In a campaign of hard marches, that of Schmettau’s Force stands out. Since early morning on August 28 it had covered sixty-five kilometers, most of them under combat conditions in August heat. Willenberg was the last major road junction in the Russian line of retreat. Regimental historians describe it as fitting that these troops, who had fought the 2nd Army from the beginning, should be the ones to close the trap. The rank and file, so exhausted that they fell asleep standing in ranks, may have been less enthusiastic, but they too were catching victory fever. A captain of the III/151st Infantry, the first battalion into Willenberg, received a report that a detachment of Russians was to be found four kilometers outside the town. Inspired by a sense of duty mixed with dreams of the Iron Cross, he called for volunteers. At the head of forty men he marched out and returned with over eight hundred prisoners. Most of them had been glad enough to trade their rifles for a drink of water. The 151st’s colonel, not to be outdone, led a lieutenant and twenty men to a farm whose owner declared that his buildings were full of Russians who wanted to surrender. When he ordered them to come out and lie down on the ground, 150 men emerged and stretched out under the German rifles. By the time that column reached Willenberg it had grown to almost two thousand hungry, confused Russians willing to obey anyone willing to give orders in any language.39
The human trophies collected by Schmettau’s Force indicated growing Russian demoralization. The detachment, however, had been too weak even to consider picketing its route of advance with its own resources. That was Conta’s job. By early afternoon the 1st Division had shaken itself loose from its tormentors. Conta drove towards Willenberg as fast as the men could march, scattering detachments along the highway like beads on a string. By midnight I Corps’s share of the encirclement was complete, with the 1st Division providing a cordon anchored at one end by Schmettau’s Force in Willenberg and at the other by the 2nd Division covering Neidenburg. It remained to be seen how seriously the Russians would test the barrier. Singly and in detachments, Russians sought to break through the slowly tightening cordon. Some were taken prisoner. Others, particularly Cossacks, were shot down by Germans seeking to avenge the devastation of their home province, or seeking easier targets than they had found so far in the war.
Mackensen’s XVII Corps formed the other arm of the 8th Army’s operational pincers. Initially he proposed to move the 36th Division into position along a north-south axis from Passenheim to Jedwabno. The 35th, less the detachments around Ortelsburg, would continue south, deploying below the 36th’s area of operations and cutting the roads through the woods north of Neidenburg. At 11:00 a.m. he informed army headquarters of this decision from his headquarters at Passenheim.
Mackensen’s advancing divisions pushed their way through Russian supply columns and past abandoned field hospitals. At Jedwabno the 129th Infantry liberated several hundred prisoners. Most of them were from the battalion of the 59th Infantry that had crossed the Maranse on the 28th and been cut off there. Rearmed and re-equipped, they were a welcome reinforcement for the weakened and exhausted regiment of XVII Corps—not least because of their embarrassment at having surrendered to an enemy now on the verge of collapse. The men of XVII Corps were almost at the end of their strength. Only the encouragement of the officers and the lashing tongues of their NCOs kept them going, but a battalion of the 21st Infantry got almost to Kannweisen, only four kilometers from the Neidenburg-Willenberg road and François’s 1st Division, before its legs gave out. Even deeper in the woods, the 5th Hussars dismounted and skirmished into the key road junction of Kaltenborn. The XVII corps had accomplished its mission—if its men could hold the ground they had reached.40
Ludendorff’s midday pessimism dissipated as the tally of prisoners and booty increased. By the evening of August 29 at least 10,000 Russians had surrendered. Between 20,000 and 30,000 men, individual stragglers and fragments of battalions and companies from XIII and XV Corps, were still in the woods north of Neidenburg, but the army staff no longer considered them a real threat. The 2nd Army seemed for all practical purposes destroyed as a fighting force. The problems for the 30th, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were sure, would involve securing prisoners, collecting those Russians still free, and establishing a front against Rennenkampf.
The army orders for August 30, issued at 10:00 p.m., confirmed that I Reserve Corps and the 37th Division were to form a line facing northwest on both sides of Allenstein and begin constructing field fortifications. The Goltz Division would secure the left of this position; the 1st Cavalry Division would move to Ortelsburg and cover its right. Unger’s troops and the 41st and 3rd Reserve Divisions were to withdraw from the front, rest, and reorganize. The XVII Corps would continue barring the 2nd Army’s way to the east, while the 5th Landwehr Brigade provided security against any attempt to break through to Neidenburg from the south. This last was not considered very likely, as the Russians in this sector were supposed to be in full retreat.41
There was also time for boasting. At 7:45 p.m. on August 29, Hindenburg reported to William II the destruction of the Russian 2nd Army. Flags, guns, and machine guns; paymasters’ chests and an airplane, over 10,000 prisoners, testified to the magnitude of 8th Army’s victory. He received in return imperial thanks in the name of the Fatherland.42 A subsequent dispatch referred to the “victory at Allenstein.” Von Stein’s official announcement spoke of a battle “in the area of Gilgenburg and Ortelsburg.” Hindenburg, however, asked the kaiser to permit it to be known as the Battle of Tannenberg. Wilhelm was pleased with the idea; Hoffmann’s suggestion of the 28th became official.43
At 11:30 p.m. Ludendorff telephoned a slightly more sober message to OHL. Bad connections made him difficult to understand, but the thrust of his message was clear: victory. Three and a half Russian corps had been completely defeated; twenty or thirty thousand survivors and hundreds of abandoned cannon were there for the collecting. Eighth Army needed no more than two or three days’ rest, then would be ready to repeat its performance against Rennenkampf.44 Ten minutes later a coded dispatch was on its way to Austrian GHQ from the liaison officer at Hindenburg’s headquarters. It too described whole corps surrounded by the Germans, with Russians surrendering in masses.45
The Russian center had fought well enough to deserve a better fate. Martos, responding to Samsonov’s last orders, spent the night of August 28th/29th trying to reach a Neidenburg that he did not know was in German hands. He learned the truth at dawn, but spent the rest of the day dodging enemy patrols and never regained contact with any of his headquarters. Deprived of central control, the units of XV Corps and the 2nd Division retreated south and east, fighting the previously described series of stubborn but uncoordinated rear-guard actions against I Corps and the 41st Division. By nightfall the bulk of the troops still under command were in the woods north of Muschaken, their surviving officers trying to decide what to do next.
As for XIII Corps, its headquarters reached Kurken at noon on the 29th with what remained of its infantry straggling along behind. At 2:00 p.m. Kluyev’s chief of staff returned from Orlau with new orders from Samsonov. Issued at 11:00 a.m., they provided for a “phased withdrawal.” XV Corps and the 2nd Division would cover XIII Corps’s march to Muschaken; Kluyev would in turn cover the retreat of the latter units across the frontier.
As a staff exercise these orders deserved a failing grade for passing the fighting elements of one corps across the lines of communication of another. But they had been issued almost in the face of the enemy. Kluyev believed—again—that 2nd Army headquarters must know what it was doing. He not only started his men south; for the second consecutive day he ordered a night march. This time the route lay through even denser woods whose few secondary roads were blocked beyond immediate remedy by the trains of XV Corps. Kluyev, his way south cut off, turned his column east.46 At Kaltenborn it was fired on by German pickets—the men of the 5th Hussars.