connection with those two phrases--"in favour of," and "vigour."
History in general treats a retirement, particularly a rapid
retirement accompanied by heavy losses, as a disaster; and the
conception that such a movement may seem to the military historian a
success, and that the energy of its conduct is just as important as
the energy of an assault, is unfamiliar to most students of civilian
record. But I am writing here, though an elementary, yet a military
history; and to the military historian a retreat may be just as much a
factor in victory as an advance; while the energy and tenacity
required for its carriage are, if anything, more important than the
corresponding qualities required for an advance. And in the case of
this critical day and a half, the Wednesday, August 26th, and the
Wednesday and Thursday night, August 26th-27th, the preservation of
the British forces, and to some extent of all that lay east of them,
was made possible by the very fact that the retirement was prosecuted
with the utmost rapidity and without a halt. Had the retreat been
interrupted in the hope of making a stand, or in the hope of repose,
the whole army would have gone.
Throughout the night, then, with heavy losses from stragglers, and in
one case with the surrounding and annihilation by wounds and capture
of nearly a whole battalion (the Gordons), the retreat of the 2nd
Corps proceeded, and, in line with it, the retreat of the 1st Corps to
the east.
But this 1st Corps, though set an easier task than the 2nd (which, at
the extreme of the line, was under the perpetual menace of
development), did not retire without losses of a serious character. It
was marching on Guise, just as the 2nd Corps to the west of it was
marching across the watershed to St. Quentin. The Munster Fusiliers,
who were on its extreme right, had halted for the night on that same
evening of the 26th; for the 1st Corps, being less hard pressed, had
more leisure for such repose. During the night a messenger was sent to
this body with orders for the resumption of the march next morning. He
was taken prisoner, and never reached his goal. The Munsters were
attacked at dawn by the German pursuit in greatly superior numbers,
surrounded and destroyed, as the Gordons of the 2nd Corps had been;
the unwounded remnant was compelled to surrender.
[Illustration: Sketch 58.]
The whole of Thursday, the 27th, and Friday, the 28th of August, the
British retreat continued, the 1st Corps following on at the valley of
the Oise towards La Fere, while the 2nd Corps to the west passed St.
Quentin, and made for Noyon, in the neighbourhood of the same river
farther down; and on the night of that Friday the Expeditionary Force
was at last in line, and in some kind of order, organized for the
first breathing space possible after so terrible an ordeal.
[Illustration: Sketch 59.]
It is clear from the accompanying sketch map that the position the
British had now reached gave to the whole Allied force a bent contour.
The French armies to the east lay along line AB, which, had it been
directly prolonged, would have stretched towards C; but the British
contingent, which, on account of its extreme position, had suffered
most heavily, was turned right back on the scheme AD, and even so,
was still in some peril of being outflanked by the German forces along
the arrow (1) to the west of it. At this moment the French, whose
fortunes we shall next describe, found it possible to check the fury
of the pursuit. The drive of the German masses, which had so nearly
annihilated the British end of the line, was blocked, and the
remainder of the great retreat followed a more orderly fashion,
proceeded at a much slower rate, and approached that term at which a
counter-offensive might be attempted.
The whole process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide,
which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed
considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb.
In order to appreciate how this was, let us next consider what the
larger French forces to the east of the British had been doing. There
are no details available, very few published records, and it will not
be possible until an official history of the war appears to give more
than the most general sketch of the French movements in this retreat;
but the largest lines are sufficient for our judgment of the result.
It will be remembered that what I have called "the operative corner"
of the Allied army had stood in the angle between the Sambre and the
Meuse. It had consisted in the British contingent upon the left, or
west, in front of Mons; the 5th French Army, composed of three army
corps, under Lanrezac, to the east of it, along the Sambre, past
Charleroi; and the 4th French Army, also of three army corps, under
Langle, along the Middle Meuse, being in general disposition what we
have upon the accompanying sketch. It had been attacked upon Saturday,
the 22nd August, by seventeen German army corps--that is, by forces
double its own. On that same day Namur, at the corner, had fallen into
complete possession of the Germans, the French retreat had begun, and
on the following day the English force had, after the regrettable
delay of half a day, also begun its retirement.
We have seen that the British retirement (following the dotted lines
upon Sketch 60) had reached, upon the Friday night, the position from
Noyon to La Fere, marked also in dots upon the sketch.
What had happened meanwhile to their French colleagues upon the east?
[Illustration: Sketch 60.]
The first thing to note is that the fortress of Maubeuge, with its
garrison of reserve and second line men, had, of course, been at once
invested by the Germans when the British and French line had fallen
behind it and left it isolated. The imperfection of this fortress I
have already described, and the causes of that imperfection. Maubeuge
commanded the great railway line leading from Belgium to Paris, which
is the main avenue of supply for an invasion or for a retreat, running
north-east to south-west on the Belgian frontier upon the capital.
The 5th French Army retired parallel to the British along the belt
marked in Sketch Map 60 by diagonal lines. At first, as its retirement
had begun earlier, it was behind, or to the south of, the British, who
were thus left almost unsupported. It lay, for instance, on Monday,
the 24th, much along the position 1, at which moment the British Army
was lying along the position 2. That was the day on which the Germans
attempted to drive the British into Maubeuge.
But during the succeeding two days the French 5th Army (to which the
five corps, including the Prussian Guard, under Buelow, were opposed)
held the enemy fairly well. They were losing, of course, heavily in
stragglers, in abandoned wounded, and in guns; but their retreat was
sufficiently strongly organized to keep this section of the line well
bent up northwards, and just before the British halted for their first
breathing space along the line La Fere and Noyon, the French 5th Army
attempted, and succeeded in, a sharp local attack against the superior
forces that were pursuing them. This local attack was undertaken from
about the position marked 3 on Sketch 60, and was directed against
Guise. It was undertaken by the 1st and 3rd French Corps, under
General Maunoury. He, acting under Lanrezac, gave such a blow to the
Prussian Guard that he here bent the Prussian line right in.
Meanwhile the 4th French Army, which had also been retiring rapidly
parallel to the 5th French Army, lay in line with it to the east along
that continuation of 3 which I have marked with a 4 upon the sketch.
Farther east the French armies, linking up the operative corner with
the Alsace-Lorraine frontier, had also been driven back from the Upper
Meuse, and upon Friday, the 28th of August, when the British halt had
come between La Fere and Noyon (a line largely protected by the
Oise), the whole disposition of the Allied forces between the
neighbourhood of Verdun and Noyon was much what is laid down in the
accompanying sketch. At A were the British; at B the successful
counter-offensive of the French 5th Army had checked and bent back the
Prussian centre under von Buelow; at C, the last section of what had
been the old operative corner, the army under Langle was thrust back
to the position here shown, and pressed there by the Wurtembergers and
the Saxons opposed to it. Meanwhile further French forces, D and E,
had also been driven back from the Upper Meuse, and were retiring with
Verdun as a pivot, leaving isolated the little frontier town of
Longwy. This was not seriously fortified, had held out with only
infantry work and small pieces, and had not been thought worthy of
attack by a siege train. It surrendered to the Crown Prince upon
Friday, 28th August.
[Illustration: Sketch 61.]
[Illustration: Sketch 62.]
On that date, then, the two opposing lines might be compared, the one
to a great encircling arm AA, the elbow of which was bent at Guise,
the other to a power BB which had struck into the hollow of the elbow,
and might expect, with further success, to bend the arm so much more
at that point as to embarrass its general sweep.
Those who saw the position as a whole on this Friday, the 28th of
August, wondered whether or not the French Commander-in-chief would
order the continuation of the successful local attack at Guise, and so
attempt to break the whole German line. He did not give this order,
and his reasons for retiring in the face of such an opportunity may be
briefly stated thus:--
1. The French forces in line from Verdun to La Fere, and continued by
the British contingent to the neighbourhood of Noyon, were still
gravely inferior to the German forces opposed to them. Even,
therefore, if the French success at Guise had been pushed farther, and
had actually broken the German line, either half of the French line
upon either side of the forward angle would have been heavily
outnumbered by the two limbs of the enemy opposed to each, and that
enemy might perfectly well have defeated, though separated, each
portion of the force opposed to it.
2. To the west, at the position FF on Sketch 62, were acting large
bodies of the enemy, which had swept, almost without meeting
resistance, through Arras to Amiens. Against that advance there was
nothing but small garrisons of French Territorials, which were brushed
aside without difficulty.
Now these bodies, though they were mainly of cavalry which were
operating thus to the west, had already cut the main line of
communications from Boulogne, upon which the British had hitherto
depended, and were close enough to the Allied left flank to threaten
it with envelopment, or, rather, to come up in aid of von Kluck at A,
and make certain what he already could regard as probable--his power
to get round the British, and turn the whole left of the Allied line.
3. More important even than these two first conclusive considerations
was the fact that the French Commander-in-chief, had he proposed to
follow up this success of his subordinate at Guise, would have had to
change the whole of his general plan, and to waste, or at best to
delay, the action of his chief factor in that plan. This chief factor
was the great manoeuvring mass behind the French line which had not
yet come into play, and the advent of which, at a chosen moment, was
the very soul of the French strategy.
It is so essential to the comprehension of the campaign to seize this
last point that, at the risk of repetition, I will restate for the
reader the main elements of that strategy.
[Illustration: Sketch 63.]
I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic
square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in
practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the
existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth
of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger
masses, "the mass of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and assume the
general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn
the enemy down to that position in which such a general
counter-offensive would be most efficacious.
To concentrate the great mass of manoeuvre was a business of some
days, and having ordered its concentration in one district, it would
be impossible to change the plan at a moment's notice. The district
into which a great part of this mass of manoeuvre had been
concentrated--or, rather, was in course of concentration at this
moment, the 28th August--was the district behind and in the
neighbourhood of Paris. It lay far from the scene of operation at
Guise. It was intended to come into play only when the general retreat
should have reached a line stretching from Verdun to the neighbourhood
of Paris itself. To have pursued the success at Guise, therefore,
would have been to waste all this great concentration of the mass of
manoeuvre which lay some days behind the existing line, and in
particular to waste the large body which was being gathered behind and
in the neighbourhood of Paris.
With these three main considerations in mind, and in particular the
third, which was far the most important, General Joffre determined to
give up the advantage obtained at Guise, to order the two successful
army corps under Maunoury, who had knocked the Prussian Guard at that
point, to retire, and to continue the general retreat until the Allied
line should be evenly stretched from Paris to Verdun. The whole
situation may be put in a diagram as follows: You have the Allied line
in an angle, ABC. You have opposed to it the much larger German forces
in a corresponding angle, DEF. Farther east you have a continuation of
the French line, more or less immovable, on the fortified frontier of
Alsace-Lorraine at M, opposed by a greater immovable German force at
N. At P you have coming up as far as Amiens large German bodies
operating in the west, and at Q a small newly-formed French body, the
6th French Army, supporting the exposed flank of the British
contingent at A, near Noyon. Meanwhile you have directed towards S,
behind Paris, and coming up at sundry other points, a concentration of
the mass of manoeuvre.
[Illustration: Sketch 64.]
It is evident that if the French offensive at B which has successfully
pushed in the German elbow at E round Guise is still sent forward, and
even succeeds in breaking the German line at E, "the elbow," the two
limbs into which the Germans will be divided, DE and EF, are each
superior in number to the forces opposed to them, and that DE in
particular, with the help of P, may very probably turn AB and its new
small supporter at Q, roll it up, and begin a decisive victory, while
the other large German force, EF, may press back or pierce the smaller
opposed French force, BC.
Meanwhile you would not only be risking this peril, but you would also
be wasting your great mass of manoeuvre, SS, which is still in process
of concentration, most of it behind Paris, and which could not
possibly come into play in useful time at E.
It is far better to pursue the original plan to continue the retreat
as far as the dotted line from Paris to Verdun, where you will have
the whole German force at its farthest limit of effort and
corresponding exhaustion, and where you will have, after the salutary
delay of the few intervening days, your large mass of manoeuvre, SS,
close by to Paris and ready to strike.
From such a diagram we see the wisdom of the decision that was taken
to continue the retirement, and the fruits which that decision was to
bear.
The whole episode is most eminently characteristic of the French
military temper, which has throughout the whole of French history
played this kind of game, and invariably been successful when it has
attained success from a concentration of energy upon purely military
objects and a sacrificing of every domestic consideration to the
single object of victory in foreign war.
It is an almost invariable rule in French history that when the
military temper of the nation is allowed free play its success is
assured, and that only when the cross-current of a political object
disturbs this temper do the French fail, as they failed in 1870, as
they failed in 1812, or as they failed in the Italian expeditions of
the Renaissance. By geographical accident, coupled with the
conditions, economic and other, to which their aggression gives rise,
the French are nearly always numerically inferior at the beginning of
a campaign. They have almost invariably begun their great wars with
defeats and retirements. They have only succeeded when a patient,
tenacious, and consistently military policy has given them the
requisite delay to achieve a defensive-offensive plan. It was so
against Otto the Second a thousand years ago; it was so in the wars of
the Revolution; it was so in this enormous campaign of 1914. There is
in their two thousand years of constant fighting one great and
salutary exception to the rule--their failure against Caesar; from
which failure they date the strength of their Roman tradition--still
vigorous.
* * * * *
The minor fortified posts lying behind the French line were not
defended. Upon 29th August the French centre fell back behind Rethel,
the Germans crossed the Aisne, occupied Rheims and Chalons, while the
British contingent on the left and the French 6th Army now protecting
its flank continued also to fall back towards Paris. And on Sedan day,
2nd September, we may regard the great movement as having reached its
end.
The German advance had nowhere hesitated, save at Guise, and the
French retirement after their success at Guise can only have seemed to
the German commanders a further French defeat. Those commanders knew
their overwhelming numerical superiority against the total of the
Allied forces--a superiority of some 60 per cent. They may have
guessed that the French were keeping a considerable reserve; but in
their imagination that reserve was thought far less than it really
was, for they could hardly believe that under the strain of the great
retreat the French commanders would have had the implacable fortitude
which permitted them to spare for further effort the reinforcements of
which the retiring army seemed in vital and even in despairing need.
Upon this anniversary of Sedan day it cannot but have appeared to the
Great General Staff of the enemy that the purpose of their great
effort in the West was already achieved.
They had reached the gates of Paris. They had, indeed, not yet
destroyed the enemy's main army in the field, but they had swept up
garrison after garrison; they had captured, perhaps, 150,000 wounded
and unwounded men; their progress had been that of a whirlwind, and
had been marked by a bewildering series of incessant victories. They
were now in such a situation that either they could proceed to the
reduction of the forts outside Paris (to which their experience of
their hitherto immediate reduction of every other permanent work left
them contemptuous), or they could proceed to break at will the
insufficient line opposed to them.
[Illustration: Sketch 65.]
They stood, on this anniversary of Sedan, in the general situation
apparent on the accompanying sketch. The 6th French Army was forced
back right upon the outer works of Paris; the British contingent, to
its right, lay now beyond the Marne; the 5th French Army, to its right
again, close along the Seine; the 4th and 3rd continuing the great bow
up to the neighbourhood of Verdun, three-quarters of the way round
which fortress the Crown Prince had now encircled; and in front of
this bent line, in numbers quite double its effectives, pressed the
great German front over 150 miles of French ground. Upon the left or
west of the Allies--the German right--stood the main army of von
Kluck, the 1st, with its supporters to the north and west, that had
already pressed through Amiens. Immediately to the east of this, von
Buelow, with the 2nd Army, continued the line. The Saxons and the
Wurtembergers, a 3rd Army, pressed at the lowest point of the curve in
occupation of Vitry. To the east, again, beyond and in the Argonne,
the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia was upon the point of reducing
Verdun, the permanent works of which fortress had already suffered the
first days of that bombardment from the new German siege train which
had hitherto at every experiment completely destroyed the defence in a
few hours. If we take for the terminal of this first chapter in the
Great War the morning of 4th September, we may perceive how nearly the
enemy had achieved his object, to which there now stood as a threat
nothing more but the French reserves, unexpected in magnitude, though
their presence was already discovered, which had for the most part
been gathered in the neighbourhood of and behind the fortified zone of
Paris.
With this position, of what it meant in immediate alternatives to the
enemy, I will deal a few pages on at the close of this book, when I
will also consider in one conspectus on the map the whole of that ten
days' sweep down from the north, and summarize its effect upon the
Allied attitude towards the next phase of the war.
But to understand a campaign, one must seize not only the
topographical positions of troops, nor only their number: one must
also gauge the temper of their commanders and of the political opinion
at home behind them, for upon this moral factor everything ultimately
depends. The men that fight are living men, and the motive power is
the soul.
It is, therefore, necessary for the reader to appreciate at this
terminal date, September 2-4, the moral strength of the enemy, and to
comprehend in what mood of confidence the Germans now lay. With this
object we must add to the story of the advance on Paris the subsidiary
events which had accompanied that great sweep into the West. We must
turn to the "holding up of Russia" upon the East by the Austrian
forces, and see how the partial failure of this effort (news of which
was just reaching the Western armies) was quite eclipsed by the
splendid tidings of Tannenberg. We must see with German eyes the
secondary but brilliant victory in front of Metz; we must stand in
their shoes to feel as they did the clearing of Alsace, and to
comprehend with what contempt they must have watched the false picture
of the war which the governments and the press of the Allies,
particularly in Britain, presented to public opinion in their doomed
territories; and we must, in general, grasp the now apocalyptic temper
of the nervous, over-strained industrialized population which is the
tissue of modern Germany.
Not until we have a good general aspect of that mood can we understand
either the war at this turning-point in its fortunes, or the future
developments which will be traced in the succeeding volumes of this
series.
I will, therefore, now turn to the three main elements productive of
that mood in their historical order: the Battle of Metz, the Austrian
operations against Russia, and, lastly, the great victory of
Tannenberg in East Prussia, before concluding this volume with a
summary of the whole situation in those first days of September, just
before the tide turned.
THE BATTLE OF METZ.
The Battle of Metz, though quite subsidiary to the general operations
of the war, and upon a scale which later operations have dwarfed, will
be mentioned with special emphasis in any just account of the great
war on account of its moral significance.
It took place before the main shock of the armies; it had no decisive
effect upon the future of the campaign; but it was of the very highest
weight, informing the German mind, and leading it into that attitude
of violent exaltation on which I shall later insist in these pages,
and which largely determined all the first months of the war, with
their enormous consequences for the future. For the action in front of
Metz was the first pitched battle fought in Western Europe during our
generation, and to an unexpected degree it fulfilled in its narrow
area all the dreams upon which military Germany had been nourished for
forty years. It thrilled the whole nation with the news, at the very
outset of hostilities, of a sharp and glorious victory; it seemed a
presage of far more to come. The Battle of Metz was the limited
foundation upon which was rapidly erected that triumphant mood that
lasted long after the tide had turned, and that matured, when bad
blundering had lost the victory in the West, into the unsoldierly,
muddled hope that could fail to win, and yet somehow not lose, a
campaign.
We have seen that the disposition of the French armies at the moment
when the shock was being delivered through Belgium involved along the
frontiers of Alsace-Lorraine the presence of considerable forces.
These, once the operative corner had taken the shock, formed part of
the mass of manoeuvre, and were destined in large part to swing up in
aid of the men retreating from the Sambre.
But in the very first days of the war, before the main blow had
fallen, and when the French General Staff were still in doubt as to
precisely where the blow _would_ fall, considerable bodies had been
operating in Alsace and over the Lorraine frontier. The whole range of
the Vosges was carried in the second week after the British
declaration of war--that is, between 10th August and 15th August.
Mulhouse was occupied; upon Monday, the 17th of August, Saarburg, the
most important railway junction between Strassburg and Metz, was in
French hands. Up to that date, though such comparatively small forces
were involved, the French had possessed a very decisive numerical
superiority. It was not destined to last, for there was moving down
from the north the now mobilized strength of Germany in this region;
and a blow struck against the French left, with no less than four
army corps, was speedily to decide the issue upon this subsidiary
front.
[Illustration: Sketch 66.]
This great force was based upon Metz, from which fortress the action
will presumably take its name in history. It stretched upon the 20th
of August from the north of Pont-a-Mousson to beyond Chateau Salins.
Before this overwhelming advance the French left rapidly retired. It
did not retire quickly enough, and one portion of the French force--it
is believed the 15th Division (that is, the first division of the 15th
Army Corps)--failed in its task of supporting the shock.
Details of the action are wholly lacking. We depend even for what may
be said at this date upon little more than rumour. The Germans claimed
a capture of ten batteries and of the equivalent of as many
battalions, and many colours. Upon the 21st the whole French left fell
back, carrying with them as a necessary consequence the centre in the
Vosges Mountains and the right upon the plains of Alsace. So rapid was
the retreat that upon the 22nd of August the Bavarians were at
Luneville, and marching on Nancy; the extreme right of the German line
had come within range of the forts north of Toul; and in those same
hours during which, on that same Saturday, the 22nd of August, the 5th
French Army in the north fell back at the news of Namur and lost the
Sambre, those forces on the borders of Alsace-Lorraine had lost all
the first advantages of their thrust into the lost provinces, had
suffered defeat in the first striking action of the war, and had put
Nancy in peril.
Nancy itself was saved. The French counter-offensive was organized on
the 23rd of August, at a moment when the German line lay from St. Die
northwards and westwards up to positions just in front of Nancy. It
was delivered about a week later. That counter-offensive which
ultimately saved Nancy belongs to the next volume, for it did not
develop its strength until after Sedan Day, and after the end of the
great sweep on Paris.
The situation, then, in this field (the very names of which have such
great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the
2nd of September, as follows:--
The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.
LEMBERG.
The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
was delivered in the West.
That is the largest view of the matter.
In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
and occupied the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
towns of Czestochowa and Kalish--the latter, in the very centre of the
bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
because Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
to which it is a stranger.
[Illustration: Sketch 67.]
This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, army faced, as
will be seen, directly towards the Russian frontier. It was the
operative wing; upon its immediate action and on the rapidity of the
blow it was to deliver depended the success of this first chapter in
the Eastern war.
[Illustration: Sketch 68.]
The southern, or second, army, which stretched all along the Galician
plain at the foot of the Carpathians to the town of Halicz, had for
its mission the protection of the first army from the south. It was
known, or expected, that the first army would advance right into
Russian Poland, with but inferior forces in front of it. It was
feared, however, that the main Russian concentration to the south-east
of it might turn its right flank. The business of the second army was
to prevent this. The first army (I), being the operative body, was
more homogeneous in race, more picked in material than the second
(II), the latter containing many elements from the southern parts of
the empire, including perhaps not a few disaffected contingents, such
as certain regiments of Italian origin from the Adriatic border.
So far as we can judge, perhaps--and it is a very rough estimate--we
may put the whole body which Austria-Hungary was thus moving in the
first phase of the war beyond the Carpathians at more than 750,000,
but less than 1,000,000 men. Call the mass 800,000, and one would not
be far wrong. Of this mass quite a quarter lay in reserve near the
mountains behind the first army. The remaining three-quarters, or
600,000 men, were fairly evenly divided between the two groups of the
first and of the second army--the first, or northern, one being under
the command of Dankl, the second under that of von Auffenberg. Each
of these forces was based upon one group of depots of particular
importance, the northern operative army (I) relying upon Przemysl, and
the southern one (II) upon Lemberg.
It was less than a week after the first German advance bodies had
taken the outer forts of Liege when Dankl crossed the frontier,
heading, with his centre, towards Krosnik and farther towards Lublin.
His troops were in Russian territory upon the Monday evening or the
Tuesday, 10th-11th August.
The second army meanwhile stood fulfilling its role of awaiting and
containing any Russians that might strike in upon the south. It had
advanced no more than watching bodies towards the frontier, such as
the 35th Regiment of the Austrian Landwehr, which occupied Sokal, and
smaller units cordonned out southward between that town and Brody.
Here, at the outset of the large operations that were to follow, it is
important for the reader to note that everything depended upon the
resisting power of the second, or southern, army.
Observe the problem. Two men, a left-hand man and a right-hand man,
go out to engage two other men whom they hope and believe to be
unready. The left-hand man is particularly confident of being able to
drive back his opponent, but he knows that sooner or later upon his
right the second enemy, a stronger man, may come in and disturb his
action. He says therefore to his right-hand companion: "Stand firm and
engage and contain the energy of your opponent until I have finished
with mine. When I have done that, I shall turn round towards you, and
between us we will finish the second man."
Seeing the paucity of Russian communications, and the physical
necessity under which the Russians were, on account of the position of
their depots and centres of mobilization, of first putting the mass of
their men on the south, the physical impossibility under which they
lay of putting the mass of their men in the north for the moment, the
plan was a sound one; _but_ its success depended entirely upon the
tenacity of the second Austrian army, which would have to meet large,
and might have to meet superior, numbers.
The first army went forward with very little loss and against very
little resistance. The Russian forces which were against it, which we
may call the first Russian army, were inferior in number, and fell
back, though not rapidly, towards the Bug. It relied to some extent in
this movement upon the protection afforded by the forts of Zamosc, but
it was never in any serious danger until, or unless, things went wrong
in the south. The Austrians remained in contact (but no more), turned
somewhat eastward in order to keep hold of the foe, when their advance
was checked by the news, first of unexpected Russian strength, later
of overwhelming Russian advances towards the south. Long before the
third week in August, the first Austrian army was compelled to check
its advance upon the news reaching it from the second, and its
fortunes, in what it had intended to be a successful invasion of
Russian Poland, had ended. For the whole meaning of the first Galician
campaign turns after the 14th of August upon the great Russian advance
in the south.
It was upon that day, August 14, that the Russian force, under General
Russky (which we will call the second army), crossed the frontier.
Its right occupied Sokal, its centre left moved in line with the right
upon von Auffenberg's force directly before it.
The Russian mobilization had proceeded at a greater pace than the
enemy had allowed for. The Russian numbers expected in this field
appeared in far greater strength than this expectation had allowed
for, and it was soon apparent that von Auffenberg's command would have
to resist very heavy pressure.
But it would be an error to imagine, as was too hastily concluded in
the press of Western Europe at the time, that this pressure upon the
front of the second Austrian army, with its dogged day after day
fighting and mile by mile advance, was the principal deciding factor
in the issue. That deciding factor was, in fact, the appearance upon
the right flank of von Auffenberg of yet another Russian army (which
we will call the third) under Brussilov. It was the menace of this
force, unexpected, or at least unexpected in its great strength, which
really determined the issue, though this was again affected by the
tardiness of the Austrian retirement. Russky's direct advance upon
the front of his enemy extended for a week. It had begun when it had
destroyed the frontier posts upon Friday, the 14th. It was continued
until the evening of the succeeding Thursday, regularly, slowly, but
without intermission. It stood upon the Friday, the 21st--the day on
which the first shots were fired at the main Franco-British forces in
the West, and the day on which the first shell fell into Charleroi
station--not more than one day's cavalry advance from the outer works
of Lemberg, but it was just in that week-end that the pressure of
Brussilov began to be felt.
This third Russian army had come up from the south-east, supplied by
the main Odessa railway through Tarnopol. It was manifestly
threatening the right flank of von Auffenberg, and if a guess may be
hazarded upon operations on which we have so little detail as yet, and
which took place so far from our own standpoint, the error of the
Austrian general seems to have consisted in believing that he could
maintain himself against this flank attack. If this were the case (and
it is the most probable explanation of what followed), the error
would have been due to the same cause which affected all Austrian
plans in these first days of the war--the mistake as to the rapidity
with which Russia would complete her preparations.
[Illustration: Sketch 69.]
The first outpost actions with the enemy, and even the more vigorous
struggles when full contact had been established with this third army
arrived thus from the south-east, only led the Austrian commander
deeper into his mistaken calculation; for upon the Sunday, August
23rd, a local success was achieved which seems to be magnified by the
Austrians into a decisive check administered to the enemy. If this was
their view, they were soon to be undeceived. In those very days which
saw the greatest peril in the West, the last days of August, during
which the Franco-British Allies were falling back from the Sambre,
pursued by the numbers we have seen upon an earlier page, the third
and the second Russian armies effected their junction, the moment of
their first joining hands being apparently that same Monday, the 24th
of August, during which Sir John French was falling back upon
Maubeuge. By the middle of the ensuing week they had already advanced
with a very heavy numerical superiority upon the part of the Russians,
which threatened to involve the Austrian second army in disaster. If
that went, the first army was at the mercy of the victors upon the
south, and with every day that passed the chance of collapse
increased. Now, too late (so far as we can judge), the second Austrian
army disposed itself for retreat, but that retreat was not allowed to
proceed in the orderly fashion which its commander had decided, and
in the event part of it turned into a rout, all of it developed into a
definite disaster for the enemy, and as conspicuous a success for our
ally. That this success was not decisive, as this great war must count
decisions, the reader will perceive before its description is
concluded; but it set a stamp upon the whole of the war in the East,
which months of fighting have not removed but rather accentuated. It
delivered the province of Galicia into the hands of Russia, it brought
that Power to the Carpathians, it ultimately compelled Germany to
decide upon very vigorous action of her own immediately in Poland, and
it may therefore be justly said to have changed the face of the war.
To this great series of actions, which history will probably know by
the name of Lemberg, we will now turn.
When this large Russian movement against the right of von Auffenberg's
army, and the considerable Russian concentration there, was clearly
discerned, the Austrian force was immediately augmented, and it was
not until after the first stages of the conflict we are about to
describe that it counted the full numbers mentioned above. But, even
so reinforced, it was inadequate for the very heavy task which there
fell upon it. It is not to be denied that its heterogeneous
composition--that is, its necessary weakness in quality--affected its
value; but the principal factor in its ill success was still the
superiority of Russian numbers in this field, and this, in its turn,
proceeded from a rapidity and completeness in the Russian mobilization
for which the enemy had never made provision.
The action of the Russian left against von Auffenberg was twofold:
Russky, from the north, was coming across the river Bug, and struck an
Austrian entrenched line in front of Lemberg. His numbers permitted
him to turn that entrenched line, or, at any rate, to threaten its
turning, for Russky's right stretched almost to within cavalry touch
of Tomasow. In combination with this movement, and strictly
synchronizing with it, Brussilov was advancing from the Sereth River.
Both these movements were being carried out full during the last days
of August.
[Illustration: Sketch 70.]
It was on Friday, the 28th of that month, that Tarnopol fell, as we
have seen, into the hands of the Russians, and that Brussilov was,
therefore, able to effect his junction with Russky in the north, and
this success was the occasion of the first of those bayonet actions on
a large scale wherein the Russians throughout the war continued to
show such considerable personal superiority over their opponents.
When Tarnopol had gone, not on account of the loss of their
geographical point, but because its occupation rendered the junction
of the Russian armies possible, and their advance in one great concave
line upon Lemberg, it was no longer doubtful that von Auffenberg had
lost this preliminary campaign.
There are moments in war where the historian can fix a turning-point,
although the decision itself shall not yet have been reached. Thus, in
the campaign of 1793 between the French Revolution and its enemies,
Turcoing was not a decisive action, but it was the necessary breeder
of the decisive actions that followed. And in the same way Tarnopol,
though but a local success, decided Lemberg. In the last days of
August all von Auffenberg's right had to fall back rather rapidly upon
entrenched positions to the south and east of Lemberg itself, just as
his left had had to fall back on similar positions against Russky.
The action for Lemberg itself opened, by a curious coincidence, the
campaign which was the anniversary of the first fighting round Sedan,
and closed precisely at the moment when the tide of German advance in
the West was turned.
Forty-eight hours decided the issue. It was, perhaps, Russky's
continual extended threat to envelop the left of the Austrian position
and to come upon Auffenberg's communications which was the chief
factor in the result; but that result was, after the junction of the
two Russian armies, no longer really in doubt. The first heavy assault
upon the trenches had taken place upon the Wednesday morning at dawn;
before nightfall of Thursday the two extremes of the Austrian line
were bent back into such a horseshoe that any further delay would have
involved complete disaster. It is true that the central trenches in
front--that is, to the east of the great town--still held secure, and
had not, indeed, been severely tried. But it remains true that von
Auffenberg had committed the serious error of risking defeat in front
of such a city. And here some digression upon the nature of this
operation may be of service to the reader, because it is one which
reoccurs more than once in the first phases of the war, and must, in
the nature of things, occur over and over again before the end of it.
Examples of it already appeared in the first six months of the war, in
the case of Lille and in the case of Lodz; and it is a necessarily
recurrent case in all modern warfare.
A great _modern_ town, particularly if it has valuable industries, is
a lure as powerful over the modern commander as was a capital or the
seat of any government or even a fortress for those of earlier times.
To abandon such a centre is to let fall into the enemy's hands
opportunities for provisionment and _machinery_ for his further
supply; it is to allow great numbers of one's nationals to pass as
hostages into his power; it is nearly always to give up to him the
junction of several great railways; it is to permit him to levy heavy
indemnities, and even, if he is in such a temper, to destroy in great
quantities the accumulated wealth of the past.
On account of all this, it requires a single eye to the larger issues
of war, and a sort of fanaticism for pure strategy in a commander
before he will consent to fall behind a position of such political
and material value, and to let it fall to his opponent.
But, on the other hand, such a position is as bad in strategical value
as it is good in material and political value.
If you suffer defeat in front of a great modern town, and have to
retreat through it under the blows of the victorious enemy, you are in
the worst possible position for conducting that retreat. The streets
of the town (but few of which will run parallel to your course and
can, therefore, serve as avenues of escape for your army) are so many
defiles in which your columns will get hopelessly congested. The
operation may be compared to the pouring of too much liquid into a
funnel which has too small an orifice. Masses of your transport will
remain clogged outside the place; you run the risk of a partial and
perhaps of a complete disaster as the enemy presses on.
There is very much more than this. A great town cannot but contain, if
you have long occupied it, the material of your organization; you will
probably abandon documents which the enemy should not see. You will
certainly, in the pressure of such a flight, lose accumulated stores.
Again, the transverse streets are so many points of "leakage," into
which your congested columns will bulge out and get confused. Again,
you will be almost necessarily dealing with the complication of a mass
of civilian conditions which should never be allowed to interrupt a
military operation.
In general, to fight in front of a great town, when the chances are
against you, is as great an error as to fight in front of a marsh with
few causeways; so far as mere topography is concerned, it is a greater
error still.
Lemberg did not, indeed, fulfil all these conditions. It is very large
(not far from a quarter of a million people), with all its suburbs it
is nearly two miles in extreme extent, and its older or central part
is a confusion of narrow streets; but it is not highly industrialized,
and the position of the Austrian armies was such that the retreat
could be effected mainly from either side of the built area,
particularly as the main enemy pressure had not come in front of the
city along the Busk Road, but far to the east and south in the open
field. But Lemberg was an exceedingly important railway centre (seven
lines converge there), and it contained an immense amount of war
munitions. When, therefore, the retreat was tardily undertaken, the
fact that the more precipitate retirement had begun in front of the
city and not behind it was of considerable effect in what followed.
To some extent von Auffenberg, in spite of the tardiness of his
decision to retire, had protected his retreat. The main line of that
retreat was established for him, of course, by the main Galician
railway, which runs back from Lemberg to Przemysl. He prepared a
position some two days' march behind Lemberg, and defended with a
rearguard at Grodek the belated withdrawal of his main force. But from
the nature of the Russian advance, Russky, upon von Auffenberg's left,
perpetually threatened this railway; and Brussilov, upon his right,
pressed the rapidly-melting mass of the varied contingents opposed to
him through the difficult, hilly, and woody country of the foothills.
[Illustration: Sketch 71.]
It was upon the Friday, September 4th, that the Austrian evacuation of
Lemberg was complete, and that the Russian administration was
established in the town. Before Monday, the 7th, the Austrian right
had already half converted their retirement into a rout, and the great
captures of prisoners and of guns had begun. That important arm, the
irregular light cavalry of the Russians, notably the great Cossack
contingent, found its opportunity, and the captures began upon a scale
far exceeding anything which the war had hitherto shown or was to
show for at least the next six months. The matter is of more
importance, to our judgment of the war, in its quality than in its
scale. In the very same week at Tannenberg nearly as many Russians had
been eliminated from the Russian forces as Austrians were here
eliminated from the Austrian forces. But the point is that, whereas in
the Battle of Tannenberg envelopment, with its consequent slaughter of
men who cannot escape and its wholesale captures, left the rest of the
Russian army with its _moral_ intact, the Austrian losses were the
product of a partial dissolution, and affected the whole of their
southern army. First and last one-third of it had fallen _as
prisoners_ into Russian hands, apart from the enormous number of
killed and removed wounded. It could only just be said that that army
remained in being upon Monday, the 7th September, with which date this
section of my work ends. The other Austrian army to the north, its
flank thus uncovered, was compelled to fall back rapidly, though the
forces in front of it were small; and the Austro-Hungarian service
never fully recovered from this great blow.
TANNENBERG.
The province of East Prussia is of a character peculiar in the German
Empire and in Europe.
That character must be grasped if the reader is to understand what
fortunes attended the war in this region; for it is a district which
in its history, in its political value, and in its geographical
arrangements has very powerfully affected the whole of the campaign.
Historically this district is the cradle of that mixed race whose
strict, narrow, highly defined, but quite uncreative policy has now
piqued, now alarmed, civilized Europe for almost two hundred years.
[Illustration: Sketch 72.]
The Prussian, or rather the Prussian aristocracy, which, by achieving
the leadership of Germany, has flung so heavy a mass at Europe,
originated in the rough admixture of certain West German and Christian
knights with the vague pagan population of the Eastern Baltic plain,
which, until almost the close of the Middle Ages, was still a field
for missionary effort and for crusade. It was the business of the
Teutonic knights to tame this march of Christendom. They accomplished
their work almost out of sight of the governing empire, the Papacy,
and Christendom in general, with what infamies history records. The
district thus occupied was not within the belt of that high Polish
culture which is one of the glories of Europe. Nations may not
inexactly be divided into those who seek and those who avoid the sea.
The Poles are of the latter type. This belt, therefore, of _Borussia_
(whence our word Prussia is derived)--roughly from the Vistula up on
to the Bight of Libau--was held by the Teutonic knights in a sort of
savage independence. The Christian faith, which it had been their
pretext and at first their motive to spread, took little root; but
they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany
itself had absorbed from the south and west could filter in; and the
northern part of the district, that along the sea (which is the least
marshy, and, as that poor country goes, the least barren), was from
the close of the Middle Ages German-owned, though for some generations
nominally adherent to the Polish crown. The Polish race extended no
farther northward in the present province than the lake country of its
southern half, and even there suffered an admixture of Lithuanian and
German blood.
That lake country well merits a particular description, for its
topography has powerfully affected the war in the East; but for the
moment we must chiefly grasp the political character following upon
the history of this land. The chief noble of "Borussia," the governing
duke, acquired, not from the empire nor perhaps in the eyes of Europe,
but from the Polish monarchy, the title of king, and it must never be
forgotten that the capital at Berlin, and the "Mark"--that is, the
frontier march--of Brandenburg, though now the centre, are neither the
origins nor the pride of the Hohenzollern power. They were kings of
Prussia because Prussia was extraneous to the European system. There
came a moment, as I have pointed out in an earlier page in this book,
when the Prussian kingship and the electorate of Brandenburg coincided
in one person. All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel,
what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook.
East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political
fetish. Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the
birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story. Its
country-sides, although still largely inhabited by a population of
servile memories and habits not thoroughly welded with their masters,
do not take up great space in the view the German takes of the region.
He sees rather the German landowner, the German bailiff, the German
schoolmaster, and the numerous German tenants of the wealthier type
who, though a minority, form the chief part of this social system. We
shall see later what this miscalculation cost the great landowners
during the Russian invasion, but we must note in passing that it is a
miscalculation common to every people. Only that which is articulate
in the States stands out large in the social perspective during
periods of order and of peace.
The Prussian royal house, the Prussian aristocracy, have then for this
bastion towards the east an especial regard, which has not been
without its sentimental influence upon the course of the war; and that
regard is very highly increased by the artificial political boundaries
of modern times.
East Prussia is, for the Germans as a whole, their rampart against the
Slav; and though, beyond the present purely political and only
century-old frontier, a large German-speaking population is to be
discovered (especially in the towns under Russian rule), yet such is
the influence of a map upon a people essentially bookish in their
information, that East Prussia stands to the whole German Empire, as
well as to its wealthier inhabitants, for a proof of the German power
to withstand the dreaded pressure of the Russian from the East.
It was to be expected, therefore, that two strategical consequences
would flow from these non-strategical conditions: first, that the
Russians would be tempted--though, no doubt, in very small force for
such a secondary operation--to raid a district towards which the
enemy's opinion was so sensitive; secondly, that enemy would be
tempted, after each such effort, to extend a disproportionate force in
ridding the country of such raids.
The Germans, for all the dictates of pure strategics, would hardly
hold firm under the news that Slav soldiers were in the farms and
country-houses, and were threatening the townsfolk of East Prussia.
The Russians, though no direct advantage was to be gained, and though
the bulk of their force must be used elsewhere, would certainly be
drawn to move into East Prussia in spite of the known and peculiarly
heavy difficulties to an advance which that province presented.
What were those difficulties?
They were of two kinds, the second of which has been, perhaps, unduly
emphasized at the expense of the first.
The first was, that the Baltic extreme of this region lay at the very
end of the longest possible line the Russians could move on. Even
supposing their front extended (as soon it did) from the Carpathians
to the sea, this Baltic piece was the end of the line and farthest
from their material bases and their sources of equipment. It was badly
served with railways, difficult of access from the soil lying to the
east, and backed by that sparsely inhabited belt of Russian territory
in which the modern capital of St. Petersburg has been artificially
erected, but which is excentric to the vital process of Russia. As a
fact, even after eight months of war, let alone in the first phases
which we are here about to describe, the extreme end of this line was
not attempted by the Russians at all.
Next to this extreme position, which was the first handicap, comes the
region of the lakes, the nature of which was the second handicap.
The Masurian Lake district can best be appreciated by some description
of its geology and its landscape. It was probably moulded by the work
of ice in the past. Great masses of ice have ground out, in their very
slow progress towards the sea over the very slight incline northwards
of that line, hollows innumerable, and varying from small pools to
considerable lakes; the ice has left, upon a background of sand,
patches of clay, which hold the waters of all this countryside in
brown stretches of shallow mere, and in wider extents of marsh and
bog. The rare travellers who explore this confusion of low rounded
swells and flats carry back with them to better lands a picture of one
grossly monotonous type continuing day upon day. Pine and birch woods,
often ordered with the regularity and industry of the German forest
organization, but often also straggling and curiously stunted and
small, break or confuse the view upon either side.
The impression of the district is most clearly conveyed from some
sandy summit, bare of trees, whence a man may overlook, though not
from any great height, the desolate landscape for some miles. He
obtains from such a view neither the sense of forest which wooded
lands of great height convey in spite of their clearings, nor the
sense of endless plain which he would find farther to the east or to
the north. He perceives through the singularly clear air in autumn
brown heaths and plains set here and there with the great stretches of
woodland and farmsteads, the stubble of which is soon confused by the
eye in the distance with the barren heaths around. In winter, the
undulating mass of deep and even snow is marked everywhere by the
small, brown, leafless trees in their great groupings, and by the
pines, as small, and weighted with the burden of the weather; but much
the most striking of the things seen in such a landscape are the
stretches of black water, or, if the season be hard, of black ice
which, save when the snow has recently fallen, fierce winds will
commonly have swept bare.
The military character of such a region will be clear. It is, in the
technical language of military art, a labyrinth of _defiles_. Care has
been expended upon the province, especially in the last two
generations, and each narrow passage between the principal sheets of
water carries a road, often a hard causeway. A considerable system of
railways takes advantage of the same natural narrow issues; but even
to those familiar with the country, the complexity of these narrow dry
gates or defiles, and their comparative rarity (contrasted with the
vast extent of waterlogged soil or of open pool), render an advance
against any opposition perilous, and even an unopposed advance slow,
and dependent upon very careful Staff work. Columns in their progress
are for hours out of touch one with the other, and an unexpected check
in some one narrow must be met by the force there present alone, for
it will not be able to obtain immediate reinforcement.
Again, all this line, with its intermixture of sand and clay, which is
due to its geological origin, is a collection of traps for any
commander who has not thoroughly studied his lines of advance or of
retreat--one might almost say for any commander who has not had long
personal experience of the place. There will be across one mere a belt
of sand or gravel, carrying the heaviest burdens through the shallow
water as might a causeway. Its neighbour, with a surface precisely
twin, with the same brown water, fringed by the same leaves and dreary
stretches of stunted wood, will be deep in mud, but a natural platform
may stretch into a lake and fail the column which uses it before the
farther shore is reached. In the strongest platforms of this kind gaps
of deep clay or mud unexpectedly appear. But even with these
deceptions, a column is lucky which has only to deal in its march with
open water and firm banks; for the whole place is sown with what were
formerly the beds of smaller meres, and are now bogs hardened in
places, in others still soft--the two types of soil hardly
distinguishable.
During any orderly advance, an army proceeding through the Masurian
Lakes will strictly confine itself to the great causeways and to the
railway. During any retreat in which it is permitted to observe the
same order it will be similarly confined to the only possible issues;
but let the retreat be confused, and disaster at once threatens.
A congested column attempting to spread out to the right or to the
left will fall into marsh. Guns which it has attempted to save by the
crossing of a ford will sooner or later find mud and be abandoned. Men
will be drowned in the unexpected deeps, transport embedded and lost;
and apart from all this vast wastage, the confusion of units will
speedily put such a brake upon the whole process of retirement that
envelopment by an enemy who knows the district more thoroughly is
hardly to be avoided.
It was this character in the dreary south of East Prussia which was
the cause of Tannenberg, and as we read the strategical plan of that
disaster, we must keep in mind the view so presented of an empty land,
thus treacherous with marsh and reed and scrub and stretches of barren
flat, which may be heath, or may be a horse's height and more of
slightly covered slime.
The first phase of the business lasts until the 24th of August,
beginning with the 7th of that month, and may be very briefly dealt
with.
Two Russian armies, numbering altogether perhaps 200,000 men, or at
the most a quarter of a million, advanced, the one from the Niemen,
the other from the Narew--that is, the one from the east, the other
from the south, into East Prussia. The Germans had here reserve
troops, in what numbers we do not know, but perhaps half the combined
numbers of the Russian invasion, or perhaps a little more. The main
shock was taken upon the eastern line of invasion at Gumbinnen; the
Germans, defeated there, and threatened by the continued advance of
the other army to the west of them, which forbade their retreat
westward, fell back in considerable disorder upon Koenigsberg, lost
masses of munitions and guns, and were shut up in that fortress. The
defeat at Gumbinnen occupied four days--from the 16th to the 20th of
August.
Meanwhile the Russian army which was advancing from the Narew had
struck a single German army corps--the 20th--in the neighbourhood of
Frankenau. The Russian superiority in numbers was very great; the
German army corps was turned and divided. Half of it fled westward,
abandoning many guns and munitions; the other half fled north-eastward
towards Koenigsberg, and the force as a whole disappeared from the
field. The Russians pushed their cavalry westward; Allenstein was
taken, and by the 25th of August the most advanced patrols of the
Russians had almost reached the Vistula.
The necessity for retaking East Prussia by the Germans was a purely
political one. The vast crowd of refugees flying westward spread panic
within the empire. The personal feeling of the Emperor and of the
Prussian aristocracy in the matter of the defeated province was keen.
Had that attempt to retake East Prussia failed, military history would
point to it as a capital example of the error of neglecting purely
strategical for political considerations. As a fact, it succeeded
beyond all expectation, and its success is known as the German victory
of Tannenberg.
The nature of this victory may be grasped from the accompanying sketch
map.
From the town of Mlawa, just within Russian Poland, beyond the
frontier, runs, coming up from Warsaw, a railway to Soldau, just upon
the Prussian side of the frontier. At Soldau three railways
converge--one from the east, one going west to Niedenberg and the
junction of Ortelsberg, a third coming in from the north-east and
Eylau.
[Illustration: Sketch 73.]
From Eylau, through Osterode, the main international line runs
through Allenstein, and so on eastward, while a branch from this goes
through Passenheim to the junction at Ortelsberg.
Here, then, you have a quadrilateral of railways about fifty miles in
length. Within that quadrilateral is extremely bad country--lakes,
marshes, and swamps--and the only good roads within it are those
marked in single lines upon my sketch--the road from Allenstein
through Hohenstein to Niedenberg, and the road from Niedenberg to
Passenheim. As one goes eastwards on that road from Niedenberg to
Passenheim, in the triangle Niedenberg-Passenheim-Ortelsberg, the
country gets worse and worse, and is a perfect labyrinth of marsh,
wood, and swamp. The development of the action in such a ground was as
follows:--
The Russian commander, Samsonoff, with his army running from
Allenstein southwards, was facing towards the west. He had with him
perhaps 200,000 men, perhaps a trifle less. His reconnaissance was
faulty, partly because the aeroplanes could discover little in that
wooded country, partly because the Staff work was imperfect, and his
Intelligence Department not well informed by his cavalry patrols. He
thought he had against him to the west only weak forces. As a fact,
the Germans were sending against him what they themselves admit to be
150,000 men, and what were quite possibly nearer 200,000, for they had
drawn largely upon the troops within Germany. They had brought round
by sea many of the troops shut up in Koenigsberg, and they had brought
up the garrisons upon the Vistula. Further, they possessed, drawn from
these garrisons, a great superiority in that arm which throughout all
the earlier part of the great war was the German stand-by--heavy
artillery, and big howitzers capable of use in the field.
On Wednesday, 26th August, Samsonoff first discovered that he had a
formidable force in front of him.
It was under the command of von Hindenburg, a man who had studied this
district very thoroughly, and who, apart from his advantage in heavy
artillery, knew that difficult country infinitely better than his
opponents. During the Wednesday, the 26th, Hindenburg stood upon the
defensive, Samsonoff attacking him upon the line Allenstein-Soldau. At
the end of that defensive, the attack on which was badly hampered in
so difficult a country, von Hindenburg massed men upon his right near
Soldau. This move had two objects: first, by pushing the Russians back
there to make them lose the only good road and railway by which they
could retire south upon their communications into the country whence
they had come; secondly, to make them think, in their natural anxiety
for those communications, that his main effort would be delivered
there to the south. As a fact, it was his intention to act elsewhere.
But the effect of his pressure along the arrow _a_ was to give the
Russian line by the evening of that Wednesday, the 26th of August, the
form of the line 1 upon Sketch 73.
The advantage he had thus gained in front of Soldau, Hindenburg
maintained by rapid and successful entrenchment; and the next day,
Thursday, 27th August, he moved great numbers round by railway to his
left near Allenstein, and appeared there with a great local
superiority in numbers and in heavy guns. By the evening of that day,
then, the 27th, he had got the Russian line into the position 2, and
the chief effort was being directed along the arrow _b_. On the 28th
and 29th the pressure continued, and increased here upon the north;
the Russian right was pushed back upon Passenheim, for which there was
a most furious fight; and by the evening of the 29th Samsonoff's whole
body was bent right round into the curve of the line 3, and vigorous
blows were being dealt against it along the arrow _c_, which bent it
farther and farther in.
It was clearly evident by that evening, the 29th of August, that
Samsonoff must retreat; but his opportunities for such a retreat were
already difficult. All he had behind him was the worst piece in the
whole country--the triangle Passenheim-Ortelsberg-Niedenberg--and his
main avenue of escape was a defile between the lake which the railway
at Ortelsberg uses.
His retirement became hopelessly congested. Further pressure along the
arrow _d_, during the 30th and 31st, broke that retirement into two
halves, one half (as at 5) making off eastwards, the other half (as
at 4) bunched together in a hopeless welter in a country where every
egress was blocked by swamp and mire, and subjected to the pounding of
the now concentrated ring of heavy guns. The body at 5 got away in the
course of the 1st and 2nd of September, but only at the expense of
leaving behind them great numbers of guns, wounded, and stragglers.
The body at 4 was, in the military sense of the word, "annihilated."
It numbered at least two army corps, or 80,000 men, and of these it is
probable that 50,000 fell into the hands of the enemy, wounded and
unwounded. The remainder, representing the killed, and the chance
units that were able to break out, could hardly have been more than
20,000 to 30,000 men.
Such was the victory of Tannenberg--an immensely successful example of
that enveloping movement which the Germans regarded as their peculiar
inheritance; a victory in nature recalling Sedan, and upon a scale not
inferior to that battle.
The news of that great triumph reached Berlin upon Sedan Day, at the
very moment when the corresponding news from the West was that von
Kluck had reached the gates of Paris, and had nothing in front of him
but the broken and inferior armies of a disastrous defeat.
THE SPIRITS IN CONFLICT.
At this point it is well to pause and consider an element of the
vastest consequence to the whole conduct of these great campaigns--I
mean the element of German confidence.
Here we have a nation which has received within a fortnight of its
initial large operations, within the first five weeks of a war which
it had proudly imposed upon its enemies, the news of a victory more
startlingly triumphant than its most extreme expectation of success
had yet imagined possible.
Let the reader put himself into the position of a German subject in
his own station of life, a town dweller, informed as is the English
reader by a daily press, which has come to be his sole source of
opinion, enjoying or suffering that almost physical self-satisfaction
and trust in the future which is, unfortunately, not peculiar to the
North German, but common in varying degree to a whole school of morals
to-day. Let him remember that this man has been specially tutored and
coached into a complete faith in the superiority of himself and his
kind over the rest of the human race, and this in a degree superior
even to that in which other nations, including our own, have indulged
after periods of expanding wealth and population.
Let the reader further remember that in this the Germans' rooted faith
their army was for them at once its cause and its expression; then
only can he conceive what attitude the mind of such men would assume
upon the news from East and from West during those days--the news of
the avalanche in France and the news of Tannenberg. It would seem to
the crowd in Berlin during the great festival which marked the time
that they were indeed a part of something not only necessarily
invincible, but of a different kind in military superiority from other
men.
These, from what would seem every quarter of the globe, had been
gathered to oppose him, merely because the German had challenged his
two principal enemies. Though yet far from being imperilled by so
universal a movement, he crushes it utterly, and in a less time than
it takes for a great nation to realize that it is under arms, he is
overwhelmed by the news not of his enemy's defeat, but rather of his
annihilation. Miles of captured guns and hour upon hour of marching
columns of prisoners are the visible effect of his triumph and the
confirmation of it; and he hears, after the awful noise of his
victories, a sort of silence throughout the world--a silence of awe
and dread, which proclaims him master. It is the anniversary of Sedan.
I do not set down this psychological phenomenon for the mere pleasure
of its description, enormous as that phenomenon is, and worthy of
description as it is. I set it down because I think that only in an
appreciation of it can one understand the future development of the
war. After the Battle of Metz, after the sweep down upon Paris from
the Sambre, after this immense achievement of Tannenberg, the
millioned opinion of a now united North Germany was fixed. It was so
fixed that even a dramatically complete disaster (and the German
armies have suffered none) might still leave the North German unshaken
in his confidence. Defeats would still seem to him but episodes upon a
general background, whose texture was the necessary predominance of
his race above the lesser races of the world. This is the mood we
shall discover in all that Germany does from that moment forward. It
is of the first importance to realize it, because that mood is, so to
speak, the chemical basis of all the reactions that follow. That mood,
disappointed, breeds fury and confusion; in the event of further
slight successes, it breeds a vast exaggeration of such success; in
the presence of any real though but local advance, it breeds the
illusion of a final victory.
It is impossible to set down adequately in these few pages this
intoxication of the first German victories. It must be enough to
recall to the reader that the strange mood with which we have to deal
was also one of a century's growth, a century during which not only in
Germany, but in Scandinavia, in the universities (and many other
cliques) of England, even largely in the United States, a theory had
grown and prospered that something called "the Teutonic race" was the
origin of all we valued; that another thing, called in one aspect "the
Latin" or in another aspect "the Celt," was something in the one case
worn out, in the other negligible through folly, instability, and
decay. The wildest history gathered round this absurd legend, not only
among the Germans but wherever the "Teutonic theory" flourished, and
the fatuous vanity of the North German was fed by the ceaseless
acceptance of that legend on the part of those who believed themselves
to be his kinsmen.
They still believe it. In every day that passes the press of Great
Britain reveals the remains of this foolery. And while the real
person, England, is at grips with another real thing, Prussia, which
is determined to kill her by every means in its power, the empty
theorizing of professors who do not see _things_, but only the
imaginary figures of their theories, continues to regard England as in
some way under a German debt, and subject to the duty of admiring her
would-be murderer.
Before leaving this digression, I would further remind the reader
that nowhere in the mass of the British population is this strange
theory of German supremacy accepted, and that outside the countries I
have named not even the academic classes consider it seriously. In the
eyes of the Frenchman, the Italian, and the Pole, the North German is
an inferior. His numbers and his equipment for war do not affect that
sentiment, for it is recognized that all he has and does are the
product of a lesson carefully learned, and that his masters always
were and still are the southern and the western nations, with their
vastly more creative spirit, their hardier grip in body as in mind,
their cleaner souls, and their more varied and developed ideals.
If this was the mood of the German people when the war in its first
intense moment had, as it were, cast into a permanent form the molten
popular soul, what was that of the nation which the Germans knew in
their hearts, in spite of the most pitiable academic illusion, to be
the permanent and implacable enemy--I mean the French people?
Comprehend the mood of the French, contrast and oppose it to that of
the Germans, and you will have viewed almost in its entirety the
spiritual theatre of this gigantic struggle. No don's talk of "Slav"
or "Teuton," of "progressive" or "backward" nations, mirrors in any
way the realities of the great business. This war was in some almost
final fashion, and upon a scale quite unprecedented, the returning
once again of those conflicting spirits which had been seen over the
multitudes in the dust of the Rhone valley when Marius came up from
Italy and met the chaos in the North. They had met again in the damp
forests of the Ardennes and the vague lands beyond the Rhine, when the
Roman auxiliaries of the decline pushed out into the Germanies to set
back the frontiers of barbarism. It was the clash between strong
continuity, multiple energies, a lucid possession of the real world, a
creative proportion in all things--all that we call the ancient
civilization of Europe--and the unstable, quickly growing, quickly
dissolving outer mass which continually learns its lesson from the
civilized man, and yet can never perfectly learn that lesson; which
sees itself in visions and has dreams of itself: which now servilely
accepts the profound religion of its superior; now, the brain fatigued
by mysteries, shakes off that burden which it cannot comprehend.
By an accident comparatively recent, the protagonist of chaos in these
things happened to be that rigid but curiously amorphous power which
Prussia has wielded for many years to no defined end. The protagonist
upon the other side of the arena was that same Romanized Gaul which
had ever since the fall of the Empire least lost the continuity with
the past whereby we live.
But the defender of ancient things was (again by an accident in what
is but a moment for universal history) the weaker power. In the
tremendous issue it looked as though numbers and values had fallen
apart, and as though the forces of barbarism, though they could never
make, would now at last permanently destroy.
In what mood, I say, did the defenders of the European story enter the
last and most perilous of their debates? We must be able to answer
that question if we are to understand even during the course of the
war its tendency and its probable end.
By the same road, the valley of the Oise, which had seen twenty times
before lesser challenges of the kind, the North had rushed down. It
was a gauge of its power that all the West was gathered there in
common, with contingents from Britain in the heart of the press.
The enemy had come on in a flood of numbers: the defence, and half as
much as the defence, and more again. The line swung down irresistible,
with the massy weight of its club aimed at Paris. If the eastern forts
at Toul and at Verdun and the resistance before Nancy had held back
its handle, that resistance had but enabled it to pivot with the freer
swing. Not only had there fallen back before its charge all the
arrayed armies of the French and their new Ally, but also all that had
counted in the hopes of the defenders had failed. All that the last
few years had promised in the new work of the air, all that a
generation had built up of permanent fortified work, had been proved
impotent before the new siege train. The barrier fortresses of the
Meuse, Liege and Namur, had gone up like paper in a fire. Maubeuge was
at its last days. Another week's bombardment and the ring of Verdun
would be broken.
The sweep has no parallel in the monstrous things of history. Ten days
had sufficed for the march upon the capital. Nor had there been in
that ten days a moment's hope or an hour of relaxation.
No such strain has yet been endured, so concentrated, so exact an
image of doom.
And all along the belt of that march the things that were the
sacrament of civilization had gone. Rheims was possessed, the village
churches of the "Island of France" and of Artois were ruins or
desolations. The peasantry already knew the destruction of something
more than such material things, the end of a certain social pact which
war in Christendom had spared. They had been massacred in droves, with
no purpose save that of terror; they had been netted in droves, the
little children and the women with the men, into captivity. The track
of the invasion was a wound struck not, as other invasions have been,
at some territory or some dynasty; it was a wound right home to the
heart of whatever is the West, of whatever has made our letters and
our buildings and our humour between them. There was a death and an
ending in it which promised no kind of reconstruction, and the fools
who had wasted words for now fifty years upon some imagined excellence
in the things exterior to the tradition of Europe, were dumb and
appalled at the sight of barbarism in action--in its last action after
the divisions of Europe had permitted its meaningless triumph for so
long. Were Paris entered, whether immediately or after that
approaching envelopment of the armies, it would be for destruction;
and all that is not replaceable in man's work would be lost to our
children at the hands of men who cannot make.
The immediate approach of this death and the cold wind of it face to
face produced in the French people a singular reaction, which even
now, after eight months of war, is grimly seen. Their irony was
resolved into a strained silence. Their expectation was halted and
put aside. They prophesied no future; they supported the soul neither
with illusions nor with mere restraint; but they threw their whole
being into a tension like that of the muscles of a man's face when it
is necessary for him to pass and to support some overmastering moment.
There was no will at issue with the small group of united wills whose
place was at the headship of the army. The folly of the politicians
had not only ceased, but had fallen out of memory.
It is no exaggeration to say that the vividness of that
self-possession for a spring annihilated time. It was not a fortnight
since the blow had come of the 15th Corps breaking before Metz, and
the stunning fall of Namur. But to the mind of the People it was
already a hundred years, and conversely the days that passed did not
pass in hours, or with any progression, but stood still.
There was to come--it was already in the agony of birth--the moment, a
day and a night, in which one effort rolled the wave right back. That
effort did not release the springs of the national soul. They
remained stretched to the utmost. By a character surely peculiar to
this unexampled test of fire, no relaxation came as, month after
month, the war proceeded.
But the passage of so many days, with the gradual broadening of vision
and, in time, the aspect, though distant, of slow victory; the
creeping domination acquired over the mass of spiritually sodden
things that had all but drowned the race; the pressure of the hand
tightening upon the throat of the murderer; released a certain high
potential which those who do not know it can no more comprehend than a
savage can comprehend the lightning which civilized man regulates and
holds in the electric wire. And this potential made, and is making,
for an intense revenge.
That is the vision that should remain with those who desire to
understand the future the war must breed, and that is the white heat
of energy which will explain very terrible things, still masked by the
future, and undreamt of here.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The ultimatum expired at midnight (August 4-5) by Greenwich time,
11 p.m. (August 4) by German, or Central European, time.
[3] AA is holding the obstacle OO against a superior number BB. There
are six passages across OO. If BB forces No. 5 and No. 6 he creates
the situation in the following diagram, where it is obvious that BB is
now on the flank of AA, and that AA must retire, even if he still
holds passages 1, 2, 3, and 4. That is what happened when Namur fell.
The French could hold, and were holding, the Germans along the Sambre,
above Namur; but the bridges of Namur, which were thought safe behind
the forts, had fallen into German hands.
[Illustration: Sketch 44.]
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