Other human factors were at work as well. The obvious course for Below, requesting clarification from army headquarters, incorporated two less-obvious risks. The first was looking like a fool in the eyes of a new set of superiors. The second was hearing what one did not wish to hear. While I Reserve Corps had done well in limited actions with a solid block of active troops close at hand, Otto von Below might well have been pardoned for feeling uneasy at the prospect of taking his civilian soldiers into Allenstein against a strong concentration of Russians while XVII Corps marched in the opposite direction. Instead Below and his staff, after consulting with the army liaison officer with I Reserve Corps,34 apparently put together the two orders in their possession and developed an interpretation performing three functions. It fulfilled their understanding of the letter of army headquarters’ directives. It preserved XVII Corps as a concentrated striking force. And it allayed the unspoken, perhaps unconscious, fears of what might happen were I Reserve Corps to be left on its own at Allenstein.
That Below was uneasy about his solution is indicated by Posadowsky’s appearance at Mackensen’s headquarters. Using a corps chief of staff as a liaison officer was hardly common practice in the German army, but its wisdom in this case was plain. According to Mackensen, only the respect he had for Posadowsky’s reliability kept him from disregarding the orders he bore. With many misgivings, Mackensen finally prepared to march west in support of Below.35
Had it been necessary, the 8th Army could probably have taken up the positions Golovine suggests. Perhaps Ludendorff had this in the back of his mind. But the army orders of the night of the 27th, based on the information available at the time and taking into account Scholtz’s constant concern for his northern flank, reflected a firm decision to continue the attack against the 2nd Army as long as possible. If they were flexible enough to be well adapted to a defense against an unexpected onslaught from Rennenkampf, this reflected the professional skill of the staff officers responsible for developing them under such pressure.
The Germans had more than a well-drawn operations order in their favor. Martos had decided on the night of August 26 that he could not safely advance on Osterode as ordered without clearing his left flank of the threat posed by Scholtz’s corps. After checking the 41st Division’s halfhearted attack, at 4:00 p.m. Martos committed XV Corps to the counterattack around Mühlen whose limited results have been described earlier. An hour later he was summoned to the telephone by Samsonov’s chief of staff. Throughout the day Martos had been begging army headquarters to order XIII Corps to cooperate with him. Now he was informed instead that Samsonov wanted XV Corps to advance to Allenstein on August 28 to “cooperate” with Kluyev and Blagoveschensky.
Martos exploded. He shouted that it was impossible to disengage his corps from the fighting in progress, and insane to march it north leaving behind an undefeated enemy. Rather than attempt such follies, Martos declared, he would prefer to be relieved of his command on the spot. Whatever its mixture of conscious bluff and simple bad temper, the challenge worked. Postovsky temporized, informing Martos that he would call again in an hour.
By this time Second Army headquarters was a scene of confusion dominated by impressions. Learning of I Corps’s defeat and retreat was a shock. So was becoming aware of the scope of the disaster that had overtaken the 2nd Division. In the light of these events and Martos’s report, Samsonov seems to have decided by early evening that the main German strength was on his left, facing XV Corps, I Corps, and what remained of the 2nd Division. His mind and his plans changed accordingly. The formal orders for August 28 were that the latter formations hold at all costs. Instead of Martos joining Kluyev, XIII Corps would march south from Allenstein and, under Martos’s tactical command, combine with XV Corps in an “energetic offensive” against the presumed flank and rear of the German position. The VI Corps would move west to the area of Passenheim and cover the 2nd Army’s right.36
It was these orders, intended to concentrate the Russian center corps against the Germans in the southern sector, that set the actual stage for what so many later general accounts described as a Cannae, or at least the possibility of one. Neither Ludendorff’s directives nor the gratuitious coups of the radio interceptions were nearly as significant for the developing Russian disaster as the command decision taken at 2nd Army headquarters during the evening of August 27—a decision made for a most logical set of reasons.
Max Hoffmann suggests that if nothing else the length of the German line, extending as it did from Usdau to Mühlen, should have convinced Samsonov that he was facing a larger force than he thought.37 But Samsonov’s orders reflected more than careless thinking or blind stubbornness. He had received no concrete information from either Rennenkampf or Zhilinski about the whereabouts of the German troops who had fought at Gumbinnen. As the situation on the 2nd Army’s own front grew more complex, Samsonov and his staff had enough to occupy their minds. Unless otherwise informed, it was logical to assume that Rennenkampf had remained in touch with a force retreating westward, or into Königsberg. In any case Samsonov had no immediate fear of an attack from the north. The VI Corps’s fragmentary reports did not indicate the scope of that formation’s collapse. As for XIII Corps, its staff and commander had settled in for the night at Allenstein convinced that there were no Germans anywhere in the vicinity!
The process of reaching this remarkable conclusion illustrates once again the problems of assimilating tactical intelligence information at the operational level. Kluyev, after two days on scraps of reconnaissance, decided to see for himself at least by proxy. He sent out two airplanes, one to check the positions of XV Corps, the other to scout the roads to the east over which VI Corps was supposed to be advancing. The latter observer reported a corps-strength force marching westward. Though he had been unable to determine if the troops were German or Russian, XIII Corps’s staff was firmly convinced that the airman had spotted VI Corps advancing as ordered. The time and place were right. No one at XIII Corps headquarters had received any information encouraging even a suspicion that German troops might be that far south. Kluyev promptly sent the pilot back with a message for Blagoveschensky and orders to land beside one of the columns and see that the dispatch was forwarded.
Around 5:00 p.m. a Russian plane, flying low as ordered, was brought down by a fusillade of small arms fire. Though the pilot said nothing about the origin or purpose of his flight, presumably he was one of the more surprised men in either army—not because he had been shot down, but that his captors were Germans. His failure to return generated no alarm at corps headquarters. Those new-fangled contraptions were always breaking down. And when a cavalry patrol of Kluyev’s 36th Division reported that it had been fired on by a column advancing westward, the division commander assumed his men had simply mistaken a trigger-happy advance guard of VI Corps for Germans! He neither attempted to verify the information nor passed it on to corps and army headquarters. The troops in question in fact belonged to I Reserve Corps, which had halted for the night only ten kilometers northeast of Allenstein.38