peasants who make up the largest
part of East Prussia's population. By thousands they fled from their
villages and hamlets, carrying on their slow oxcarts or on their
shoulders whatever they had gathered as their most precious possessions
in their first hours of fear and terror. To them the word "Cossack"
still called up pictures of the wild hordes that had overrun their
country during the Seven Years' War, and later again in the Napoleonic
wars. The large, strongly fortified cities of Koenigsberg and Danzig
seemed to hold out the only hope for life and security, and toward these
they flocked in ever-increasing masses. Even Berlin itself had brought
home to it some of the more refined cruelties of war by the arrival of
East Prussian refugees.

We have already seen that at the outbreak of the war only five active
German corps were left on the eastern front. Two, the First and the
Twentieth, had, so far, had to bear the brunt of the Russian advance;
one other, the Sixth, had been sent from Breslau to detract, as much as
possible, the Russian onslaught against the Austrian forces in Galicia;
and the other two, the Fifth and Seventeenth, stationed in Danzig and
Posen, were too far back to be immediately available.

CHAPTER LXXV

BATTLE OF TANNENBERG AND RUSSIAN RETREAT

When on August 22, 1914, the full strength of the Russian attack became
evident, the German General Staff decided on heroic measures. An
immediate increase of the German forces to the point where they would
match the Russian seemed out of the question, and the solution of the
problem, therefore, clearly lay in the ability of the general staff to
find a general who could, with the forces on hand, meet the requirements
of the situation--free East Prussia of the invader.

Fortunately for Germany, its hour of need on the eastern front brought
forth this man. There had been living for a number of years in the west
German city of Hanover a general who had been retired in 1911 as
commander of an army corps. His name was Paul von Hindenburg. He was at
that time in his sixty-seventh year, but having been an army officer
since his youth, he was "hard as nails," and from a military point of
view still in the prime of his years as a leader.

It was well known in military circles that Von Hindenburg had acquired
the most thorough knowledge of the difficult lake district south of
Koenigsberg. He had devoted his time and energies for years to a most
exhausti