At the Somme I met Captain von Papen, the former German military
attaché, who was sent home by America. After six weeks on the firing
line he was made chief of staff to General Count Schweinitz, commanding
the Fourth Guard Division and holding the Grevillers-Warlencourt-Ligny
line. He has proved himself an efficient officer.
Captain Boy-Ed, the naval attaché, who was sent back to Germany at
the same time, is now chief intelligence officer at the admiralty
in Berlin. He is very bitter toward America, while von Papen is
friendly. Dr. Dernburg, the other propagandist who was returned to the
fatherland, is philosophical as regards his work in America, and is
without rancour over his treatment. He is living in Berlin, working
on housing plans for the poor, but he has lost the confidence of his
Government....
All the world knows Hindenburg. Germany's Iron Man, the hero of the
Masurian Swamps, a colossal wooden statue of whom stands opposite the
Reichstag in the Sieges-allee, the Avenue of Victory, in Berlin's
Tiergarten. But who is Ludendorff?
Ludendorff is Germany's man of mystery, the grim, inscrutable,
silent man whose picture is on sale in every shop, whose name is in
every mouth, but whose real personality is hidden even from his own
countrymen.
Ludendorff is Hindenburg's indispensable right-hand man....
There are those who say that Ludendorff is Hindenburg's brain,
and that Hindenburg's greatest successes have been planned by his
silent, retiring assistant. Hindenburg, when in the mood, becomes
very talkative and chatty, and at such times he often attributes his
success to his assistant. There is a perfect harmony between the two;
Ludendorff plans and Hindenburg decides....
On August 28 (1914) it was announced that the Russians were fleeing
across the border. The news grew. Five army corps and three cavalry
divisions had been annihilated. More than ninety thousand prisoners
were taken. Tannenberg, one of the greatest victories of the war, had
changed the whole face of affairs in the east.
There have been bigger battles and longer battles, and there have been
battles of more significance in the history of the war, but there has
been no other battle in which the result has been so overwhelming and
complete a victory for either side.
Just what happened at Tannenberg and in the Masurian Swamps is still
a secret. There have been stories that a hundred thousand men were
drowned in the swamps. There have been tales of dikes released and men
swept away in a swirl of rushing waters. All that is known certainly is
that a Russian army disappeared.
(This American war correspondent then gives his impressions of men
and events within the German Armies, telling many interesting tales
of Boelcke, the German "knight of the air" who shot down thirty-eight
enemy aeroplanes before he was killed in collision with one of his own
German machines.)