Ludendorff and Hindenburg were more than simple media creations. Institutionally the German army badly needed heroes by mid-September. Its commitment to a quick decisive victory made it correspondingly vulnerable to even slight checks in its announced program. Nor were its peacetime stars playing their intended roles very well. Moltke all but collapsed from stress. Kluck, among the darlings of the army’s new men, was unable to execute the programmed sweep through Belgium. Crown Prince William bogged his army down in a series of costly encounter battles. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria checked an invasion of Lorraine, but then sacrificed thousands of men in a vain effort to break through the French frontier defenses. Their respective staff officers proved correspondingly unable to work miracles—a fact highlighted by the fiasco of the Hentsch mission. The spectacle of a mere lieutenant-colonel deciding the movement of whole armies would have been hard enough to swallow in the context of total victory. As German troops fell back from the Marne, as Schlieffen’s grand design degenerated into a series of thwarted flanking movements, friction between staff and command, between higher and lower headquarters, flared far beyond the parameters of command accepted since the days of Moltke the Elder.
Ludendorff’s contemporaries and Hindenburg’s acquaintances knew that these men had not suddenly been apotheosized into military geniuses. Even in mid-September, voices at OHL suggested that the Russians had been easy meat, that the defensive had ever been the strongest form of warfare, even that the victors had slipped into ein gemachtes Bett: a “made bed,” a situation in which it was impossible to lose. But such comments bore the unmistakable tang of sour grapes—particularly when the booty of Tannenberg was compared with the relatively meager spoils of the French campaign.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff also had the advantages of isolation, of being separated from the tensions and rivalries proliferating in a high command forced in the aftermath of the Marne not merely to replan a campaign, but to rethink its basic views of war.32 Erich von Falkenhayn, Prussia’s war minister, also assumed for all practical purposes the post of chief of staff on September 14. In the next weeks he brought order from the broken-down Schlieffen-Moltke visions for the West. He developed practical, if not necessarily optimal, proposals for the conduct of a war that had suddenly taken on a life of its own. Yet his credibility suffered precisely because he was the symbolic bearer of bad news. Falkenhayn’s presence as chief of staff was a reminder of failed hopes and opportunities that would never come again. Hindenburg and Ludendorff correspondingly symbolized both the success of the old military order and the hopes for greater achievements in new contexts.
II
The fata morgana of Tannenberg above all strengthened the moral position of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in their arguments for an “eastern” solution to Germany’s strategic dilemma in the aftermath of the Marne and First Ypres. In the years before 1914 the idea of concentrating Germany’s primary military effort against Russia had virtually no defenders. Its reappearance was a function of personal ambition combined with professional reappraisals. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their staff officers had without exception entered the war as committed “Westerners.” Yet they could hardly avoid asking what might have been achieved in the east with slightly stronger forces. Ludendorff regarded reinforcements as unnecessary to win an immediate victory at Tannenberg. But add three or four fresh corps to the operational equation at the Masurian Lakes, on the plains of Poland, or in front of Łodz, and was it so far-fetched to speak of decisive victory? Was Russia’s surrender, or at least her seeking a negotiated peace, merely the stuff of late-night fantasies?
In 1914–15 the Russian front played a role in German strategy similar to that of the Mediterranean in Wehrmacht planning for a later war. Andreas Hillgruber and Gerhard Schreiber are only two of the distinguished scholars who insist the Middle Sea was ultimately a strategic dead end, that Britain could not be driven from the war as long as the United States underwrote her participation, and that in any case the Axis had neither the logistical system nor the operational resources to achieve anything but the sterile illusions of victory in the Mediterranean and Near East. Their arguments are compelling, yet the irresistible questions also remain in this context: what might the Axis have achieved with two or three more Panzer divisions, a few hundred additional aircraft, and a little bit of grand-strategic vision?33
The closing of the western front with the completion of the race to the sea in November, 1914, put the Imperial German army at a sudden disadvantage in its own eyes. The offensive was still regarded as the only form of war that could generate a decision. But the tactical superiority of defense over offense had been a familiar point of departure in German doctrine and planning since the days of the elder Moltke. This was why the German army so favored flanking movements. A continuous front from Switzerland to the English Channel prefigured a series of breakthrough battles against determined and capable foes. The strengths of the German army, argued the emerging Easterners, involved mobility, flexibility, and imagination—not brute force. Germany’s soldiers had spent decades insisting that Germany’s society could not afford a war of attrition. Further concentration on the western front seemed all too likely to prove them right.
Tannenberg invited interpretation as a case study in vindication. In its only fair test in the east the Imperial German Army’s strategic planning, operational doctrine, and institutional preparation had apparently resulted in exactly what the generals promised: a battle of annihilation, a Vernichtungsschlacht on a scale unmatched since Napoleon. Given the level of information generally available even to the German military in 1914–15, Tannenberg indicated that the army’s approach to war had not been completely mistaken. Under the conditions of the Russian theater, where the balance between numbers and space had not yet created stasis, where “flank” and “rear” were still meaningful strategic concepts, the German army would have the chance to do best what it did well.
Another significant reason for pursuing an eastern option involved the Russian army. If it had shown great shortcomings in the autumn campaigns, it had also shown great potential. The orderly Russian retreat, the new quartermaster-general and future Prussian war minister Wild von Hohenborn declared, was far from “what we need: a catastrophe.”34 The Russian steamroller might well prove even more formidable for being delayed a season. Ludendorff’s thinking in December paralleled Conrad’s in August. The relative weakness of the Central Powers in the east demanded action, not reaction—both for itself and as the best means of propping up a badly battered Habsburg ally.
Newly appointed chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn was anything but indifferent to the prospects of an eastern concentration. His images, however, harked back to those of the elder Moltke four decades earlier. Victories in the east could not, must not, be pursued at the cost of weakening the western front. Falkenhayn was even more Moltkean in his underlying conviction of the necessary linkages of force and diplomacy. Even in the heyday of the Schlieffen and post-Schlieffen eras, German planners had never confused a battle of annihilation with a war of annihilation. Indeed, the success of the great plan itself depended heavily on negotiations. In order to transfer forces to the eastern theater as projected, France must not merely be defeated. She must acknowledge that defeat in a way precluding either a broken-backed Volkskrieg in the style of 1871 or a long and comprehensive military occupation. And that in turn meant, if only by implication, a French government willing to make peace and strong enough to enforce authority within its own frontiers. Wilhelm Groener wondered on September 3 if the war in the west was not going a bit too well. France’s armies were in full retreat. Its president had fled to Bordeaux. Generals were refusing to obey orders. Paris was demanding a commune. But if the dissolution continued, mused Groener, there would be no government with which peace could be negotiated.35