Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER TWENTY

For the Defense of Holy Russia

THE next afternoon, August 2, 1914, the Tsar issued a formal proclamation of hostilities at the Winter Palace. It was a blazing-hot midsummer day. The palace square, one of the largest in Europe, was packed with thousands of sweltering, excited people carrying banners, flags and icons and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could pour out their emotion in the presence of the sovereign himself. On the Neva side, where the Tsar would arrive by boat from Peterhof, crowds of people swarmed along the bridges and quays, singing and cheering. The river itself was teeming with yachts, steamers, sailboats, fishing smacks and rowboats, all streaming flags and crowded with spectators.

When Nicholas and Alexandra stepped onto the quay at the Palace Bridge, wave on wave of cheers rolled over them: “Batiushka, Batiushka, lead us to victory!” Nicholas wore the plain uniform of an infantry regiment. Alexandra, in a pure white dress, had turned up the brim of her picture hat so that the crowds could see her face. The four young Grand Duchesses walked behind, but the Tsarevich, still unable to walk because of his injury on the Standart, remained at Peterhof, weeping in disappointment.

Inside the palace, the Tsar and the Empress slowly made their way through the crush of people lining the grand staircases and wide corridors. As Nicholas passed, bowing and nodding, men and women dropped to their knees and frantically tried to kiss his hand. The service was held in the great white marble Salle de Nicholas, where five thousand people had jammed themselves beneath the glittering chandeliers. An altar had been erected in the center of the hall, and on it stood the miraculous icon, the Vladimir Mother of God. The icon, brought to Moscow in 1395, was said to have turned back Tamerlane. Before the icon in 1812 the grizzled General Kutuzov had prayed as he was leaving to take command of Tsar Alexander I’s armies in the war against Napoleon. Now, at the beginning of a new war, Nicholas II invoked the icon’s blessing. Raising his right hand, he pronounced in a low voice the oath taken by Alexander I in 1812: “I solemnly swear that I will never make peace so long as a single enemy remains on Russian soil.”

After taking the oath, Nicholas and Alexandra went to meet the expectant masses waiting outside. When the two small figures appeared alone on a red-draped balcony high above them, the great crowd knelt. Nicholas raised his hand and tried to speak; the front rows hushed, but at the rear the excitement and commotion were too great and his words were drowned. Overwhelmed, Nicholas bowed his head. Seeing him, the crowd spontaneously began to sing the Imperial anthem whose chords make up the final crescendo of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”:

God save the Tsar,

Mighty and powerful,

Let him reign for our glory,

For the confusion of our enemies,

The Orthodox Tsar,

God save the Tsar.

Hand in hand, the man in the khaki uniform and the woman in the white dress stood on the balcony and wept with the crowd. “To those thousands on their knees,” declared Paléologue, “at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls.”

It was the same throughout the empire: wild excitement, crowds filling the streets, laughing, weeping, singing, cheering, kissing. Overnight, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia. In Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Kazan, Tula, Rostov, Tiflis, Tomsk and Irkutsk, workmen exchanged their red flags of revolution for the icons of Holy Russia and portraits of the Tsar. Students rushed from the universities to enlist. Army officers, caught in the street, were happily tossed in the air.

In St. Petersburg, every day brought new demonstrations in favor of the Tsar and Russia’s allies. From his window in the French Embassy, Paléologue looked down on huge processions carrying flags and icons, shouting “Vive la France!” On August 5, as the German armies crossed the frontiers of neutral Belgium, a telegram from London to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, announced that England had entered the war. The same day, the Union Jack was hoisted into line with the Tricolor and the Russian Imperial banner. With a fine Gallic sense of detail, Paléologue noted that “the flags of the three nations blend eloquently. Composed of the same colors, blue, white and red, they are a picturesque and striking expression of the coalition.”

At the German Embassy, an immense granite building surmounted on the roof by two huge bronze horses, the violent mob predicted by Count Pourtalès made a sudden vengeful appearance. Their rage was directed not at their own government, as Pourtalès had promised, but at his. Invading the building, they smashed windows, ripped tapestries and pictures and hurled into the street not only the Embassy furniture, china and glassware, but the Count’s own priceless collection of Renaissance marbles and brasses. Ropes were coiled around the equestrian statues on the roof, hundreds of hands pulled and tugged, and with a crash the Kaiser’s prancing horses toppled into the street.

In those early days, patriotism was closely tied to a deep-rooted fear of the Germans. “For Faith, Tsar and Country!” and “For the defense of Holy Russia!” were the calls that stirred the barracks, factories and villages. “The war with Japan,” wrote Kerensky, was “dynastic and colonial,” but “in 1914 the people immediately recognized the conflict with Germany as its own war … a war which meant that the destinies of Russia were at stake.” Rodzianko, walking in the streets of Petersburg, mingled with workers who a few days earlier had been chopping down telegraph poles, overturning streetcars and building barricades. “Now all Russia is involved,” they told him. “We want to rally to our Tsar to make certain of victory over the Germans.” Nobility and peasants burned with the same emotions. “This is not a political war,” said Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, widow of the Tsar’s uncle Vladimir. “It is a duel to the death between Slavism and Germanism. One of the two must succumb.” An old peasant from Novgorod told Kokovtsov, the former Prime Minister, “If we are unlucky enough not to destroy the Germans, they’ll come here. They’ll reign over the whole of Russia and then they’ll harness you and me—yes, you as well as me—to their plows.”

The Duma sat only one day, August 8, passing the government’s military budget without a dissenting vote. “War was declared and all at once, not a trace was left of the revolutionary movement,” declared Kerensky. “Even the Bolshevik members of the Duma were forced to admit—though somewhat sullenly—that it was the duty of the proletariat to cooperate in the defense.”

That Germany would be defeated, few Russians doubted; Britain’s entry made the outcome certain. There was controversy as to how long the war would go on. “Six months,” said the pessimists, who argued that the Germans might fight, “The Germans don’t know how to fight,” replied the optimists. “They only know how to make sausages. All the Russians will have to do to annihilate the whole German army is simply to throw their caps at them.”

Ancient tradition prescribed that Russian tsars begin their wars by going to Moscow to ask the blessing of God in the historic seat of tsarist rule, the Kremlin. If anything, when Nicholas and his family arrived in Moscow on August 17, the city was more wildly enthusiastic than St. Petersburg. A million people lined the streets, jammed balconies, windows and rooftops or clung from the branches of trees as the Imperial procession wound through the streets to the Kremlin’s Iberian Gate. That night, inside the Kremlin, a private worry reappeared. “Alexis Nicolaievich is complaining a good deal of his leg tonight,” Pierre Gilliard wrote in his diary. “Will he be able to walk tomorrow or will he have to be carried? The Tsar and Tsaritsa are in despair. The boy was not able to be present at the ceremony in the Winter Palace. It is always the same when he is supposed to appear in public … some complication will prevent it. Fate seems to pursue him.”

On the following day, Gilliard continued: “When Alexis Nicolaievich found he could not walk this morning, he was in a terrible state. Their Majesties have decided he shall be present at the ceremony all the same. He will be carried by one of the Tsar’s Cossacks. But it is a dreadful disappointment to the parents who do not wish the idea to gain ground among the people that the Heir to the Throne is an invalid.”

At eleven, the Tsar, the Empress, their four daughters, the Tsarevich, in the arms of a huge Cossack, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, wearing the gray robe of her religious order, appeared in the St. George Hall of the Kremlin. In the center of the hall, Nicholas proclaimed to the nobility and people of Moscow: “From this place, the very heart of Russia, I send my soul’s greeting to my valiant troops and my noble allies. God is with us!” Moving into the Ouspensky Sobor—the Cathedral of the Assumption—where eighteen years earlier they had been crowned, the Tsar and the Empress prayed before the lofty, jeweled iconostasis. In the flickering glow of hundreds of candles, through pungent clouds of sweet incense, they walked around the church to kneel and pray before the tombs of Russia’s patriarchs. The triumphant setting and the glorious display of pomp and piety seemed an eloquent dramatization of the basic principle of the Russian autocracy: “As it is God Himself who has given us our supreme power, it is before His altar that we are responsible for the destinies of Russia.”

The following morning, while Moscow still seethed with excitement, Gilliard and his young pupil slipped quietly out of the Kremlin for a drive into the hills outside the city. Returning through narrow streets clogged with workmen and peasants, their unescorted automobile was slowed and halted by the mass. Surging on all sides of the auto, the crowd suddenly recognized its young passenger. “The Heir! The Heir!” they shouted, struggling for a better view. As those nearest the car were crushed against its sides, the bolder of them thrust their arms inside and touched Alexis. “I’ve touched him! I’ve touched the Heir!” shouted a woman in triumph. Frightened and pale, the Tsarevich huddled back in the seat while Gilliard frantically tried to get the car moving. Eventually the auto was rescued by two large Moscow policemen who happened on the scene and moved the crowd back with much puffing and shouting.

When the Imperial family returned to Tsarskoe Selo on August 22, Nicholas was exhilarated. The two largest cities of his empire had given spontaneous, overwhelming demonstrations of affection and patriotism. Determined to be worthy, Nicholas issued a decree intended to expunge every blemish from the holy crusade on which Russia was embarking. Throughout the empire, the sale of vodka was banned for the duration of the war. The gesture, coming at a moment when military expenditures were soaring, was more noble than wise, for the sale of vodka was a state monopoly from which the Imperial government drew a substantial proportion of its revenue. Nor did the ban stop drinking in Russia; the rich drew from their well-stocked cellars, the poor made alcohol at home. In a second burst of enthusiastic patriotism, after returning from Moscow, Nicholas suddenly changed the name of his own capital. On August 31, 1914, the German St. Petersburg was changed to the Slav Petrograd.

In the opening days of the war, the same heady emotions surged through Paris, London and Berlin. But after the trumpets had sounded, the hymns had been sung and the men had marched away, then war began its stern testing of the nations. In the terrible years ahead, Britain, France and Germany each called up deep reserves of national purpose and strength. But in Russia, behind the massive façade of an enormous empire, the apparatus of government, the structure of society and economy were too primitive, too inflexible, and too brittle to withstand the enormous strains of a great four-year war.

Two shrewd and cunning Russians sensed this danger immediately. From the beginning, although their voices were drowned in the gush of war excitement, Rasputin and Witte opposed the war. Still close to the villages, Rasputin sensed what war would cost in peasant blood. Once before, in 1908, he had argued against fighting Austria over the annexation of Bosnia: “The Balkans are not worth fighting for,” he had said. In 1914, still lying in bed in Siberia recovering from his stab wounds, he telegraphed, “Let Papa not plan war, for with the war will come the end of Russia and yourselves and you will lose to the last man.” Anna Vyrubova, who delivered the telegram to the Tsar, reported that he angrily tore it to pieces before her eyes. Rasputin was undeterred. Taking a large piece of paper, writing in almost illegible letters, he scrawled this ominous prophecy:

Dear friend, I will say again a menacing cloud is over Russia lots of sorrow and grief it is dark and there is no lightening to be seen. A sea of tears immeasurable and as to blood? What can I say? There are no words the horror of it is indescribable. I know they keep wanting war from you evidently not knowing that this is destruction. Heavy is God’s punishment when he takes away reason that is the beginning of the end. Thou art the Tsar Father of the People don’t allow the madmen to triumph and destroy themselves and the People. Well, they will conquer Germany and what about Russia? If one thinks then verily there has not been a greater sufferer since the beginning of time she is all drowned in blood. Terrible is the destruction and without end the grief.

Gregory

Witte, abroad when the war broke out, hurried home to urge that Russia withdraw immediately. He spoke bluntly to Paléologue: “This war is madness.… Why should Russia fight? Our prestige in the Balkans, our pious duty to help our blood brothers?… That is a romantic, old-fashioned chimera. No one here, no thinking man at least, cares a fig for these turbulent and vain Balkan folk who have nothing Slav about them and are only Turks christened by the wrong name. We ought to have let the Serbs suffer the chastisement they deserved. So much for the origin of the war. Now let’s talk about the profits and rewards it will bring us. What can we hope to get? An increase of territory. Great Heavens! Isn’t His Majesty’s empire big enough already? Haven’t we in Siberia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, Russia itself, enormous areas which have not yet been opened up? Then what are the conquests they dangle before our eyes? East Prussia? Hasn’t the Emperor too many Germans among his subjects already? Galicia? It’s full of Jews!… Constantinople, the Cross on Santa Sophia, the Bosporous, the Dardanelles. It’s too mad a notion to be worth a moment’s consideration. And even if we assume a complete victory, the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs reduced to begging for peace and submitting to our terms—it means not only the end of German domination, but the proclamation of republics throughout central Europe. That means the simultaneous end of Tsarism. I prefer to remain silent as to what we may expect on the hypothesis of our defeat.… My practical conclusion is that we must liquidate this stupid adventure as soon as possible.”

Paléologue, whose job it was to do everything possible to keep Russia in the war fighting on France’s side, watched Witte go and mused on the old stateman’s character: “an enigmatic, unnerving individual, a great intellect, despotic, disdainful, conscious of his powers, a prey to ambition, jealousy, and pride.” Witte’s views, he reflected, were “evil” and “dangerous” to France as well as to Russia.

Nowhere was Nicholas’s optimism more keenly shared than among the officers of the Russian army. Those unlucky enough to be stationed with regiments far from the frontier were frantic with worry lest it all be over before they had a chance to see action. Guards officers, fortunate enough to be leaving immediately for the front, asked whether they should pack their dress uniforms for the ceremonial parade down the Unter den Linden. They were advised to go ahead and let their braid and plumes follow by the next courier.

Day after day, the capital trembled to the cadence of marching men. From dawn until nightfall, infantry regiments marched down the Nevsky Prospect, bound for the Warsaw Station and the front. Outside the city, other regiments of infantry, cavalry squadrons and batteries of horse artillery clogged the roads leading toward the Baltic provinces and East Prussia. In motion with only casual organization, the soldiers walked rather than marched, followed in no particular order by long columns of baggage carts, ammunition wagons, ambulances, field kitchens and remount horses. So dense were the moving columns that in places they left the roads and spread out across the dry summer fields, swarming in a jumbled confusion of dust, shouts, horses’ hoofs and rumbling wheels, recalling the Tartar hordes of the thirteenth century.

Paléologue, driving back to the capital from an audience with the Tsar, encountered one of these regiments marching along a road. The general, recognizing the Ambassador, saluted and boomed out, “We’ll destroy those filthy Prussians! No more Prussia! No more Germany! William to St. Helena!” As each company paraded past Paléologue’s car, the general rose in his stirrups and bellowed, “The French Ambassador! Hurrah!” The soldiers cheered frantically, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Finally, the general galloped away, shouting over his shoulder, “William to St. Helena! William to St. Helena!”

Sometimes, women with children followed for the first few miles: “One … was very young … and she was pressing a baby to her breast. She was striding out as well as she could to keep pace with the man at the rear of the file, a fine fellow, tanned and muscular. They did not exchange a word, but gazed fixedly at each other with loving, haggard eyes. Three times in succession, I saw the young mother offer the baby to the soldier for a kiss.”

The same scenes were repeated in railway stations in every town and village in Russia. In Moscow, British Consul R. H. Bruce Lockhart remembered: “the troops grey with dust and closely packed in cattle trucks; the vast crowd on the platform to wish them Godspeed; grave, bearded fathers, wives and mothers, smiling bravely through their tears …; fat priests to bless the happy warriors. The crowd sways forward for a last handshake and last embrace. There is a shrill whistle from the engine. Then, with many false starts, the overloaded train, as though reluctant to depart, crawls slowly out of the station and disappears in the grey twilight of the Moscow night. Silent and bareheaded, the crowd remains motionless until the last faint echo of the song of the men, who are never to return, has faded into nothing.”

Somehow, it was the men rather than the officers who sensed what was coming. Beneath the gaudy talk of parades in Berlin and cries of “William to St. Helena!” many a Russian soldier marched to war suffused with a melancholy resignation that he would never see his family or his village again. At the front, General Alfred Knox, a British military attaché, found a tall young recruit from Kiev downhearted because he had left his wife and five children. Knox tried to cheer him, telling him he would come back, but the soldier only shook his head and said, “They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”

In sheer numbers of soldiers, the Russian army was a colossus. The pre-war regular strength of the army was 1,400,000; mobilization immediately added 3,100,000 reserves. Behind this initial mass stood millions more. During three years of war, 15,500,000 men marched away to fight for the Tsar and Holy Russia. In the British press, this mass of bodies ready to bleed was reassuringly described as “the Russian steamroller.”

In every respect except numbers of men, Russia was unprepared for war. The railroads were hopelessly inadequate; for every yard of Russian track per square mile, Germany had ten. French and German reserves moving to the front traveled 150 to 200 miles; in Russia, the average journey was 800 miles. A general commanding a Siberian corps told Knox that he had been on a train for twenty-three days bringing men to the front. Once the operations began, the supremacy of German railroads allowed the German command to move whole armies rapidly from one front to another. On the Russian side, said Knox, “the Supreme Command ordered, but the railroads decided.”

Russian industry was small and primitive. For every factory in Russia, there were 150 in Great Britain. Russian generals, expecting a short war, had accumulated limited reserves of weapons and ammunition. Russian guns, having fired all their ammunition, quickly fell silent, while enemy shells, arriving steadily from German factories, burst continually overhead. At one point, Russian artillerymen were threatened with court-martial if they fired more than three rounds per day.

Russia’s immense and isolated geography made it impossible for the Western Allies to help. Germany easily blockaded the Baltic, and Turkey, entering the war against the Allies in November 1914, barred the Dardanelles and the Black Sea. Communication remained only through Archangel, frozen solid in the winter, and Vladivostock on the Pacific. Russian exports dropped 98 percent and imports 95 percent. An average of 1,250 ships called at Russian ports annually during the war, while arrivals in British ports amounted to 2,200 weekly. Once the British and French attempt to break the blockade by storming the Dardanelles at Gallipoli had failed, Russia became a “barred house which could be entered only through the chimney.”

Not all the flaws lay in technology and geography. At its summit, the Russian army was commanded by two men who hated each other: General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, the Minister of War, and Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, the Tsar’s distant cousin, who commanded the armies in the field. Sukhomlinov was a small chubby man with a fat feline face of whom Paléologue observed, “with his sly look, his eyes always gleaming watchfully under the heavy folds of his eyelids, I know few men who inspire more distrust at first sight.” Although totally bald and advancing on seventy, Sukhomlinov retained a strong taste for expensive pleasures including a voluptuous wife thirty-two years his junior. Mme. Sukhomlinov enjoyed giving enormous parties, clothing herself in Paris and vacationing on the Riviera; her husband was left to pay the bills as best he could. Allowed a handsome traveling allowance based on mileage, he conducted frequent inspection trips to Vladivostock, eight thousand round-trip miles from his office. Once there, local officers found that the War Minister disliked leaving his train.

Sukhomlinov’s reputation was not so much bad as a mournful joke. “The true picture of a drawing room soldier, scented, pomaded, with gold chain bracelets on his white wrists,” recalled a lady who met him in society. “In spite of his mature age, Sukhomlinov was … eager for pleasure like a youth,” wrote Sazonov, his ministerial colleague. “He enjoyed life and disliked work.… It was very difficult to make him work, but to get him to tell the truth was well-nigh impossible.” Nevertheless, along with supporting his wife, it was Sukhomlinov’s responsibility to organize and equip the Russian army. A former cavalry officer who had won the Cross of St. George in the 1878 war against the Turks, he believed in the charge—the cavalry with sabers, the infantry with bayonets. Modern weapons, such as machine guns and rapid-firing artillery, he thought unworthy of brave men. As a result, the Russian army entered the war with half as much field artillery as the Germans—seven field-gun batteries per division as opposed to fourteen—and 60 batteries of heavy artillery compared to 381. “Sukhomlinov,” explained General Nicholas Golovine, who served under him, “believed that knowledge acquired by him in the ‘seventies of the last century and largely of no further practical importance, was permanent truth. His ignorance went hand in hand with an extraordinary light-mindedness. These two personal characteristics enabled him to treat the most complicated military questions with astonishing levity. His attitude of easy assurance made the impression on those not familiar with the complicated technique of modern military art that Sukhomlinov handled such problems well and took the right decisions quickly.”

Most significantly, Sukhomlinov made this impression on the Tsar. Like many rogues, he could be enormously charming, and he carefully did everything in his power to please Nicholas. His reports, unlike those of other ministers, were brief and free from gloomy predictions. Knowing that the Tsar took pride in the army, he gave constant assurance that morale and equipment were in splendid condition. When he reported in person, he larded his talk with selections from his vast fund of funny stories. At court, he was known as “General Fly-Off” because of his alertness and speed in anticipating the Tsar’s wishes. Nicholas enjoyed him greatly, and, watching the superbly polished regiments of the Imperial Guard march past on parade, could not believe that the Russian army was unready for war.

Sukhomlinov was a courtier who used high military rank to support a lavish way of life. His arch-rival, the Commander-in-Chief in the field, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, was a prince of the Imperial blood, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I. Although born to great wealth and impeccable position, Nicholas Nicolaievich devoted his life to service in the army. In appearance, the fifty-seven-year-old Grand Duke was awesome. Standing six feet six inches tall, with a thin body, blazing blue eyes in a narrow face, his beard trimmed to a neat point, a dagger or sword hanging from his belt, he was the ancient warrior chieftain. “He was the most admired man in the army, not only an old-fashioned soldier, but deeply Slav,” wrote Paléologue. “His whole being exuded a fierce energy. His incisive measured speech, flashing eyes and quick, nervous movements, hard, steel-trap mouth and gigantic stature personify imperious and impetuous audacity.”

In the army, the Grand Duke inspired feelings of awe. By “the peasant soldiers of the Russian army,” declared Knox, “… he was regarded as a sort of legendary champion of Holy Russia.… They felt that, though he was a strict disciplinarian and very exacting … he would ask from the private soldier no greater effort than he … imposed upon himself.”

Naturally enough, the Commander-in-Chief and the Minister of War despised each other. The Grand Duke took his responsibilities as seriously as Sukhomlinov took his lightly. In 1908, when the Duma had criticized the appearance of members of the Imperial family in high military ranks, Nicholas Nicolaievich resigned from active command. Sukhomlinov, appointed War Minister in 1909, had seen a clear field for his own advancement to the more glamorous role of Commander-in-Chief once war was declared. To his chagrin, in 1914 the Tsar, having been dissuaded from assuming personal command of the armies in the field, appointed his cousin to the post. Thereafter, both in word and in deed, the jealous War Minister did what he could to undercut the Grand Duke. At one point, with messages streaming in begging for more shells, Sukhomlinov refused to raise the order for more ammunition. When the Chief of Artillery came to him weeping to say that Russia would have to make peace because of the shortage of shells, Sukhomlinov told him curtly to “go to the devil and shut up.”

Both in Berlin and in Paris, strategy was tailored to the size and clumsiness of the Russian colossus. Aware that the state of Russia’s railroads would not permit a rapid concentration of the Tsar’s millions of soldiers, the German General Staff planned that the weeks before the cumbersome giant could move should be used to destroy France. “We hope in six weeks after the beginning of operations to have finished with France, or at least so far as to enable us to direct our principal forces against the East,” General von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff, told his nervous Austrian counterpart in May 1914. The Kaiser characteristically expressed the German plan more crudely: “Lunch in Paris, dinner in St. Petersburg.”

Knowing that the blow was coming, French generals and diplomats had struggled single-mindedly for twenty years to ensure that the Russians would move quickly in the East once war began. To speed up Russian mobilization, France had poured money into her ally; the loans were given strictly on condition that they be used to build railroads leading to the German frontier. Even with this new track, the number of men in position by M-15—fifteen days after mobilization—would be only a fraction of Russia’s strength. Nevertheless, France insisted that the Russians attack on M-15 with whatever they had ready; the French counted on seven hundred thousand men. To wait longer meant catastrophe for France.

In its first weeks, the war ran brilliantly according to the German timetable. Through the hot weeks of August, the cream of the German army, one million men in gray uniforms, moved like a human scythe across Belgium and northern France. On September 2, less than a month after crossing the frontier, the Kaiser’s weary advance guard stood thirty miles north of Paris. With a single lunge, they would be on the Champs-Elysées.

From the day war began, the primary mission of the French Ambassador in St. Petersburg was to urge the Russians to hurry. With a stream of anguished telegrams from Paris flowing into his Embassy, Paléologue bustled from one office to the next, begging, imploring and demanding haste. On August 5, he told the Tsar, “The French army will have to face the formidable onslaught of twenty-five German corps, I, therefore, implore Your Majesty to order your troops to take the offensive immediately. If they do not, there is danger that the French army may be crushed.” Nicholas responded emotionally. Reaching out and clasping Paléologue in his arms, he said, “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, let me embrace in you my dear and glorious France.… The moment mobilization is complete I shall order an advance. My troops are most enthusiastic. The attack will be pressed with the greatest vigor. No doubt you know that the Grand Duke Nicholas is extraordinarily forceful.”

On the same day, the Ambassador called on the Grand Duke: “The generalissimo received me in his enormous study where maps were spread out on all the tables. He came towards me with his quick firm strides. ‘God and Joan of Arc are with us,’ he exclaimed. ‘We shall win.…’ ” “How soon will you order the offensive, Monseigneur?” asked Paléologue. “Perhaps I shan’t even wait until the concentration of all my corps is complete. As soon as I feel myself strong enough, I shall attack. It will probably be the 14th of August.” Escorting Paléologue to the door, he vigorously shook the Ambassador’s hand, crying, “And now, into God’s hands.”

The Grand Duke was as good as his word. The front he commanded was 550 miles long, beginning in the north on the Baltic where the Russian Baltic provinces bordered East Prussia. From there, the front curved south and west around the enormous bulge that made up Russian Poland. Then, along the bottom of the Polish bulge, it ran eastward to the frontier of the Ukraine. On the southern sector of this long line, in the Austrian province of Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian army of one million men was massing. West of Warsaw, on the direct line to Berlin, the Russians could not advance because of the danger on their lengthy Galician and East Prussian flanks. The Russian attack, therefore, was delivered in the north, against East Prussia.

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. Rennenkampfs 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.