Detachments and individual Russians continued to straggle in and surrender or to lay down their arms after a brief exchange of honor-saving shots. Other parties, bolder or luckier, made their way across the border. But the only organized formation that broke through the German cordon was a cavalry brigade reduced to about two hundred riders—all that remained intact of Samsonov’s main body.73
The Germans seemed almost as disorganized by victory as the Russians by defeat. The I and XVII Corps in particular had companies and battalions scattered everywhere from Neidenburg and Ortelsburg to the Russian frontier, securing booty and guarding prisoners. Cleaning up proved almost as much a challenge as winning the battle. The sandy roads of the region were blocked in every direction by destroyed or abandoned guns, caissons, carts, and wagons. Dead Russians were beginning to bloat in the August heat. Wounded Russians were being combed out of the woods by search parties. Tens of thousands of prisoners had to be evacuated to Germany on a railroad network straining to support a developing two-front war. They had to be fed without drawing on supplies destined for the 8th Army; no one took seriously the kaiser’s shocking suggestion that the captives simply be driven into a barren peninsula in the Baltic and left to starve.74
On the evening of August 30 Ludendorff tempered his boasts to OHL with praise for the tenacity of the Russians and warnings that the battle in the south might not yet be over. But by the afternoon of the 31st he was reporting the “complete destruction” of the enemy. Sixty thousand prisoners, he declared, were in German hands, with more certain to come as stragglers were rounded up. Three Russian corps had been annihilated; the commanders of two of them, Martos of XV and Kluyev of XIII, were prisoners. The battle, Ludendorff declared, was over. Eighth Army was ready for new operations. As for Rennenkampf’s army, it appeared to be going nowhere.
This did not stop Ludendorff from requesting reinforcements. However strongly he may have denied his need for XI Corps and the Guard Reserve Corps while the battle was going on, Ludendorff on the 31st declared that “in spite of the victory” their arrival would now be welcome. He also requested heavy artillery for use against the Russian fortresses in the interior. Next stop—St. Petersburg.75
In response the 8th Army shook off its brief victory euphoria. Staff officers began studying maps and charts, their eye on the next moves. Stragglers rejoined their units, or were delivered by the military police. Replacements arrived from provincial depots themselves often disrupted by the invasion. Lightly wounded men showed off their bandages. Talk of Iron Crosses swept the ranks. The dead were buried in those neat little cemeteries that were the German army’s pride: fifty here and a hundred there, neatly fenced and marked. Not yet for them the anonymity of Verdun or the Somme, where cynics and realists sang to the tune of Zapfenstreich, “Auf Wiedersehen ins Massengrab, wir sehen uns wieder ins Massengrab….” That time was coming.
PART IV
THE BITTER FRUITS OF VICTORY
10
Opportunities and Illusions
The details of the Russian disaster at Tannenberg remain varied. Eighth Army headquarters was too busy to tally jots and tittles. On the Russian side nobody was left to keep records. The German official history gives a total of 92,000 Russian prisoners, plus approximately 50,000 dead and wounded. These are the figures most frequently cited, and while the Germans could hardly be accused of understatement, their numbers are probably reasonably reliable. In operational terms, the Russian 2nd Army had been annihilated. Its center corps were destroyed. Only two thousand stragglers from XV Corps and the 2nd Division escaped the German noose. The XIII Corps had three thousand men left in its two divisions. The I and VI Corps could muster at most the equivalent of a division each, and both formations were badly demoralized. N. N. Golovine gives an elaborate breakdown of the prisoners taken by each German corps in an attempt to prove that the 2nd Army did not really surrender as a unit. But 90,000 prisoners constituted a self-evident fact.1
I
On closer examination, however, the data begins to blur. Two Russian corps had been destroyed, and two more badly mauled. But the Russian army of 1914 mobilized no fewer than thirty-seven active corps, to say nothing of independent brigades, reserve formations, and enough individual replacements to begin reconstituting 2nd Army’s decimated formations almost immediately. Losses of guns and equipment, while serious, were not out of proportion to the forces engaged.
Tannenberg, in other words, was by no stretch of the imagination a “battle of annihilation” in any material sense relative to Russia’s numbers. Nor did the losses represent the kind of cost exacted in a later war at Stalingrad and Kursk, where the cutting edge of an already overmatched army was irreparably dulled. Tannenberg’s significance is better sought in the realm of will. At the start of the campaign the Russian Northwest Front was reckoned by its own command as having a two-to-one superiority. The Russians had the further advantage of deploying principally active units, while almost half of the 8th Army was composed of illequipped reserve and fortress troops. The stage seemed set for an overwhelming victory, and the effect of Tannenberg was therefore even more crushing. By 1917 the then war minister A. J. Guchkov, testifying before the provisional government’s commission of inquiry, said that he had decided the war was lost “as early as August, 1914.” He said further that he had been made to feel this way by his “first impressions at the front”—that is, by Samsonov’s defeat.2 If this was the effect of Tannenberg on such a vigorous statesman, what must it have been on weaker spirits?
Tannenberg affected Russia’s allies as well—particularly Great Britain. In 1914 the British government realized the necessity of cooperating with its entente partners to avert a German victory. But Britain suspected the long-term objectives of her friends almost as much as the immediate intentions of her enemy. Memories of past imperial rivalries, concerns for the future welfare of Britain’s empire and Europe’s balance of power generated a significant body of opinion asserting that Britain could best assist her allies by providing money and arms rather than men.
This policy of “business as usual” had enough of perfidious Albion about it to have at best limited appeal on the continent. Its success depended on the ability and the willingness of France and Russia to stand against the German onslaught with no more than nominal direct support from their third partner. After Tannenberg neither the British nor the Russian government entertained that kind of faith in the tsar’s empire. Britain’s increasing commitment to a land war in Europe during 1915—16 was to a significant degree instrumental—a gesture that allies were not being left to their own resources, and one meant to show abandonment of Britain’s original strategy for conducting a great European war.3