff calm by cracking jokes, but morale was no substitute for rifles in the fighting line. A Landwehr battery advanced at the gallop to the south end of the Kömmerei-Wald, unlimbered in the open, and blasted the Russians back into the forest. But the gunners, whose experience was seldom less than a decade old, were less successful when it came to hitting targets they could not see. Fighting from tree to tree, the Landwehr infantry kept contact by singing and shouting to each other. Time and again the familiar Hamburg rallying cry, “Hummel, Hummel,” and the equally familiar obscene response, served as password and countersign for men blinded by smoke and sweat. But the Germans steadily lost ground to their younger and fitter adversaries. When Goltz rode forward to rally his men, his personal staff was scattered to the points of the compass by a sudden Russian charge. Unlike their comrades of the active reserve, the Landwehr had no machine guns to provide close fire support. They fell back, leaving not only the Kömmerei-Wald but the village of Mörken in the hands of XIII Corps. Goltz’s division was cut in half, its companies and battalions scattered almost at random across the sector, when darkness ended the fighting.61
Goltz’s downcast staff officers settled for the night with the sense of having taken a beating. Ludendorff, with the advantage of hindsight, could afford to be more generous. The Landwehr had performed a mission prewar planners regarded as appropriate only for active troops or first-line reservists. They held off an army corps and barred its road to the south. Yet a fresh Russian brigade might have given Goltz’s division, and by extension the whole German position in that sector, much more than a sense of guilt. As things stood on the night of August 28, the 2nd Army’s center had not broken. Its flanks had been shaken. It had been pushed back. But disaster was to overtake it only on the next day, and only through the efforts of troops other than those on its immediate front.
9
The Province of Victory
I
At 1:20 a.m. on August 28, one of Mackensen’s staff officers telephoned army headquarters to report the Russian VI Corps in full retreat. Over two thousand prisoners and two complete batteries of artillery were in German hands. Fifty more Russian guns were reported bogged down and abandoned. Mackensen hoped this information would convince Hindenburg and Ludendorff to allow XVII Corps to continue its pursuit south instead of marching on Allenstein. “I do not believe it possible,” he declared, “that we will go still further back tomorrow.” But this ambiguous, not to say incoherent, statement was as far as he went in questioning what he believed were his orders.
Army headquarters responded with no more than a question mark in the margin of the message’s written version. The lateness of the hour probably had as much to do with the confusion as did Mackensen’s diffidence. The results were the same. Mackensen ordered his divisions to turn towards Allenstein. Even the detachments which had gone south ahead of the main body were called back—all except for one advancing on Ortelsburg, as directly prescribed by orders.1