And over the field telephones went the commands and the awful slaughter of Tannenberg began—that battle of which historians will write as one of the great conflicts of the world. Back into the lakes and swamps that he knew so well, that he had fought so hard to save from the Reichstag, Von Hindenburg drove the Russians. Whole regiments slowly sank in the ooze and disappeared from sight. By regiments the soldiers of the Czar were driven into the soft bottomed lakes and shifting sands of Masurenland. And behind the line, Hindenburg, who knew every square mile of that country and knowing the topography almost to every tree, could tell the German troops exactly what to do. And from his headquarters the command would go by telephone to the General in the field.
I think it will not be until after this war is over that the world will know in detail what happened at Tannenberg. Von Hindenburg's strategy has jealously been hidden by the German General Staff. Not a single military attaché of a neutral country has been able to learn it. All one knows is that the Old Man of the Swamps drove the Russians into the swamps and that they perished by the thousands.
All I know of the battle of Tannenberg is this. I learned it while at dinner with an officer of Von Eichorn's staff.
"Oh, yes," he said quickly, "I was in the battle of Tannenberg. Some of our officers went insane. You see we drove the Russians back into the swamps and as they felt themselves sinking they threw away their guns and put up their hands, clutching at the air in their death throes. We were coming up to make them prisoners when some of them fired on us. So we turned the machine guns on them," he paused. "I guess it is better that we did. For they were in the swamps and slowly sinking to their death. All night you could hear their cries and the horses made worse screams than the men. It was terrible. Four of my brother officers went out of their minds simply from hearing the shrieks."
An intolerant old warrior who cares not what the newspapers say in his praise, who is bored with the thousands of letters and presents that are being sent him from all parts of Germany, who when this war is over has not the slightest desire to become Minister of War—Field Marshal von Hindenburg is a military genius with a kind German heart in spite of his grim exterior, fond of a glass of good wine and a good story, but accomplishing both work and play in the fascination of strategical study.
But what amazed me more than anything else about Von Hindenburg is the way he is regarded by official military circles in Germany. I knew that to the mass of people and soldiers he is a hero; they think him a military genius of almost divine inspiration. I mentioned this fact one night to a captain in the Great General Staff.
"Oh, yes," he said, "Von Hindenburg is a great general. He has had his opportunity. If he were killed to-morrow there is another general ready to step in and carry on the same work. And if that general were to be killed there is still another. I could mention five or six. You see Von Hindenburg, great man that he is, is simply a cog in a machine. A very great cog, to be sure, but then, don't you see, it is not a single individual that counts but the whole machine. If we lose a part of the machine it is replaced. It is very simple. I know General von Hindenburg and I know that all this talk about him, all this fuss, this idea of asking him, a super man, is very distasteful to him."
Von Hindenburg, only the part of a system! The real hero of Germany then must be the composite of a myriad of remarkably efficient units of which Von Hindenburg is a single element in the war machine of such consummate ability that he seems to stand alone.