Below had ordered his divisions to advance “as far as possible,” and not until after midnight did the exhausted and hungry men of I Reserve Corps finally break contact. Kitchens were long since left behind. Emergency rations were long since consumed, with or without authorization. Men broke out of uneasy sleep to empty their rifles into the darkness. The cannoneers of at least one field battery spent the night under the partial protection of their gun shields, as spent and unspent bullets rang against the steel from all directions.7
XVII Corps had a no less trying afternoon and evening. Max Hoffmann supplemented his face-to-face conversation with Bartenwerfer by giving Major Schwerin of the corps staff a detailed briefing over the phone. Mackensen’s first response was a long-distance call to Frögenau in which he expressed his views on the need for even senior officers to make up their minds. He then turned to—and on—his division commanders, informing them XVII Corps was to use everything resembling a road to reach Jedwabno and Ortelsburg as fast as possible and at any necessary cost.8
Mackensen might not have been the army’s brightest intellectual light, but he was a driver and his men were ready to respond. Since midmorning rumors of great victories in the south had been spreading through the ranks of XVII Corps. Now staff officers rode from headquarters to headquarters with the information that the corps was marching in pursuit of a beaten enemy. Knapsacks were abandoned or thrown onto wagons. Infantry clung to gun carriages and stirrup leathers. But zeal was no substitute for system. The day was hot enough to produce mass sunstroke if everyone tried to march as long as he could move his legs. Infantry officers looked with speculative eyes on their supply trains. Typical was the experience of the 5th Grenadiers. Two companies and part of a third jammed themselves, their rifles and knapsacks into a mixture of army wagons and commandeered civilian vehicles. At the head of the column, burning with eagerness, Captain Lilie of the regiment’s fusilier battalion gave the order: “Forward!” But he started his convoy in the wrong direction, towards Allenstein. In the confusion someone had failed to pass the word that XVII Corps was now headed the opposite way! Finally the matter was sorted out, and Lilie’s task force moved south at a brisk trot. As long as the Germans remained on the high road all went well. But after a few kilometers their route led onto a sandy, rutted side road that seemed to go up and down the steepest part of every hill in East Prussia. Wagon after wagon got stuck or tipped over. The passengers spent so much time freeing or righting their transport that they were overtaken by the rest of the regiment and retransformed into workaday marching infantry.9
Local initiatives were supplemented by more orthodox flying columns—a squadron or two of cavalry, a battalion of artillery, and a hundred or so riflemen as local security, mounted on the gun limbers or riding in trucks commandeered from the supply trains. What these forces lacked in strength, they were expected to make up in speed. Horses dropped dead in their traces. Men collapsed from heat exhaustion beside them, or fell asleep on their feet, staggering forward until they collided with someone in the next rank. Unlimber and deploy, open fire, fall in, and push on until the cavalry reported another target, until a burst of Russian fire meant dispatching patrols to clear woods or farm buildings. Day gave way to a night that seemed bitterly cold to exhausted men drenched in sweat. But at 3:00 a.m. on August 29, a squadron of the 35th Division’s 4th Jäger zu Pferde rode into an Ortelsburg only recently abandoned by the Russians. An hour later a ragtag group of men on foot, led by a detachment of gunners whose horses had long since given out, stumbled in to reinforce the troopers. The XVII Corps was at last moving in the right direction.10
Events on the German side of the line on August 28 were a microcosm of the World War I—an often random, almost antic mixture of old and new, of modern technology and traditional histrionics, of orders disregarded as irrelevant and orders obeyed too well. A general pushing forward aggressively by auto had to be rescued by horse cavalry. An airplane became an instrument of direct command in a manner prefiguring Vietnam while whole divisions lost touch with higher headquarters. An army corps spent most of the day marching back and forth in a manner that would have guaranteed a spate of early retirements had it happened in a maneuver. Yet despite this series of fiascoes the 8th Army’s staff began to relax by the end of the afternoon. They did so with a certain relief at having avoided disaster—not all of it in the field.
Both Scholtz and Hermann Hoth, then a lieutenant on the army staff, described Ludendorff as receiving during the morning of August 28 an unsubstantiated report that Rennenkampf was advancing southward. He responded by proclaiming that the battle against Samsonov would have to be broken off and the 8th Army turned against Rennenkampf if anything was to be saved. Hindenburg took his chief of staff by the arm and led him behind a hedge. They talked for a few minutes. When they returned Hindenburg calmly said that operations would be carried out as planned.
For those officers unreassured by Hindenburg’s confidence, at 4:10 p.m the governor of Königsberg reported that though “apparently” three Russian corps were marching westward, their main bodies were still well behind the Alle River. This meant the bulk of Rennenkampf’s army faced a seventy-kilometer march to the battle zone. As for Samsonov’s forces, according to the best information available to the 8th Army, their left flank, I Corps, was fleeing south. The 2nd Army’s center, two and a half corps, was pinned in the woods between Allenstein and Neidenburg. On the Russian right, VI Corps had retreated beyond Ortelsburg. The army staff nevertheless took discretion as valor’s better part, and decided to leave only I and XX Corps and the 3rd Reserve Division to continue the pursuit of the 2nd Army on August 29. Goltz’s Landwehr and Unger’s garrison troops, who had fought better than anyone expected, were ordered to move into reserve. The I Reserve Corps and XVII Corps would remain in the north, deployed behind Allenstein to meet the 1st Army should it appear unexpectedly. This proposed disposition contradicted the orders given Mackensen at 2:35 p.m. to drive south as fast as possible. But since no one at army headquarters had any real idea of the situation of either Bülow or Mackensen’s corps, the new orders were initially not sent to Ostgruppe.11
At 5:30 p.m. on August 28, Ludendorff started to dictate the text. He began, according to Hoffmann, with the words, “Frögenau—leave the exact time open.” Hoffmann instead suggested that Ludendorff should use as the place the name of the historic village in front of them—Tannenberg.12 Five centuries earlier, in 1410, a Polish-Lithuanian army had smashed the forces of the Teutonic Knights in a battle symbolizing the end of Germanic eastward expansion. As the history and mythology of the Teutonic Knights grew to be a major subject of study and popularization in the Second Empire the battle had become correspondingly familiar to Germans.13 For anyone who might have overlooked it, the five hundredth anniversary had been thoroughly observed, with suitable contemporary allusions, both in Russia and among Germany’s Polish community. Scholtz saw the connection as clearly as Hoffmann. Ludendorff, after a few moments’ reflection, decided it was a fine idea. The stain of an ancient defeat would be blotted out by a modern victory; the Teutonic Knights would be avenged.