November 15, 1914, the End of the Western Campaign.
We have seen that it was the plan of the German General Staff to hold the Russian armies while the great attack upon France was being made. To do this the Germans had left a very small force in East Prussia, but had practically assigned to Austria the task of holding up Russia. (Vol. II, 371.)
German calculations as to Russian mobilization proved sadly inaccurate. While the German troops were still in Belgium and the Battle of Charleroi unfought, Russian troops crossed the East Prussian boundary and began an invasion which produced something approximating a panic. (Vol. II, 434.) One Russian army came due west from the Niemen, another north from Warsaw, and all of Germany east of the Vistula seemed in grave peril. (Vol. II, 437.)
TANNENBERG AND LEMBERG
It was then that the kaiser summoned Hindenburg, gave him the task of defending East Prussia, and thus introduced one of the few famous and successful soldiers of the war. (Vol. II, 438.) Hindenburg cleverly concentrated his forces, leaving only a screen in front of the Russian army coming from the Niemen toward Königsberg, practically surrounded the other Russian army in the marshes about Tannenberg, brought into action great parks of German heavy artillery, and routed and destroyed the Russian army about September 1, 1914. (Vol. II, 438-441.)
On "Sedantag" Germany was able to celebrate one of the most decisive of all her many victories, and the Russian peril in East Prussia had been quickly abolished.
But the East Prussian incident was only a detail, due, it is still insisted, to the prompt yielding of Russian strategy to Allied appeals for some action in the east that might relieve the terrible pressure now being exerted upon the Anglo-French forces in the west. And if the East Prussian invasion did not, as was asserted at the time, compel the Germans to send troops from Belgium to East Prussia, it did hold up new formations and seriously complicate the German problem, contributing materially to the French victory at the Marne thereby.
The real Russian blow was delivered against Austria. Faithful to her agreement, Austria had promptly undertaken the invasion of southern Poland and in the third week of August an Austrian army was approaching Lublin, while another stood in a wide circle about the Galician city of Lemberg. (Vol. II, 376-379.)
Ignoring the first army, the Russians sent their main masses westward on a front extending from the Rumanian boundary to the Kiev-Lemberg railroad. Before Lemberg the Austrian army was overwhelmed in a terrible rout, which ended in a wild flight, costing some 300,000 prisoners and almost destroying the Austrian military establishment. (Vol. II, 385, 386.)