Sontag’s attack orders reflected a preference for finesse over force. He divided his attenuated division into three of what a later generation would call battle groups: two or three infantry battalions reinforced by a battalion of field artillery and a detachment of cavalry. He proposed to slip these task forces one after the other in a single column between the Russian positions, cut the high road, swing left and break through Waplitz to the Paulsgut heights. Then the battle groups would take separate positions to block the Russian retreat.
The plan’s flaws lay less in conception than in execution. The night march to the lines of departure was made in increasingly thick fog. Platoons and companies lost their way time and again. Whole battalions scattered out of control, regrouped, and scattered once more. For security reasons the infantry marched with unloaded rifles, a command decision that did nothing to enhance feelings of confidence in the face of episodic bursts of fire from Russian stragglers and pickets.
As the German advance guard passed through the abandoned village of Adamsheide it was greeted by the crowing of a solitary rooster. It was as though the bird gave a signal. By 3:45 a.m. the banging of individual Russian rifles had become a steady rattle. Sontag’s leading regiment, the 59th Infantry, deployed blindly in the fog, overran Russian outposts, and drove forward in what the officers hoped was the general direction of Waplitz. The regiment’s vanguard, its third battalion, was pinned down in minutes by what seemed random firing. In the damp air, every shot sounded as though it came from every direction. The 59th’s heavy loss of officers on August 26 took quick effect. One or two casualties left entire companies leaderless. No one of any rank knew what was happening. Patrols sent into the fog never returned, their men shot, bayoneted, or simply lost in the confusion.
By 4:15 a.m. the regiment’s second battalion joined the fighting line, its squads and platoons advancing as best they could on their own initiative. Waplitz, a large village rather than a small town, straggled for a kilometer along both sides of the shallow Maranse River. Captain Benecke, commanding the 59th’s 8th Company, led a rush across the bridge west of the village. A Russian officer and a few enlisted men, up to their knees in water, waved handkerchiefs in token of surrender. In Scholtz’s corps, as in Mackensen’s before Gumbinnen, tales were rife of enemy abuses of the white flag. A few shots, a few hoarse screams, and a half-dozen brown-uniformed corpses were left bobbing in the slow-flowing water. But the Germans were unable to advance farther across the open, boggy ground in the face of Russian fire to their front and flank. What began as a bridgehead within minutes became a pocket.
With his casualties mounting almost faster than his confusion, the colonel of the 59th committed his reserve battalion. By this time, even if the Russian infantry could see no more clearly than the Germans, their artillery was finding the range. Elements of four German companies pushed into Waplitz house by house, seeking cover as much as victory. There the attack stalled. Nowhere in the 59th’s sector could reinforcements or ammunition be brought forward. Every man still on his feet and every round still available must be husbanded, at least until the fog lifted enough to determine who was where.
As they came up on the 59th’s right flank, the battle groups based on the 148th and the 152nd Infantry stuck fast in their turns. Once the fog began to clear between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m., it was the Russians who took advantage of the changed situation. Batteries of XV Corps opened an increasingly accurate fire from the east. The 2nd Division’s guns, which had survived the previous day’s rout of their infantry, joined in from around Frankenau. German counterbattery fire was ineffective, at least in the eyes of infantrymen who already felt all too thoroughly mishandled by their superiors. Instead Waplitz, the most obvious target in the area, came under fire from the 41st Division’s guns.
As he saw more and more German shells burst in the village Captain Benecke, still holding his bridgehead with a handful of men, decided the situation was serious enough to justify leaving his position to make a personal report. For almost an hour he stumbled blindly in fog and smoke until he found not the poorly directed artillery, not the 59th’s regimental headquarters, but the colonel of the neighboring 148th Infantry. That officer promised to do all he could to help if Benecke was willing to attack. Benecke’s optimism soared further on the way back to his own men when he encountered and commandeered a detachment of pioneers commanded by an Offizierstellvertreter. Within minutes elements of the 148th also reached the Maranse, using the ditches alongside the road as protection from the Russian fire. But they were still on the wrong side of the river. With the fog lifting minute by minute, the young lieutenant commanding the 148th’s leading platoon refused to take his men across a bridge that had become a magnet for concentrated Russian fire. And thereby hung a tale of arms and men.
The pioneers of the Imperial German Army were specialist troops, whose primary mission of building and overcoming field fortifications set them apart from ordinary infantry. Yet more than Britain’s Royal Engineer field companies or France’s sappers, they were considered a combat arm. On many occasions in their history, particularly in their versions of it, pioneer companies had served as emergency reserves and assault troops. Peacetime maneuver experience had reinforced by default the pioneers’ infantry role. Time and costs forbade much direct practice in construction and demolition. Rather than pay compensation for destroyed fields to angry landowners, troops in field exercises usually marked their entrenchments with flags. Corps commanders correspondingly tended to regard their pioneer battalion as an extra source of manpower. That as much as anything had determined Sontag’s assignment of Company 3, Pioneer Battalion 26, to the 59th Infantry’s combat group. Even if they found nothing technical to do, their 250 rifles would be useful. Now some of them were staring more or less nervously at the fire-swept planks in front of them.
Their commander was also something of an anomaly. The German army had long recognized in peacetime that it would not have enough commissioned officers to fill all the positions that would open upon mobilization. Expanding the reserve officer corps was unacceptable partly on the familiar social grounds, but also for financial reasons. Instead, as so often, the army turned to its NCOs—specifically its Vizefeldwebels. Best translated as staff sergeant or platoon sergeant, this grade was held in the active army by men promoted beyond ordinary squad and section responsibilities, yet too junior to be considered for Feldwebel or unable to find a vacancy in that grade. In 1866 and 1870/71, Vizefeldwebels frequently and successfully served as platoon commanders in the field. In the intervening forty years, the grade was also increasingly given to those one-year volunteers who for one reason or another, social, economic, or professional, failed to qualify for a reserve officer’s commission.