Unaware of the situation to their rear, Martos’s infantry and artillery, with what remained of the 2nd Division, began abandoning their forward positions late on the 28th. Kluyev’s predicament was even worse. During the day his corps had engaged Germans coming from north, east, and west. His trains had been overrun and scattered, with only the small consolation that most of the supply wagons were empty. To stand his ground was to invite destruction. Kluyev decided that his best alternative was to pull his corps together and push south in the direction of Martos’ guns. Then around midnight on the 28th he received orders from Samsonov. The XIII Corps was to move eastward to Kurken, and expect “further instructions.”
Implementing these orders involved significant risks. The locations of Kluyev’s regiments by the evening of August 28 condemned them to night marches over sandy secondary roads in order to thread a needle. Kurken was a crossroads—but a crossroads that lay in the midst of a half-dozen lakes. The routes to the village were easily barred, and obvious targets for German artillery. In particular the Schlaga-Mühle causeway, between Little Plautzinger Lake and Stau Lake, was the only way from Grieslienen and Mörken to Kurken. Block it, and the elements of XIII Corps that had performed so well against Goltz and Morgen would be isolated prey for their enemies.
The Russian army never encouraged the kind of initiative among its subordinates that might lead to the creative disobedience of a François. For Kluyev the move to Kurken was the line of least resistance in more ways than one. His original intention to march south would involve fighting his way through the Germans around Hohenstein, while the way to Kurken was as yet unobstructed. But as XIII Corps prepared to retreat, Below’s reservists were also on the move.26
The revised army order of 10:00 p.m. was late in reaching Below’s headquarters. Rather than risk its interception or misunderstanding by using the radio or the telephone, Ludendorff had sent Drechsel back by car. He arrived around 2:00 a.m. on August 29 with the new orders, and almost certainly with the verbal information that Hindenburg and Ludendorff were anything but pleased at the situation in Below’s sector. The corps commander had reservations of his own. Below had already ordered both of his divisions to advance toward Hohenstein as early as possible the next morning without regard for straggling. This sharp contrast to Below’s usual concern for the condition of his men indicated his desire to complete on the 29th what he had expected, and been expected, to do on the 28th. Now he was supposed to send half his corps away from the fighting, towards Jedwabno, in the middle of nowhere in particular. Despite Hindenburg’s strictures on obedience, Below decided that both his divisions were too far west and too closely engaged with the Russians to be dispatched on this particular excursion. Instead he detached two independent battalions, the 1st and 2nd Reserve Jäger, and a machine-gun company, supported by two Landwehr squadrons and six guns. The senior officer of this improvised force, a captain, was told to advance not to Jedwabno, but toward Kurken, fifteen kilometers further west and correspondingly closer to the main body of the corps should his detachment need support.27
Below’s initiatives suggest that he was expecting a harder fight than army headquarters thought likely. Initially he was not mistaken. The I Reserve Corps advanced down the Allenstein-Hohenstein road at first light, the 1st Reserve Division in the lead, picking up enemy stragglers on the way. Around 7:00 a.m., south of Grieslienen, the corps encountered the first serious Russian resistance and stuck fast. Below brought up his artillery—two field regiments and the pride of I Reserve Corps, a nonregulation battalion of heavy howitzers borrowed from the Königsberg garrison. The Germans even managed, for one of the few times in the campaign, to put up a balloon. Below’s operations officer, an artilleryman by training, shed rank, years, and dignity to climb an observation ladder and direct fire when he suddenly saw even more lucrative targets coming into range from the west.28
Around 5:00 a.m. the battalions of Goltz’s Landwehr bivouacked south of Mörken had observed columns of Russians moving over the Schlaga-Mühle causeway. Their commander promptly sent his men forward to occupy the road and cut the Russian line of retreat. Shortly afterward the 6th Reserve Brigade also attacked towards Mörken, under orders from Morgen to push across the causeway. Then the 37th Division came on the scene with a commander burning to make good the previous day’s fiasco. Its vanguard advanced through Hohenstein, now ablaze from German and Russian shelling, while the Landwehr and reservists fought through the woods south of Schlaga-Mühle. Kluyev’s riflemen made the Germans pay for every yard of ground. Russian guns firing over open sights broke up advance after advance, defying the best efforts of Staabs’s batteries to silence them. Two Landwehr battalions finally reached the Schlaga-Mühle causeway, but lost their commanding officers in the process and were too badly disorganized to push further. The XIII Corps, in short, was fighting another model rear-guard action—until the artillery of I Reserve Corps took a hand.
At 10:30 a.m. sixty-six German light guns and sixteen 150-millimeter howitzers opened fire simultaneously. Russians scattered in all directions. Driverless wagons and riderless horses careened through the fields. Gun crews fell around their suddenly silenced pieces. Yet detachments and organized units continued to put up a desperate fight, ignoring or overlooking the surrender tokens raised by their comrades. Would-be German parliamentarians were shot down beneath their flags of truce. In Hohenstein, snipers and stragglers continued to take toll of the careless and the unlucky. Goltz and his staff came under such heavy rifle fire on entering the town that the general personally organized a house-to-house mop-up. As the Landwehr and elements of I Reserve Corps cleared out other pockets of resistance, Morgen’s division pushed through the tangled mass of guns and wagons on the causeway to open the way for pursuit towards Kurken. By 2:00 p.m. the fighting in this sector was over. Germans who the day before had sworn vengeance for dead comrades were plying Russian prisoners with cigars and sweets. At least one group of Russians feared to eat the chocolate they were given, begging to be shot rather than be poisoned by “that brown stuff.”29
As German privates enjoyed proof of their cultural superiority, as captains and colonels sorted out their formations, as generals congratulated each other, Ludendorff, accompanied by Max Hoffmann, suddenly appeared on the scene. In the course of the morning his headquarters had grown uncomfortably warm. At 8:40 a.m. the army’s telegraph service received a message from the Zeppelin base at Königsberg. It reported that a reconnaissance flight, begun around midnight and ending at 6:00 a.m., had observed Russian bivouac fires as far west as Preussisch-Eylau. Perhaps they had only been made by cavalry patrols. But the Zeppelin’s commander declared that his ship had been under heavy infantry and artillery fire during the entire flight, and the gas bag and the gondola had enough holes to sustain his description. Twenty minutes later the signallers reported another dispatch from Königsberg. Sent at 7:35 a.m. but delayed in transmission, it was an intercepted order to Rennenkampf from the Northwest Front. The 2nd Army was hard pressed; Rennenkampf was to send infantry and cavalry to Samsonov’s support—just how many, or which units, could not be deciphered from the message.30