Nicholas and Alexandra (51 page)

Two Russian armies were selected to make the attack. The First Army, consisting of 200,000 men under General Rennenkampf, was to move southwest parallel to the Baltic coast, while the Second Army, 170,000 men under General Samsonov, would advance northward from Poland. Rennenkampf's army was to start first, drawing on itself the bulk of the German forces in East Prussia. Two days later, once the Germans were fully engaged, Samsonov was to strike north for the Baltic, putting himself across the rear of the Germans fighting Rennenkampf. Each of the Russian armies individually was larger than the German force. If the Grand Duke's strategy worked, the Germans would be ground up between the two armies, and the Russians would begin crossing the Vistula River below Danzig. Ahead of them, the road to Berlin—only 150 miles away—would lie open.

Because of the need for haste, the Russian offensive was assembled piecemeal. Grand Duke Nicholas did not leave the capital for field headquarters until midnight of August 13. Allowing his train to be shunted onto sidings so that troop trains could pass, he took fifty-seven hours for the journey and arrived on the morning of the 16th.

General Samsonov, commander of the Second Army, was an asthmatic and had been on leave with his wife in the Caucasus. He arrived at his headquarters on the 16th to find his troops already on the march toward the frontier. General Rennenkampf, a swashbuckling cavalry officer, sent his Cossacks raiding across the border as early as the 12th. A German machine gun, captured on one of these forays, appeared as a trophy two days later on the lawn at Peterhof, where it was examined with interest by the Tsar and the Tsarevich. On August 17, Rennenkampf's entire army advanced, driving the German frontier troops before them. In these first skirmishes, Rennenkampf's tactics recalled the Napoleonic Wars one hundred years before. Under fire from German cannon, the General sent his cavalry to charge the guns. As a result, in the war's first engagements many young Guards officers, the flower of Russia's aristocratic youth, were shot from their saddles.

Although the German General Staff had anticipated a Russian advance into East Prussia, the news that Cossack horsemen were riding over the rich farms and estates of Junker aristocrats sent a thrill of horror through Berlin. Temporarily ignoring the Russian Second Army moving up from the south, the Germans engaged Rennenkampf's force on August 20. The Russian artillery, firing 440 shells per day, was effective, and the result was a partial German defeat. In desperation, the German General Staff hastily dispatched a new pair of generals to take command. On August 22, Paul Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the formidable military duo which was to lead Germany through four years of war, were both aboard the same train bound for East Prussia.

While Rennenkampf rested—too long—from his victory, Samsonov's army was struggling north through the wild, uninhabited country north of the Polish border. The route lay through a maze of pine and birch forests intersected by streams and marshes, with few inhabitants, poor roads and no railroads. There were few farms on this sandy soil, and the army ate only what it could pull behind it in carts. On the eve of battle, some of the men had been without their full ration of bread for five days.

Despite their hardships, Samsonov's men struggled forward. Many of the men, coming from small Russian villages, were pleased at the sight of the East Prussian towns. Soldiers of the 23rd Corps, reaching the town of Allenstein, cheered enthusiastically, believing themselves to be entering Berlin. Samsonov himself was less sanguine. At the end of a long chain which began in Paris, passed through Paléologue, the Grand Duke and the Northwest Front commander, Samsonov received

constant signals to hurry. "Advancing according to timetable, without halting, covering marches of more than 12 miles a day over sand. I cannot go more quickly," he telegraphed back. As it was, his men were hungry, his horses without oats, his supply columns disorganized, his artillery mired.

On August 24, a day after their arrival in East Prussia, Hindenburg and Ludendorff decided on a sweeping gamble. Leaving only two brigades of cavalry to face Rennenkampf, whose army still was motionless five days after its victory, they loaded every other German soldier onto trains and trundled them south to meet Samsonov. By August 25, the transfer was complete. Rennenkampf still had not resumed his advance, and Samsonov was now confronted by an army equal in size and vastly superior in artillery. Informing General Jilinsky, commander of the Russian Northern Front, of his predicament, Samsonov was rudely told, "To see the enemy where he does not exist is cowardice. I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward. I insist that he continue the offensive."

In four days of battle, Samsonov's exhausted troops did what they could. Nevertheless, faced with hurricane barrages of German artillery, enveloped on three sides by German infantry, the Second Army disintegrated. Samsonov was fatalistic. "The enemy has luck one day, we will have luck another," he said and rode off alone into the forest to shoot himself.

The Germans named their victory the Battle of Tannenberg in revenge for a famous Slav defeat of the Teutonic Knights near the same site in 1410. At Tannenberg, the Russians lost 110,000 men, including 90,000 prisoners. Blame fell on General Jilinsky, who was replaced, and on Rennenkampf, who was discharged from the army. Grand Duke Nicholas, whose southern armies were winning a great victory against the Austrians in Galicia, met the defeat at Tannenberg with equanimity. "We are happy to have made such sacrifices for our allies," he declared when the French military attaché at his headquarters offered condolences. In St. Petersburg, Sazonov told Paléologue, "Samsonov's army has been destroyed. That's all I know," and then added quietly, "We owed this sacrifice to France, as she has showed herself a perfect ally." Paléologue, thanking the Foreign Minister for the generosity of his thought, hurried on to discuss the only thing that truly concerned him: the massive threat to Paris which was mounting by the hour.

For all the reckless gallantry and foolish ineptitude of the premature Russian offensive, it nevertheless achieved its primary objective: the diversion of German forces from the West. The limited penetration

of East Prussia had had a magnified effect. Refugees, many of them high-born, had descended in fury and despair on Berlin, the Kaiser was outraged, and von Moltke himself admitted that "all the success on the Western front will be unavailing if the Russians arrive in Berlin." On August 25, before the decisive blow against Samsonov, von Moltke violated his supposedly inviolable war plan of ignoring the Russians until France was finished. On urgent orders, two army corps and a cavalry division were stripped from the German right wing in France and rushed to the East. They arrived too late for Tannenberg; they could not be returned before the Marne. "This was perhaps our salvation," wrote General Dupont, one of Joffre's aides. "Such a mistake made by the Chief of the German General Staff in 1914 must have made the other Moltke, his uncle, turn in his grave."

As France's generals had foreseen, one key to the salvation of France lay in immediately setting the Russian colossus in motion. Whether the colossus met victory or defeat mattered little as long as the Germans were distracted from their overwhelming lunge at Paris. In that sense the Russian soldiers who died in the forests of East Prussia contributed as much to the Allied cause as the Frenchmen who died on the Marne.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Stavka

At the outbreak of war, Nicholas's first impulse had been to take command of the army himself, assuming the ancient role of
warrior-tsar at the head of his troops. He was urgently dissuaded by his ministers, who pleaded that he not risk his prestige as sovereign, especially—as Sazonov put it—"as it is to be expected that we may be forced to retreat during the first weeks." The supreme command went to Grand Duke Nicholas, who departed with his staff from Petrograd on August 13 to establish field headquarters at Baranovichi, a Polish railway junction midway between the German and Austrian fronts. The camp, called
Stavka
after an old Russian word meaning the military camp of a chief, was set off the main Moscow-Warsaw track in a forest of birch and pine. Here, surrounded by three concentric rings of sentries, the Grand Duke and his officers lived and worked in a dozen army trains drawn up fanwise beneath the trees. In time, as the encampment became semi-permanent, roofs were built over the cars to shield them from heat and snow, and wooden sidewalks were laid so that officers could walk from train to train without slipping on mud or ice.

From his private railway car spread with bearskins and Oriental rugs, the Grand Duke dominated the life of the camp. On the wall of his sleeping compartment, crowded between the windows, were more than two hundred icons. Over the doors of all the rooms frequented by the Grand Duke, small pieces of white paper were affixed to remind the six-f oot-six-inch Nicholas Nicolaievich to duck so as not to bump his head.

General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, British military attaché in Petrograd, arrived at
Stavka
on Grand Duke Nicholas's train and remained there until the Tsar's abdication. His diary of these two and a half years gives a vivid portrait of Imperial Russian Headquarters

during the First World War: "We all attended the little wooden church in the camp. All the headquarters troops were drawn up at the entrance to the church, Guards and Cossacks of the Guard ... all in khaki with long, grey overcoats reaching to their feet—still as rocks— looking almost like a line of statues against the pine forests. Here we waited till suddenly a fanfare of trumpets rang out and in the distance, coming along a road from the train, there marched, stern-faced and head erect, that great and to the army he loved so well, almost mystical figure, Grand Duke Nicholas. . . . He reached the line and swung around facing his men . . . looking them absolutely straight in the eye, and called out to all ranks the customary 'Good day.' With the rattle of presenting arms came the answering shout from every man in reply . . . and so we all slowly filed into church."

It was to this vigorous, masculine atmosphere that the Tsar came often as an enthusiastic visitor. When the Imperial train, its long line of blue salon cars emblazoned with golden crests, glided slowly under the sunlit foliage onto a siding alongside the Grand Duke's, the Tsar stepped happily into the routine of army life. He loved the disciplined sense of purpose at
Stavka,
the clear-cut giving and taking of orders, the professional talk at the officers' mess, the rough, hardy, outdoor life. It called back memories of his days as a junior officer when his heaviest responsibility was getting out of bed in time to stand morning parade. It was a release from government and ministers and a change from Tsarskoe Selo, where, no matter how devoted he was to wife and children, the world was small, closed and predominantly feminine.

Nicholas was careful during his visits to Headquarters not to intrude on the authority of the Grand Duke. Sitting beside the Commander-in-Chief at morning staff conferences, the Tsar played the part of the interested, honored guest. Together, the two men listened to reports of the previous day's operations at the front; together, they bent over the huge maps of Poland, East Prussia and Galicia, studying the red and blue lines which marked the positions of the opposing armies. But when the moment came to issue commands, the Tsar was silent and the Grand Duke spoke.

It was when the Tsar was in this relaxed, happy mood at Headquarters that General Hanbury-Williams first met him. "At 2:30 I was summoned to meet the Emperor," he wrote. "On arrival, I found two huge Cossacks at the door of His Imperial Majesty's train. . . . The Emperor received me alone. He was dressed in perfectly plain khaki uniform, the coat being more of a blouse than ours, with blue breeches and long black riding boots, and was standing at a high writing desk. As I saluted, he came forward at once and shook me warmly by the hand. I was at once struck by his extraordinary likeness to our own

King, and the way he smiled, his face lighting up, as if it were a real pleasure to him to receive one. His first question was one of inquiry after our King and Queen and the Royal family. ... I had always pictured him to myself as a somewhat sad and anxious-looking monarch, with cares of state and other things hanging heavily over him. Instead of that I found a bright, keen, happy face, plenty of humor and a fresh-air man."

Meals at Headquarters were hearty and masculine: plentiful
zakouski,
roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, vodka and wines. The vodka, wrote Hanbury-Williams, "went down my throat like a torchlight procession." At the table, surrounded by men he considered his fellow officers, Nicholas spoke freely without the inhibitions imposed at court. Once he offered an analysis of the difference between Russia and the United States:

"At dinner tonight, H.I.M. [His Imperial Majesty] talked about empires and republics. His own ideas as a young man were that he had a great responsibility and he felt that the people over whom he ruled were so numerous and so varying in blood and temperament, different altogether from our Western Europeans, that an Emperor was a vital necessity to them. His first visit to the Caucasus had made a vital impression on him and confirmed him in his views.

"The United States of America, he said, was an entirely different matter, and the two cases could not be compared. In this country [Russia], many as were the problems and the difficulties, their sense of imagination, their intense religious feeling and their habits and customs generally made a crown necessary, and he believed this must be so for a very long time, that a certain amount of decentralizing of authority was, of course, necessary but that the great and decisive power must rest with the Crown. The powers of the Duma must go slowly, because of the difficulties of pushing on education at any reasonably fast rate among all these masses of his subjects."

As for the personal role of the Autocrat, Nicholas admitted that, while he could give any order he liked, he could not ensure that it was carried out. Often, when he found that something he had asked had not been properly done, he said wistfully to Hanbury-Williams, "You see what it is to be an autocrat."