Mackensen’s response was determined by tactical rather than strategic, local rather than general, concerns. On the principle of “in for a penny, in for a pound,” he decided that the only feasible option was to continue the attack against the Russians to his front with every man able to march and shoot. The 6th Landwehr Brigade had neither field kitchens nor machine guns. Its men were exhausted. Mackensen ordered it out of the battle zone. The XVII Corps would drive straight ahead; I Reserve Corps would seek to turn the Russian left flank. All that remained to screen the Germans from II Corps, and perhaps the rest of Rennen- kampf’s army, was the 1st Cavalry Division. Small wonder that the XVII Corps staff gave up their supply trains for lost and abandoned hope of seeing their personal baggage again.63 That was far from the worst that might happen.
8
The Province of Chance
Any weakness in Ludendorff’s nerves during the early evening of August 26 was not reflected in the orders he issued at 9:00 p.m. Eighth Army was to destroy the Russian XV Corps and anything remaining of the 2nd Division before XIII Corps could come to their aid. The decisive sector would be in the south, with François taking Usdau, then advancing eastward on Neidenburg to roll up the Russians facing Scholtz. Since I Corps would have to guard its own right flank against the Russians around Soldau, Ludendorff ordered Scholtz both to detach a half-dozen battalions to reinforce François and to mount a “strong” secondary attack towards Usdau, while at the same time continuing the frontal attack begun on August 26. The 3rd Reserve Division and the garrison troops would remain in position on Scholtz’s left, holding a line extending from Hohenstein to Waplitz.1
Ludendorff’s orders suggest that he continued to think less in terms of an idealized Cannae than of a more conventional victory. Here again were no subtle operational combinations, no deliberate refusing of the center to lure the Russians deeper into a trap before springing it. Ludendorff was too much the practical soldier not to be aware that an army still depending on muscle power for mobility, with a communications system as shaky as 8th Army’s had proven, was not likely to be successfully brilliant. What was required instead was hard fighting all along the line in the hopes that somewhere the enemy would crack.
At 10:50 p.m. on the 26th Ludendorff boasted to OHL over the telephone that the success of his attack was as certain as human calculation could make it, even in the face of five enemy corps. He may have been talking as much for his own benefit as Moltke’s. At 10:30 p.m. 8th Army headquarters had finally learned that the 3rd Reserve Division was nowhere near its assigned position. Informed of Morgen’s failure to advance, Scholtz and Hell were relieved. They still expected an attack on their left flank the next day—an attack delivered by the combined strength of XIII and XV Corps. While the main body of XX Corps was attacking towards Usdau, Scholtz, rather than see the 3rd Reserve Division as far north as Hohenstein, wanted it moved south behind the Drewenz to serve as his flank guard. Army command, deferring once more to the commander on the spot, finally accepted this disposition, but only under protest. It seemed the virtual end of any hopes of executing a tactical envelopment against the 2nd Army from the north. Now everything depended on the operational flanks: François around Usdau and Mackensen at Bischofsburg.2
I
The night of August 26 remained quiet on I Corps’s front. François had issued his orders at 8:30 p.m. The 1st Division would attack Usdau from the northwest. The 2nd would strike from the south with one brigade, while the 3rd Brigade covered its right flank. The 5th Landwehr Brigade would screen the entire operation against any advance by the Russians around Soldau. In reserve, ready to exploit any success, was the detachment from XX Corps: six battalions, a squadron of cavalry, and a battalion of field artillery. The artillery preparation would begin at 4:00 a.m., with the infantry advancing an hour later.3
The I Corps was ready. Its infantry had a full night’s sleep; most of them also received a hot breakfast. The corps artillery and the ammunition columns were finally in position. But the Russian position was naturally strong. It offered good fields of fire to front and flanks and ample room to conceal artillery close to the front line. It had been improved by several days of digging. Conta initially held his infantry on the lines of departure to give the guns more time to do their work. Falk’s 2nd Division, which had worked closer to the Russian positions during the previous evening, advanced on schedule. Both divisions were nervous—so nervous that François’s headquarters received a report of Usdau’s capture around 5:00 a.m. He learned the report was false only when his headquarters convoy drove into heavy rifle and machine gun fire along the Usdau road. An enthusiastic junior officer had mistaken an isolated farm west of Usdau for the beginning of the village itself.4
The arrival of I Corps on his front initially caught François’s Russian counterpart completely by surprise. Artamonov had not used his two cavalry divisions for anything but flank security. Neither of his infantry division commanders bothered to send out patrols to their front. Artamonov regarded himself as a soldier’s general, a front-line commander impatient of modern restraints. Instead of coordinating what little intelligence reached his headquarters, he kept popping up in forward positions, interfering with company officers and “inspiring” enlisted men by asking inane questions about their home lives while an entire German corps detrained within a day’s march of his positions.
Artamonov might have been taken unaware; he had no intention of merely holding his ground. On the night of the 25th/26th he reported to Samsonov that he expected to be attacked by superior forces from the northwest. But to Artamonov, as to most of his contemporaries everywhere in Europe, the best defense was a determined offense. The Russian corps commander decided that he could best fulfil his role as flank guard by attacking the only enemy whose position he definitely knew: the 5th Landwehr Brigade at Lautenberg. To get the strength to do this he withdrew a brigade from his right, thereby increasing the already wide gap between I Russian Corps and the 2nd Division in Samsonov’s center. A first result of this unfortunate maneuver came on August 26, when Scholtz was able to outflank and scatter the 2nd Division without interference. Yet the next morning Artamonov had no thoughts beyond overwhelming the Germans at Lautenberg.5
For all its shortcomings, Artamonov’s plan appears more feckless in retrospect than it might have been with better luck or better execution. The Russian advance collided head-on with the Landwehr, who had been advancing since early morning and were feeling quite pleased with themselves. The forward elements of the brigade came under Russian fire just west of Skurpien and suffered heavy casualties in the first few minutes, some of them from German artillery, which once again fired too short. At the same time the brigade was flanked from the south by a strong force of Russian cavalry. Word swept through the ranks that they had been ordered to halt. Officers who tried to get the lines moving again were shot down by Russian sharpshooters. The situation seemed serious enough to justify a prompt retreat and an immediate appeal to François for reinforcements.
The Landwehr were well off compared to the 2nd Division. Falk’s 4th Brigade reached the Usdau road by 5:00 a.m., but its commander was a tidy-minded officer who preferred to keep his casualties low and his flanks well covered while other units did the dirty work. Not until 11:15 a.m. did the 33rd Fusiliers occupy the high ground behind Usdau, and by that time the town was already in the hands of the 1st Division. The 3rd Brigade had worse fortune. Reinforced for its role as flank guard by two battalions of the 45th Infantry, it was ordered toward the village of Gross-Tauersee. Though one colonel with a taste for melodrama ordered his men to “advance towards the rising sun,” early-morning fog combined with broken ground to disorganize the forward elements before they encountered the first Russian positions. The line of advance had not been reconnoitered during the night, nor was it well screened by skirmishers. Two kilometers short of its objective, the brigade was advancing across open ground when it came under rifle and machine-gun fire from what seemed every point of the compass. Within minutes Russian artillery joined in—first the field guns, then the 122-millimeter howitzers of I Corps artillery, which found Falk’s men a welcome target of opportunity.