Ludendorff responded to the morning’s news of Rennenkampf by hedging his bets and taking the field. At 12:20 p.m. he telephoned Koblenz to declare the battle won, with five army corps and three cavalry divisions the victims of German prowess. But, he declared, the predicted encirclement of two Russian corps could not now be expected to succeed. The bag of prisoners was less than it might have been had the extremely “nervous” German corps been properly handled.33
After this blast at his subordinates Ludendorff left for Hohenstein. The mere sight of the crowds of demoralized captives was reassuring, and their surrender could not have been more timely. Ludendorff ordered Staabs’s 37th Division withdrawn from the fighting line as rapidly as possible to reorganize. Below was to concentrate not one division, as the 6:30 a.m. army order stated, but his whole corps on the Osterode-Allenstein road and dig in against the possibility of any sudden move by Rennenkampf. The Goltz Division, badly disorganized from its two-day fight, would pull itself together and provide support. These four divisions would be available against Rennenkampf by the end of the day.34
Below’s rewriting of his direct orders had contributed not a little to Ludendorff’s anxieties. In the event, the whole of I Reserve Corps was not needed around Hohenstein. A division sent to Jedwabno would almost certainly have cut Kluyev’s line of retreat beyond remedy. As it was the two battalions Below actually ordered in that direction got no closer than ten kilometers to the highway, then spent the day destroying captured Russian ammunition—a task safer, if less glorious, than blocking the escape of a presumably desperate enemy.
The I Reserve Corps’s failure to perform part of its assigned mission was highlighted by the behavior of the 41st Division. That unfortunate unit had advanced at 7:15 a.m., also with Jedwabno as its objective—the southern half, in other words, of a possible tactical pincers. But its officers and men were a bit too conscious of previous defeats and previous casualties. A weak screening force of XV Corps held them almost on their start lines from 8:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Even after these Russians had retired, Sontag’s pursuit was slow and cautious. His division made a total of only fifteen kilometers during the day, getting no further than Orlau by 5:00 p.m.
Below’s insubordination and Sontag’s slowness meant that Morgen’s 3rd Reserve Division found itself pushing the Russians through an open bottleneck. By nightfall Kurken was in German hands, but the men were too tired to advance further. Once again their kitchens had failed to keep pace. Men unable to grub potatoes from abandoned fields or liberate chickens from abandoned farmyards fell asleep with empty stomachs. Some battalions compensated with music, the Leuthen Chorale being an obvious choice for the division’s Pomeranian Protestants.35
Below was also more pleased with himself than he might have been. Captain Borowski, commanding a battalion of the 1st Reserve Field Artillery, had spent the afternoon and most of the evening inching his guns along the Kurken road through masses of prisoners and wagons. Around 10:00 p.m. he met no less a personage than his corps commander, who asked Borowski what he was doing. “Hunting Russians, your excellency,” was the reply. “Not at all necessary. They’re in the pot. A great victory. Plenty of prisoners. Find a nice place to bivouac and let your people relax properly.” It was not exactly a Napoleonic recommendation, however welcome it might have been to the weary gunners, but it admirably fit the mood of soldiers conditioned to think in terms of wars ending with one decisive victory.36
On the German right flank, I Corps faced two problems. Hermann von François was under orders to bar the thirty-five-kilometer gap from Neidenburg to Willenberg. He also had to expect a serious Russian attempt to break through at Neidenburg, since the only major road to the frontier ran through the town. In preparing his orders for August 29, the corps commander decided to send his 1st Division along the Neidenburg-Willenburg road behind Schmettau, while the 2nd took position at Grünfliess to cover Neidenburg against any counterattacks by the 2nd Army’s center corps.
When the 2nd Division began its advance on the morning of the 29th, Falk’s forward units demonstrated the truth of the adage that there are old soldiers and bold soldiers, but no old and bold soldiers. Its opponents, elements of that same Russian 2nd Division so severely handled on August 26, withdrew slowly towards Orlau. But in the minds of Falk’s two-week veterans, every furrow and every rooftop posed a potential threat. Instead of leading gallant and costly rushes, officers waited for the machine guns, using them to blast real or suspected Russian positions. Entire companies and battalions deployed to clear out a few snipers, often demanding help from the artillery. By day’s end the 2nd Division was no more than five kilometers north of Neidenburg.37
Other detachments of the Russian 2nd Division also delayed François’s 1st Division for several hours. Conta had received reports of enemy columns marching on Neidenburg from the north, and his subordinates were sufficiently concerned about the possibility of surprise to deploy their men in the face of anything resembling a threat. The German cavalry was initially more active than their infantry. At 5:00 a.m. the 8th Uhlans, reinforced by three squadrons from XX Corps and a battery of the 16th Field Artillery with a platoon of the 3rd Grenadiers perched on its caissons, rode southward out of Neidenburg towards the Russian border. The countryside seemed empty of life until midafternoon, when the troopers overtook what remained of the trains of XV Corps and the 2nd Division. The escorts were scattered and dispirited. The drivers were middle-aged family men, many of them unarmed. German trumpets shrilled the charge. Amid scenes reminiscent of Tilly, Murat, and Nathan Bedford Forest, the German horsemen rounded up over a thousand wagons and almost five thousand prisoners—including a disconsolate and exhausted pilot routed from his bed in the border village of Roggen by two artillerymen. His aircraft was destroyed on the ground; another Russian machine barely managed to take off in time to avoid a similar fate.38
The I Corps’ second cavalry regiment, the 10th Jäger zu Pferde, also left Neidenburg around 5:00 a.m., but in a different direction, northeast along the high road to Willenberg. On the way they overtook the infantry of Schmettau’s Force. That energetic commander had his battalions on the march by 8:00 a.m., most of the men with less than four hours’ sleep. Again and again Schmettau’s vanguards deployed under rifle and artillery fire, but Russian resistance was light and poorly coordinated. Here and there the main body marched past a gray-uniformed corpse or a man twisting with pain on a litter. A more common scene was a knot of walking wounded glad enough to be out of it, waving to and cheering on their comrades still in the ranks. As they advanced the Germans began overrunning Russian supply trains. Kitchens, wagons, and war chests fell to the East Prussians. Silverware and underwear, top hats and feather beds—the pitiful plunder of the Russian advance was now reclaimed, though contemporary accounts say little about how much of it eventually reached its rightful owners.
Schmettau was not the kind of tidy-minded officer who worried about securing either his rear or his booty. Keeping his columns closed as tightly as possible, he drove them toward Willenberg as fast as the men could march or limp. Enterprising riflemen loaded their packs on liberated horses. Others impressed Russian prisoners to carry their gear. One company converted itself into mounted infantry with the aid of Cossack ponies. At 8:00 p.m. on August 29, after twelve hours on the road, Schmettau’s vanguard entered Willenberg. The Russians had done nothing worse than break a few store windows. There was plenty of beer and wine on hand, and Willenberg’s citizens were not slow to show appreciation of their liberation.