This information came near to precipitating another crisis at 8th Army headquarters. Opposed to the Russians stood only two brigades of the 1st Cavalry Division and, far to the north, the 6th Landwehr Brigade. A half-dozen small towns were garrisoned by small detachments. Against this weak cordon the whole 1st Army could be advancing. Suddenly it seemed that any hour might see at least Russian cavalry in 8th Army’s wide-open rear.
What exactly had become of the Russian 1st Army? It had spent two days recovering from its victory at Gumbinnen, burying the dead and evacuating the wounded, replenishing ammunition and replacing officer casualties. On August 23 its advance resumed. By the 26th, the Russians had moved no farther than fifty miles against no more than the token resistance offered by scattered patrols and detachments. This slowness was a product of both tactical and operational decisions. Rennenkampf’s cavalry remained committed to dismounting in the face of a few rifle shots, despite the fact that the situation prefigured Palestine in 1918 rather than Cambrai in 1917. The Russians faced no complex network of prepared defenses, no impassable concentrations of firepower—only scattered detachments of home guards and rear guards. Opportunities for going around instead of going through were virtually unlimited. But Barrows, Macandrews, and Light Horse Harry Chauvels are not always available at need. The troopers who might have overtaken the retreating Germans, and who certainly would have given their generals some anxious moments, remained tied to the main body—tied so closely that even junior officers wondered at their superiors’ caution.31
At command level Rennenkampf was not a simple victim of his own inertia. A school of thought on the American Civil War holds that Union generals in the eastern theater suffered from a massive inferiority complex vis-à-vis their Confederate opposite numbers. This factor is presented as contributing to many southern military successes. Equivalent attitudes were not widespread in the Russian high command at this stage of the war. Like Samsonov, Rennenkampf respected his German counterparts. He did not concede that they were better generals in command of better troops—nor, based on the course of events to date, did he have any convincing reason to believe that. What Rennenkampf was doing was attempting to lead from strength. For all its prewar talk of mobility the Russian army of 1914 was not an ideal instrument for a proto-blitzkrieg. Its familiar image as a steamroller reflected structural realities in which haste was indeed likely to make waste. Rennenkampf’s attitude after Gumbinnen prefigured to a degree that of Montgomery after El Alamein. Maintaining the initiative did not mean preserving direct contact. Instead of challenging the Germans on their own terms, the process that was proving so costly to Samsonov, the better part of wisdom in Rennenkampf’s mind involved positioning 1st Army to deliver a single sledgehammer blow to end the campaign once and for all. Whether the decisive battle took place east or west of the Vistula was less important than its nature.
Then on the morning of August 26, Rennenkampf received new orders from the Northwest Front. Two of his corps were to blockade Königsberg. The rest of the army, two corps and the cavalry, were to pursue the Germans who had not taken refuge in the fortress. Zhilinski and his staff were certain at this point that neither the 1st nor the 2nd Armies had anything to fear from the apparently defeated and demoralized Germans. Dividing Rennenkampf’s army in the fashion ordered meant great strains on the already shaky services of supply. More seriously, however, Zhilinski’s orders created an attitude loop. They reinforced at Rennenkampf’s headquarters an impression largely created at Northwest Front by Rennenkampf’s reports from Gumbinnen: the Germans were retreating in disorder. By emphasizing the blockade of Königsberg, Zhilinski proposed to hold the 1st Army back while the 2nd pushed northwest as Samsonov proposed to do, driving the Germans onto Rennenkampf’s guns.
Rennenkampf, though less than pleased with the division of his forces, responded by ordering his right-flank corps, III and XX, to prepare to turn north, cross the Deime River, and besiege Königsberg. The IV and II Corps were to continue their advance westward. In his army order number 4, Rennenkampf declared that the army must not be halted for lack of bread. Vegetables and potatoes gathered along the line of march would replace the temporarily missing staple. Victory, declared the commander, is in the legs. More or less responding to the exhortation, IV Corps reached the area of Friedland-Allenburg and II Corps Gerdauen-Rastenburg on August 27. Both formations were still a good distance from Samsonov’s operational sector, but close enough, as has been seen, to unnerve the Germans at regular intervals.
Any possibility that the 1st Army might move from the realm of psychological intimidation ended when Rennenkampf received another telegram from Zhilinski on the night of August 27. It declared that the troops defeated on the 1st Army’s front on August 20 had been moved south by rail, and were now attacking the 2nd Army. Rennenkampf was ordered to assist Samsonov by advancing his own left wing as far south as possible. The dispatch reflected, however, little substantive anxiety about the 2nd Army’s position. Had Zhilinski been really concerned, he could have assigned Rennenkampf specific geographic objectives farther south. He could have ordered his subordinate to advance by forced marches—a method whose shortcomings scarcely deterred its regular employment by subordinate Russian generals in the Tannenberg campaign. Instead Zhilinski merely instructed the advance of the 1st Army’s left into the area he also expected the 2nd to reach within the next few days. This was hardly an encouragement for Rennenkampf to move southward with any haste, particularly in the context of a follow-up order from Northwest Front prescribing in great detail the procedures to be followed in besieging Königsberg—still the 1st Army’s principal objective in the mind of the Northwest Front’s commander.
Rennenkampf and Zhilinski have been so universally excoriated for their lack of insight during the Tannenberg campaign that it seems appropriate to stress the fact that neither general had any reason to assume the 2nd Army faced any problems it would be unable to solve with its own resources. The German order of battle was known, and events on the western front precluded any likelihood of significant reinforcements being stamped out of the ground. In a worst-case scenario, four German corps, at least two of them roughly handled at Gumbinnen, plus a mélange of second-line garrison and fortress troops, faced four Russian active corps. The German army might be good, but to accept it as so much better than one’s own that even odds were too great was the kind of mind-set no army can afford at the beginning of a war. Northwest Front’s telegram, intercepted by the Germans as noted above and received by 1st Army at 7:00 a.m. on August 29, did not suggest an emergency, much less a disaster. And when it was cancelled four hours later, Rennenkampf received no information no more specific than the bald fact that the 2nd Army had retreated.32