Transcript of 598. The First World War: The Eastern Front Explodes (Part 5)

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Ravaruska. A burned out station building. A sign hanging askew from the facade. Somber silence. The little town all shot up. A deserted track along the edge of a forest. Sand. Sand, feet and forest. Turkey, oak and pine. September mists. The dewy chill of daybreak. The area is devoid of life. Even the birds are in hiding. Suddenly we freeze and stare at each other. Did you hear that?

Yes.

Artillery. Sounds like we're getting near the thick of it. We weren't the only ones to hear. A silent tremor of anxiety ripples through the crowd. That was how it still was. Then later on it would become an everyday thing, as much a part of life as a greeting. Then even more so. Eventually the greetings were dropped. The guns took their place. This was how the burning of the world announced itself. So that was the burning of the world by the artist Bella Zombari Moldovan, who was called up to the royal Hungarian Honved, which is of course in English, defenders of the homeland in August 1914. And I say, of course I don't actually speak Hungarian, but fortunately we are in the presence of someone who does and speaks all the Balkan languages and knows the Eastern front like the back of his hand. And that is of course, Dominic Sambrook. And he's written one of the most haunting and lyrical of all memoirs, but little known in the English speaking world because it's about the Eastern Front and Dominic, I admit I had never heard of it, but presumably, you know when you're out in the wilds of Moldova or Belarus or whatever.

Yeah, you talk of little else with the. The circles of intellectuals and historians.

Rugged, wily peasants. Tom, surely of course you're out there.

Talking with rugged, wily peasants, but you're also in the coffee shops, aren't you?

Yeah.

Discussing the history of Middle Europa.

Well, this book, the Burning of the World, is actually published by the New York Review of Books, I think it is in their classics range, so it's slightly easier to get hold of than you're suggesting. It's a brilliant memoir, actually. It is a really, really haunting book. So this guy, he's on the Adriatic Sea, he's on holiday in the summer of 1914, and then the sort of signs literally go up by the beach, by the hotels, saying, you're called up. You know, all the men are told to report to their regiments, and off he goes to the Eastern Front, and it's far, far more hellish than he could possibly have imagined. And the funny thing about it is, of course, loads of people listening to this won't have heard of this, but why would they? Because, actually, even though the first shots of the First World War are fired in the east, in Bosnia and in Serbia, these places then completely vanish.

And Austria basically vanishes from the knowledge of the First World War. The Archduke gets shot, there's a few generals with big mustaches in the buildup to the First World War. And then it vanishes.

The war starts because Austria wants to take revenge on Serbia and the Russians want to stop them, and those three countries just then vanish. By and large, from our own accounts, it's then all Tommies and the Somme and Verdun and stuff. But we're going to put that right, because we're going to tell the story this week of what happened in the east, and it's a really, really remarkable story. So, first of all, it is completely different from the story of what's going on in the West. In the west, you have the lines of trenches, you have the mud, you have the Tommies, all of that.

It's a stationary war, isn't it? Whereas in the east, it's much more like the Great Northern War, or you might say, like the Eastern Front in the Second World War, it is the.

Front lines kind of ebbing and flowing. These gigantic armies, actually without the same technology of the Second World War, so they don't have very good communications. These vast armies kind of completely lost sometimes in kind of forests and marshlands and whatnot. They're wandering about this colossal landscape. And the other important thing about this is this is a war that is fought on the borderlands of three empires, so Austria, Hungary, Russia and Germany. And a lot of the territory that's being fought on is inhabited not by Austrians, Hungarians, Germans or Russians, but by Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, which adds its own kind of flavor to the conflict.

Because the borderlands of empires are often bloody.

Exactly and actually, a lot of historians looking at what happened in the Balkans, in East Prussia and in a place called Galicia, which is now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine, they see this as a rehearsal for the horrors to come in the 1930s and 1940s. But let's start with the people who fired the very first shots of the war. So the Austrians, the Serbians. So if you remember six years ago when we did our series, it seems like six years when we did our first series. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo with the collaboration of elements of Serbian military intelligence. And then for the next four weeks, the Austrians weighed up their options and they decided this was their chance to settle accounts with Serbia for forever and to remind people about the Austro Hungarian Empire. It's a dual monarchy under the 170-year-old Franz Josef. So, in other words, what you have is Austrians, Hungarians ruling this huge variety of people. So Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, some Italians, lots of Romanians and so on and so forth. At the time, it was seen as a bit of a sick man of Europe.

I think the trend among historians now is to say actually the Empire is still kind of staggering along. It's not necessarily about to collapse.

In the series we did on the assassination of the Archduke and then the road to the First World War, I mean, you very convincingly represented the Austro Hungarian Empire as not a basket case, but I have to say, in a spoiler alert.

Yeah.

The record of the Austro Hungarian army in the campaigns to come, I mean, they're a shower.

Yeah, they're an absolute shambles. Tom, I don't think that's going too far. I think if you're looking for an object lesson in utter ineptitude and incompetence, but in a kind of. Kind of a pleasing way. No, because, I mean, the thing about the Austrians is you imagine them being slightly inept while eating loads of cake and listening to Mozart and thinking about Freud and Schoenberg and stuff. You'd be disappointed if they then ended up being ruthlessly efficient, wouldn't you?

Well, I mean, it was a counterpoint to your Austro Hungarian propaganda. In the previous two series, I was reading Max Hasting's Catastrophe and he said about the Austro Hungarian army, its principal strength lay in exotic parade uniforms and splendid bands. And I'm not taking that as a criticism.

No, no, no, no, that's. We admire that. Surely the big fear for people in the Austro Hungarian elite is nationalism, is ethnic nationalism. And in Particular the South Slav ambitions of the Kingdom of Serbia. And the person who really ends up directing the war effort. And the key character in today's story is a man called Baron Franz Conrad von Hutzendorf. So Conrad von Herzendorf, he's 61 years old. He's the chief of the general staff. He's got this sort of strange brush of hair and he's got, of course, a gigantic mustache.

Is there anyone in this story coming up who doesn't have a gigantic mustache.

And they just get bigger? Yeah, I was having to get the thesaurus running out of superlatives.

Massive, gigantic, colossal, stupendous, stupefying.

Each time you think you've seen the biggest mustache, you're wrong, because there's another one to come. Yeah, basically, the further east you go in the story, I think the mustaches get bigger.

And this guy Conrad, Yeah, the salient thing about him is he's in love with a much younger woman and he wants to impress her by basically starting a world war.

Correct?

That's my vague memory of him.

Yeah. So we talked about this a tiny bit in the Franz Ferdinand series. Conrad, he's a very dapper man and he's sort of like all these people. He's kind of melancholic, but he's got a romantic side. So when his first wife died, I think around about 1907, he met this woman at a dinner party. She was called Gina von ryinghaus. She was 27, and she was the wife of an Austrian businessman. And Conrad immediately said to himself, well, this. This is the lady for me. And he then wrote her 3,000 letters.

When he could have been looking at railway timetables.

Right.

Oh, I'll write another letter.

Instead, he wrote her 3,000 letters, begging her, say, you know, I enjoyed meeting at the dinner party, would you consider leaving your husband and marrying me? And amazingly, she. She ends up having an affair with him. But to get a divorce and then to remarry, they will need, effectively, the permission of the Emperor and the approval of Viennese high. And Conrad knows the only way to get that is by starting and winning a world war.

And so that's what he does.

Well, although, to be fair to him, he has always been deadly serious about the threat of Serbia. He really does see Serbia as a lethal menace to the Empire's survival.

So he's the kind of hawk, isn't he, to Franz Ferdinand's dove?

Completely. He is. So in 1913, he had asked 25 times if he could start a war with Serbia. And basically Franz Ferdinand had blocked him at every opportunity. But within hours of Franz Ferdinand's death, he says, brilliant, this is the opportunity. What an irony. The one guy who was stopping me, I can use his death as the pretext. And he said to the foreign minister of Austria, Count Berchtold, you know, we have a poisonous adder at our heel and we need to stamp on its head. And Berchtold, I think we quoted this in the Franz Ferdinand series, later wrote, with a faraway look of melancholy on his fine featured face, he concluded emphatically with three words, war, war, war.

So there's never been any conspiracy theory that he was behind the murder of Franz Ferdinand.

Gosh, that's a good idea.

It's a good one, isn't it?

Well, maybe that could be the conspiracy that our team of crack detectives, who will be introducing in the second half of the show, they can investigate that. That's the season finale.

That is exciting news for listeners. What's coming in the second half?

You'll be surprised. Well, you won't if you've heard the previous episode, but newcomers will be surprised. Right, so the Austrians send their ultimatum. On 23rd of July, the Serbs reject the key demands. And on the 28th of July, Franz Josef signs the declaration of war. Now, the mad thing about the Austrians is they are conscious that the Serbs have this gigantic patron and protector in Russia, but they really give Russia no thought at all. They don't send any troops to their eastern border. Conrad's hope is that basically the Germans will either deter the Russians or in the worst case scenario, if the Russians join the war, the Germans will deal with them. All he's thinking about is the spectacular victory that he's going to win over Serbia. The question, though, of course, is is Austria going to get a win? I mean, this is the weird thing. The Austrians haven't really given any thought to whether they'd actually win such a war. So they have 40 infantry divisions, the Austrians, the Serbs have 11. The Serbs population is much smaller, oddly relative to the population. The Serbs have more troops, but the Austrians have more.

In absolute numbers. The Austrians have quite good weapons, but not enough of them. And the reason they don't have enough of them is because before the war there'd been this endless, endless budget squabbling with the Hungarian parliament. And that, I think, tells its own story about Austria. Hungary's greatest military problem, which is basically diversity, is not its strength. So most of the men don't even speak the same language. Most of the officers speak German and there's actually been huge arguments about whether that should continue or not. You know, is it right that all officers have to speak German? But out of every hundred soldiers in the Austro Hungarian Army, 26 speak German, 23 Hungarian, 13 Czech, 9 Serbian and or Croat. 8 speak Polish, 8 are Ukrainian, 7 are Romanian, 4 are Slovaks and 2 are Savinians. And I'm sure there's also a category that just says other Roma. Yeah, exactly. Or Jews who speak Yiddish or something.

Yeah.

So in other words, you know, this is a sort of a real rag bag kind of. It's a Tower of Babel, Tom. It's a traveling Tower of Babel. Conrad thinks, well, that's not a problem. We can overcome this. He had written many times before the war. In 1890, for example, he had written that leadership is all about swift decision making and strength of will. All you need is strength of will. I mean, actually, the Austrians don't really have either of those things. They're slow decision makers.

And as I remember that, don't they also have a massively complicated railway system that prevents them from moving troops rapidly across their territories?

Yes, exactly.

Which is what Conrad should have been studying rather than writing letters to Gina, one might argue.

Well, every way in which they organize this war is laughable. Here's a perfect example, right. The morning after the declaration war, the early hours of the 29th of July, they say, well, we're going to kick off the campaign. And they have this river warship called the Bodrog, great name, which begins firing shells across the Danube into the center of Belgrade. So you think, okay, right, it's all going to kick off, but then the Austrians do absolutely nothing. So they then do nothing for two weeks. And the reason for that is that Conrad, to please the kind of farming lobby in the Empire, had introduced harvest leave for the army. So all his men are away, like literally working in the sort of Thomas Hardy.

Yeah. With their scythes.

Yeah. And like Thomas Hardy novel, they're kind of scything corn or wheat or whatever they're doing. And the troops from places like Zagreb and Budapest won't get back until the end of. So basically, the Serbs have all this time to get organized. They've got two weeks to get organized. And here is the maddest part of this story. The man that the Serbs want to lead their armies, lead the resistance, it's a man called Radimir Putnik, and he had led their armies in the Balkan wars. So the wars they fought against The Ottoman Empire and then Bulgaria just before the First World War. And Radimir Putnik. Everybody loves Radimir Putnik in Serbia. He's in his late 60s. He's got a huge white beard, of course, and he's got chronic emphysema, of course.

So he's basically. He's a peak First World War general.

He is. Well, also, he's been smoking those kind of really heavy Balkan cigarettes.

The kind you love when you're hanging out in the cafes.

Correct. Now, here's the thing, right? Where has he been? Of course, he's been taking the waters at a spa while this has been going on, and in all places in the Austro Hungarian Empire. So this bloke Putnik has been at a spot called Bad Gleichenberg, which is in Bohemia. He finds out there's going to be a war, he says, oh, I better get home. He gets on the train and he's literally changing trains in Budapest when he's arrested by the Austro Hungarians. And this, I think, is the ultimate sign of the Austro Hungarian lack of seriousness. They've arrested this guy who's going to lead Serbia's armies against them. And when Franz Josef hears about this, he says, oh, this is very poor, poor form. It's. You can't arrest this guy, let him go home. It's chivalrous.

Yeah.

So do you know what they do? They. They literally put him on a train to go home. Now it takes him an eternity to actually get home.

I mean, on one level, it reflects tremendously well on the Austro Hungarian Empire.

Yeah.

On another level, what were they thinking?

I don't think the British would have done that with Napoleon, do you?

Well, would they have done that with Michael Collins?

No, I don't think they would. Although they did. No, because they did arrest Eamon De Valerae and then let him go.

They locked him up in Lincoln Jail. Yeah.

But later on, they arrested him by accident and let him go when the truce was going on, all the truce negotiations.

Oh, well, that's fair enough if it's the truth.

Yet another opportunity to praise our beloved country. Wonderful. Well done. You handled that beautifully. Anyway, Pudnick takes him ages to get home. The other Serbian officers basically have to blow open his safe to find out what his plans are. They read his plans. His plans are we won't engage the Austrians on the border. We'll actually withdraw from Belgrade and we'll wait for the Austrians to move before reacting. So the Serbs are, on paper, massive underdogs in this war. I mean, this is the war the First World War is all about and nobody really knows anything about it. The Serbs have about 200,000 men, but they've just fought in the Balkan wars, very vicious wars, actually, in which they didn't necessarily cover themselves with certainly not moral glory. They haven't really got any uniforms left. Everyone says they look like tramps and scarecrows. They're sort of very battered looking, but they're famously stoical, the Serbian soldiers.

And they can melt into the mountains, can't they?

They can melt into the mountains. The historian Nick Lloyd, who's just written a brilliant book on the Eastern Front, he quotes one guy who said, if you give the Serbian soldier bread and an onion, he's satisfied.

And is that your experience? Would you concur with that?

Yeah, I think so. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, in my experience, they were always eating onions and stuff. They love it. They're also. They're very fierce. I mean, this is a terrible. This is now generating to absolute sort of bulk and stereotype 101.

But, yeah, the Michael Palin of.

Yeah, exactly. The Serbs are a proud, rugged people. Basically, you're fighting the Serbs. They're complete bastards. They see fighting as a great adventure. They're led into battle by these musicians playing on bagpipes and playing, like, folk songs on fiddles. And actually, this is a continuity in Serbian history because in the 1990s, when they were fighting in the sort of post Yugoslav wars, music was a huge part of Serbian nationalism, something called turbo folk pounding music.

It's brilliant. You're here to do this.

Oh, that's great.

Well, bringing all your local knowledge.

Okay, well, yeah, I read that in the newspaper. Anyway, back to the Austrians. The Austrians are expecting a complete walkover and basically, Conrad wants a really quick victory because if he wins a quick victory over Serbia, he thinks Romania and Bulgaria will pile in on the side of the Central Powers. However, at this point, Conrad accepts that actually he will have to go and lead the army against the Russians. He can't pretend the Russians don't exist any longer. So he casts round for the ideal man to fight the Serbs. And a man pops into his head who's had a perhaps unfortunate beginning to the summer, because this is the governor of Bosnia. He's called General Oskar Potiorek. He is the man who had invited Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo, been responsible for his security, had told him nothing could possibly go wrong, and, if you remember, had even told his army not to enter Sarajevo under any circumstances because he wanted to show the world how safe it was for Franz Ferdinand.

But aside from the assassination, I mean, it had gone well.

It'd actually been a brilliant trip. Otherwise, it's gone really well. Now Potioric has a point to prove, and he wrote to Vienna, he said, I intend to be absolutely offensive, which is the mantra that we adopt on this show, isn't it, Tom? Yes, it is. However, you mentioned Max Hastings book Catastrophe. Potioric has never actually fought in a battle, and Max Hastings describes him as, and I quote, a bachelor who had devoted his life monastically to his profession while remaining ignorant of every aspect of it that was either modern or important. So maybe not very promising. On the 12th of August, so two weeks after the Austrians had declared war, which is mad, Potiorek finally says, right, we're ready. And he orders the 5th army to advance across the River Drina from eastern Bosnia into central Serbia, which is mountainous and very, very den.

Densely forested, so excellent for military maneuvering.

It's a total shambles. So on the first day, the bridging equipment doesn't turn up, so basically they have to send their engineers to paddle across and build these pontoon bridges. They all get across. It's the Balkans in August. It's incredibly hot, it's incredibly dusty. They're carrying these huge packs and they're dripping with sweat. Max Hastings quotes a soldier called Mattia Malesich. He said, thirsty, thirsty, thirsty. Our kit as heavy as lead. Unbearable heat, and yet we must keep going, keep going. It's so hard that a man instinctively asks himself why he was brought into the world. Was it just to suffer?

So morale is good.

Morale is tip top. They march in suffocating heat and like dust through all these Serbian villages. But they're slightly perturbed to see the place is almost empty.

So it's silent, too silent.

Very good, Tom, very good. There are just old crones and small children cackling.

Do they have white eyeballs?

Undoubtedly. But there's no men. Where are the men? We talked in the episode about Belgium, about the Germans, fear of Franc Dureur, of sort of partisans. But this is on a different level, because the Serbs, they love. I mean, the Serbs love a partisan. And so from the very beginning, they waged this partisan campaign and this exacerbated in the minds of the Austrians by the fact that the Serbs, even their regular troops, because they don't have any uniforms left, they look like bandits. They've kind of got their, you know, sort of bandoliers of ammunition.

I mean, basically, they are bandits.

They are yeah, pretty much. So what they will do is the Austrians will march through a village and then they'll go through and they'll go off into the woods. And at this point, the Serbs will strike. They'll shoot them all from behind and they'll melt away into the Balkan landscape. Now, the Austrians do not take this lying down. And now we come to a massive feature of the Eastern Front, no matter where it happens, actually, and this is the killing of civilians. The Austrians make the Germans in Belgium look like, you know, social workers or something, right? So their field commander is a guy called General Laborious Ritter Von Frank.

Of course he is.

And he says, listen, the Serbs are terrible people anyway, since we're under attack from civilians, like, the gloves are off, forget about international law. Doesn't really apply. Let's just, you know, go for it. So straight away, they start looting and burning these villages. They shoot anybody that they think even remotely is connected with partisan activity. Now, I have to say, before anyone starts sort of weeping for the Serbs, the Serbs three years earlier had really disgraced themselves in the Balkan wars. I mean, they had behaved really atrociously in Kosovo and Macedonia and so on. What they've sowed, they are now reaping to some extent.

Can I just ask, in Belgium, when the Germans commit atrocities against civilians, this is obviously bad news for Germany's reputation and therefore, in the long run, for their ability to prosecute the war. But is anyone paying attention to what's going on in the Balkans? And isn't there a kind of a slight attitude in the gentleman's clubs of London that this is just the kind of thing that people do in the Balkans?

Yeah, totally. Right. Double standard. The same double standard applies when we're talking about the Russian atrocities in Poland and Ukraine, for example. I mean, exactly that. Basically, nobody cares in the west. And insofar as they do care, whenever it comes up, they say, well, I mean, this kind of thing happens there all the time. Ancient hatreds. Ancient hatreds. Exactly. That's exactly, exactly what happens. And having said, oh, this is what the Serbs sowed, they're now reaping even. So, there are some really, really grim stories. So here's a good example. These are told by the Austrians themselves. So this is from a young Hungarian officer called Alexander Pallavicini. So his column of troops was fired on from a cornfield on the 17th of August, and they sent out patrols. And these patrols came back with 63 people they said they'd found hanging around the field. Some of these Palavicini claimed were women and children caught with rifles. One of them was an Orthodox priest caught with grenades. And he wrote an hour later, only a mass grave was visible. In order not to upset our soldiers by the sound of shooting, these people were bayoneted to death.

The priest's beard had supposedly been ripped off. Our men were that angry after the atrocities committed against them. He describes this very starkly. And then he has no regrets or guilt. He says, the hatred for us is boundless and everyone is our enemy. We're not fighting against an army of 300,000, but against a whole nation.

And Dominic, presumably the evidence for the priest having the grenades and the women and children having guns comes exclusively from the people who've shot them.

Of course. Yes. Who's to say how true this is? And the Austrians do not try to cover this up at all. They actually want it to be public. So Conrad says, you know, make this very overt, because we want to terrify people into collaborating with us. There's a terrible story told by another Austro Hungarian officer a week later, the 24th, 4th of August. He says, I met a column of 30 people assembled for execution. He says they were being kind of kicked and whipped and whatnot. While they were standing there. He and a couple of others tried to restrain the people doing it, but it was impossible. And he goes on to say there was an execution place at the edge of the woods behind the monastery. The Serbs had to dig their own graves. Then they were sat down in front of the pit and bayoneted five at a time. Three infantrymen stabbed each. A gruesome spectacle. It was terrible to see earth being heaped on the victims while some still lived and indeed tried to climb out of the grave. And to see some of those rising from the grave, our men behaved like savages.

I couldn't stand the sight and I left them to it. So, you know, Austro Hungarian officers themselves are troubled by this. They probably executed about 3,000 people in two weeks.

Oh, dear. Yeah.

For all the stuff about the military bands and the cake, there is a kind of dark side to the Austrian army.

So the id. The ID as well as the ego is in place.

Yeah. Sigmund Freud would have a field day now. Meanwhile, the Austrians have been marching into Serbia. They have a particular objective in mind, which is this railway junction at a place called Valjevo. And in the way, there is this kind of heavily forested ridge called Mount Sir. And they reach the top on the late afternoon of the 15th of August. They're knackered, they're Very thirsty, they're very hungry. There's a massive thunderstorm that night. And in the middle of the thunderstorm, that's the point, the Serbs choose to strike back. And the result is total chaos. The Austrians are inexperienced, they panic, they start running away. They're kind of a huge mob of Austrians running away down this mountain. Unbelievably, they just keep running. And within four days, they've crossed the river again and they've gone back to Bosnia. So their first attempt to invade Serbia has been a ludicrous failure and a very bloody failure. The Serbs have lost 16,000 men. The Austrians have lost 30,000, including loads and loads of their officers. And in the eyes of the world, this is a terrible humiliation for them. General Potiorek has spent the whole time in Sarajevo, right.

Ironically, he says, oh, well, this wasn't my fault at all. I think it was the fault of our Czech troops, actually. They're very disloyal. They're poorly behaved Czechs. By blaming the Czechs, he's able to cling on to his job. And straight away he starts writing to Conrad and he says, I'd love to have another crack at the Serbs. Will you send me some more men and some more guns and whatnot? Conrad says, no, I don't think so. You've had your chance. But Potiorek is well connected at court. He gets his friends to lobby the Emperor Franz Josef, and eventually he's given permission to have another crack at the Serbs. So at dawn on 14 September, he has a second go. Once again, they cross the rivers into Serbia from Bosnia. This time the Serbs have dug trenches, and it degenerates quite quickly into kind of bloody hand to hand trench warfare. The Austrians are thrown back. Oh, no, it was not quite as chaotically as before. They say, well, we'll have another go. So in November, they have attempt number three. Now, at this point, the Serbs are absolutely exhausted themselves and they're running out of shells.

They haven't got any artillery. They can't really rest their troops because they're running out of men. So slowly, painfully, the Austrians are able to inch their way forward, and the Serbs have to abandon Belgrade. And they take up a new defensive line on a river called the Kolubara, which is deep inside central Serbia. So at this point, the Austrians, foolishly, I think Tom, decide to celebrate victory. They have premature victory celebrations. The Emperor sends Potiorek a message of congratulations. Lots of towns name him an honorary citizen. A street in Sarajevo is renamed in his honor.

Wow, that's Punchy, that is.

Yeah. The man is basically. His foolishness has caused the whole thing.

It's caused the First World War. Yeah.

However, it will surprise you to know that the Austrians are perhaps being a little bit premature because that guy who they'd released, the bloke with the beard and emphysema, Radomir Putnik, his emphysema has gotten far worse under the pressure war. So he can't breathe. We will not surrender. Exactly. But even though he can't breathe, he's still a much better commander than any of the Austrians. So he knows that the Austrians have. Now, they've gone on the attack. They've sustained massive casualties, more than 130,000 casualties. They haven't got any food. They're ravaged by lice. They're miles ahead of their supply lines. They've got no shoes. Their fancy uniforms are in rags. They're very miserable. And actually, the weather has now changed. So having been very. This is the thing about the Eastern Front. There's only two weather settings. It's either unbelievably, suffocatingly hot or you're dying of, you know, Frostbite. Frostbite, exactly. So now it's snowing. And meanwhile, Putnik has done something amazing. He's arranged with the French to have 11,000 shells imported via Salonika, Thessaloniki. They're the wrong size for the Serbian guns, so every single shell has been taken apart and reassembled and transported to the front.

So, late November, Putnik rallies his forces. He's basically got all the Serbian men. That's 200,000 of them. He's got 400 guns. And he has a secret weapon.

I know. What's that, Dominic?

The secret weapon is a man. It's Petar Karadjorjevic. The King of Serbia.

The King of Serbia. And, Dominic, just a wild guess here.

Yeah.

From what I've previously learned about significant players in the early months of the First World War, I'm guessing he's very elderly.

Yeah.

I'm guessing he's very melancholy.

Yeah.

And I'm guessing that he has some terrible ailment. Would I be correct?

He's got rheumatism. But if you Google him, he really does have a superb mustache.

And he's elderly.

Yeah. He's 70.

Of course.

Anyway, he tours the trenches. King Petar. And he says, my children, I have learned that some among your number tire of fighting, but I. I shall stay to the end. And a French reporter who was there said of the Serbs, I'm sure this is true. Each of them felt his soul gripped with a furious desire to seize victory or to die for their old uncle, who had stayed there among his children in spite of his failing health, even as the cannons roared and their bullets whistled.

I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, how it mirrors the pattern of what's happened on the Western Front, that the Germans overextend their supply lines. There's an elderly man who says, we're going to fight.

Yeah.

Counterattack is launched, and, I mean, we're being harsh on the Austrians. But I wonder whether it doesn't reflect a basic fact that all the kind of armies are struggling to cope with that the capacity for defense is vastly greater than the ability of attacking forces to break through those defenses. Do you think?

I think that's absolutely true. Once you've got modern artillery and machine guns and things, and trenches and things. Completely true. However, I think anybody who's written about the Austrian performance in the war, say Nick Lloyd or Alexander Watson or whoever, in their books, they unanimously agree that the Austrian performance is absolutely risible. Anyway, the Serbs launched their counterattack on the morning of 3rd December 1914. It's a foggy, snowy morning. They start with the shells that the Austrians weren't expecting, then they charge. There's a brilliant description, actually, in Nick Lloyd's Eastern Front book. The battle goes on into the night. There's kind of hand grenades exploding, there's troops charging, there's machine gun fire. The Austrians are losing more and more men. Basically, they start going backwards, and day after day they go backwards. By the 9th of December, they're falling back into Belgrade. And then five days later, just say, okay, the game is up again and they withdraw across the River Sava, across the Danube, back into Imperial territory. Unbelievably, even as Serbian troops are marching through the center of Belgrade, being cheered as liberators, Potiorek is writing to Vienna saying, I'd love to have another go.

Oh, no, a fourth go. Yeah.

You've got to admire his self confidence, I suppose.

Exactly. Even the Emperor says, no, no, no, enough is enough. And actually, just before Christmas, he's sacked. And I think it's fair to say he's had a very disappointing six months.

Yeah, that CV is going to take quite a lot of work.

Exactly. Actually, I didn't quote this, actually, but in I think it's maybe Max Hastings book, there's a line from him where he says he's so disappointed to have been sacked, he says, I'm very disappointed because I now won't have the opportunity to clear my name of the very cruel and foolish things that people are saying about me. Well, for Austria, this could not have been a more terrible fiasco. They'd sent 462,000 men to fight in the Balkans, of whom 273,000 have become casualties. Wow.

Oh, my God. So over half.

Yeah. Now that includes tens of thousands killed, a far greater number who are missing, and tens and tens of thousands who are dead of disease of one kind or another. And the real nightmare for the Austrians is that now that their weakness has been exposed for everybody to see, the vultures are circling, and one vulture above all, and that is their supposed ally, Italy. However, there is one bit of good news for the Central Powers in the east, because although the Austrians have let themselves down elsewhere, our old friends the Germans have found two very impressively efficient and ruthless commanders to lead them against the Russians.

And mustachioed commanders. Right, so yet more.

Yeah.

Massive Teutonic mustache action to come. And we will find out who they are and what impact they have on the Eastern front after the break.

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Only@folioSociety.com that is Foliosociety.com hello, everybody, it's Dominic here. Now I'm absolutely delighted to announce that every Friday for the next few weeks, I'll be joined by our Rest is History producer and resident book lover, Tabby Syrette. And we'll be discussing a different, different book. And members of the Rest Is History Club can listen to this thrilling new content right away. So what we're doing is we're looking at the context when the books were written, the lives of the people who wrote them, what makes the book so brilliant and why they still matter. Today we'll be digging into everything from Truman Capote's true crime chiller In Cold Blood to Albert Camus to Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula. And we'll be looking at the history behind their great books. So last week we talked about J.R.R. tolkien's the Hobbit. We looked at how it affected Tolkien's experiences in the First World War, how it reflects the sensibility of the 1920s and 1930s, how Tolkien drew on all kinds of different influences from the imperial fiction of the Victorian era to the Norse epics that he loved so much. And next week, if you don't like the Hobbits, we'll be doing something very different.

We're doing Margaret Atwood's book, the Handmaid's Tale. And as a treat for our listeners, we have a short clip at the end of this episode so you can see what you're missing. And if you like what you hear, you just need to sign up@therestishistory.com you' join the rest is History Club. You get all the amazing benefits, but above all, you get access to this thrilling new content. Enjoy.

Hello, welcome back to the Rest is History. We've been looking at Austria messing things up. Time now to look at another power messing things up. And Dominic, this power is Russia. And we haven't really mentioned Russia at all, have we? Which is odd because in some ways perhaps the Russians more than any other power, have responsibility for turning a Balkan crisis into a world war.

Yeah, I think that's a fair, that's a fair case, Tom. Some Listeners may disagree, but the Russians didn't have to treat Austria's attack on Serbia as the trigger for an all out conflict. They did. They felt they couldn't give ground and so they've got involved in a war which will, of course, in the long run, destroy the Tsarist regime and kill Nicholas II. So Russia is the world's largest country, 164 million people. It's the world's fourth biggest economy.

So what are the top three? Britain, Germany, America.

Yes, Britain, Germany, United States, but not in that order. I think. I think the United States at this point is number one. And the Russians have the world's largest army. So they've got one and a half million people within another three million in reserve. This is what had always terrified the Germans and the Austrians. There are just so many Russians. So the supreme commander of the Russian army at this point is not the Tsar. The Tsar does become the supreme commander later, but at first he appoints his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, who is an enormous man. He's six foot six.

So Peter the Great style.

Peter the Great style, like Peter the Great, he is a terrifying man. He's got a famously savage temper and it gives you some sense of his character when I tell you that his great specialism and hobby was in breeding especially aggressive borzoi hounds.

What's a borzoi hound?

That's this kind of hound, very aggressive. Okay, that's cleared it up, isn't it? Good. So he would take these Borzoi hands hunting and he has supposedly personally cut the throats of thousands of wolves.

Wow. But no bellow action?

No bellow action. And yet there is a softer side to him because when Nicholas II says to his uncle, says uncle Nikolai, you know, I'd like you to be their supreme commander. He's never commanded troops in battle either, and he's very uncertain. He sort of says to everybody, God, I don't know what I'm doing here, I'm completely out of my depth. And actually he started crying because he was so anxious.

It's quite a feature again, isn't it? Unexpected feature that generals are always crying.

Yeah. So their initial thought is that they will send two thirds of their huge army south into Galicia, Poland and Ukraine.

So they're dividing their forces up, which always works out well in war, doesn't it?

It's always a brilliant idea. They'll send them south against the Austrians and we'll find out in the final episode of this series how they got on. But they send the other third into the German Province of. Of East Prussia. So this is the sort of very heavily forested, watery landscape of the Teutonic Knights and the Baltic Crusades. It kind of got an odd, kind of a sort of dreary romance to it, I think.

So the Teutonic Knights who had been defeated in this landscape at a place called Tannenberg.

They had indeed. And we will be talking about that. You might say this is very foolish. The Germans have the world's best army. Why would you take them on with only a third of your own? And the reason has so often, the French are the real villains in all. French have basically made the Russians promise to force the Germans to fight on two fronts. So the Russians are doing this to please the French, basically, because there's a load of lakes in the middle of East Prussia called the Masurian Lakes, this kind of chain of little lakes. And they're going to send one army around the north and one army around the south. So the one that will go north is the first army. And this is commanded, confusingly, by a general called Paul von Rennenkampf.

He's the Russian commander, just to be clear.

Yes, he's the Russian commander.

He obviously has a German name because, again, this is a feature of the events of 1914.

He is a Baltic German baron and he has, I think, the outstanding mustache in history. I think he's the winner if people Google him.

Let me look it up. Wow, that is impressive. That's enormous.

Yeah, there you go.

It's like a muskrat.

He's. He's great. I think he's great. He's not a very good general, but he's got a great mustache on the.

Mustache front because, you know, and the competition is very heavy at this time.

It's very fierce, but not from his colleague. So the Second army, which will go south around the lakes, is commanded by a guy called Alexander Samsonov. So he's from Kherson in. In Ukraine. He has a beard unusually, and he looks very like, I think, Nick Timothy, the conservative MP and former guru of Theresa May, which is to say he.

Looks a little bit like Nicholas ii.

Yeah, a little bit, actually. Yeah. So now he. There's always a little. A little nice detail with these guys. Samson has horrendous asthma. He has really, really badass.

What is it with generals and terrible breathing.

So he can't really breathe either. Anyway, shouldn't laugh. On 17 August, the Russians set off. Rennenkampf goes first and Samsonov will follow further south from Warsaw. They're A colorful host because most of them are peasants, peasant infantry, but they have kind of Turkmen and Kalmic cavalry with yellow robes and sheepskin hats. There's Cossacks with caftans and kind of those boots that go up at the end.

So for fans of exotic Orientalism.

Exactly.

It's a tremendous show.

Well, it's amusing for us, but for the people of East Prussia, it's awful. Alexander Watson, who's written a couple of brilliant books about the Eastern Front, he says this event, which is barely known in the west, is a defining experience for a generation of Germans. So we don't often think of Germany being invaded in the First World War, but when the Russians crossed the border into East Prussia, this is unbelievably traumatic for the people of Germany because the Russians advanced with unbridled ferocity. Three fifths of the small towns in East Prussia were looted and burned. More than a quarter of the farms were burned to the ground. Again, as so often the obsession with partisans, Grand Duke Nicolai said, any village where our troops are attacked in any way must be completely destroyed. They shoot about 1, 500 people. And I think the reason there's not more is because these pressure is not very densely populated. They would have shot more if there were more people.

These are the bloodlands then of Timothy Snyder's book.

Yeah.

Probably the worst place to be born in the 20th century.

Do you know it's also the worst place to be an enthusiastic cyclist like your great uncle. Is it?

Yeah. Why?

Because to have a bicycle. In the Russian Empire, bicycles were a luxury and they were very unusual. Russian soldiers, when they saw people on bicycles, assumed that they were military machines and shot their riders because they said, these people are clearly partisans. One in 20 of the people killed by the Russians was riding a bike.

Very glad that Great Uncle Charlie was on the Eastern Front. Front. Yeah, you wouldn't have fared well.

It's rare that you hear people say they wish that their ancestors true in either world war. Anyway, at first the Russians advance. They think, oh, this is going brilliantly. East Prussia has this army guarding it called the 8th Army. German. They're hugely outnumbered. They have an elderly commander called General, General von Pritzwitz.

Does he have breathing problems and a large mustache?

I think he has commanding problems, actually, rather than breathing.

Okay.

Because when his men first meet the Russians at a place called Gunbinun, a village, the Germans end up retreating in confusion. And Prittvitz says, oh, we're doomed. We're never going to beat the Russians. The Russians, meanwhile, are cockahoop. So Rennenkamp's men, they've never seen such wealth as they're seeing on these German farms. So they're absolutely. All these stories about them stuffing themselves with ham and goose. They find a cheese factory.

Oh, yeah, this is a great story.

And they loot this cheese factory. So all the Russians, all the cavalry, are riding with an entire cheese dangling from their saddles. And one of them said later, a cavalry man is used to many odors, but never did we smell as we did then. It's a stink of cheese. Now, at this point, the Russians make some terrible mistakes. First of all, Rennenkampf, he's the guy who's gone north with the 1st Army. He says, well, we're doing splendidly. Let's have a little rest now and gather some supplies. Now, Samsonov is going around the lakes to the south. He has a very tense relationship with Rennenkampf, and he wants in on this cheese action and on the spoils and stuff. And he says to his men, come on, keep going south around the lakes. Now, both of them assume that the Germans are finished. And indeed, the German commander, Prittwitz, he thinks that. He thinks that he rang Moltke, and on the 21st of August, he said, My men are as good as done.

But it's interesting, isn't it? This is exactly the same time as the Germans are making an identical mistake about the French and the British on the Western Front.

Yeah. Goes back to the point you made in the first half of this episode, Tom. If you're attacking in the First World War, you're generally in trouble.

Yeah, you're losing.

Anyway, Prittvitz said, we're doomed. Let's all withdraw. This is a terrible disaster. The very next afternoon, von Moltke sent a message to Prittvitz's headquarters, which pleasingly was at Marienburg, beside the vast fortress of the Teutonic Knights. So today that's Malbork in Poland. I've been to this castle. It's one of my favorite castles. Huge brick castle. Brilliant.

Yeah. It's the one built out of brick, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. Prvitz kind of opens the message, and the message basically says, you're fired. Because in his place, Moltke is going to appoint somebody who he thinks can win the war against the Russians, and he's got another elderly general in mind. And this is the top Teutonic walrus hewn from the oak of Prussia. Paul von Hindenburg.

Right? Yes. Who will play a Key role in the story of the Nazis.

So Hindenburg is a of classic Junker stock. That means he's part of the kind of Prussian landowning classes. He'd fought in the Franco Prussian War. He then taught at the War Academy and he'd retired in 1911. So since then he's been sitting at home in Hanover basically smoking his pipe and reading the paper. And when war broke out, he waited for the call and it never came. And he was gutted and he complained, he said, I sit like an old woman in front of the stove, I've got nothing to do. And Moltke sends him this telegram. It reached Hanover on the afternoon of the 22nd of August. I want you to go and command the army in East Prussia. Hindenburg sent a brilliant terse two word reply. Am ready. And then at 4 o' clock in the morning he went down to Hanover Station. There was a special train waiting for him on a darkened platform and he gets on this train and on the train is his new Chief of Staff and then they head off east. Everybody said of Hindenburg, the thing about Hindenburg that's great is he's very meticulous, he takes his work seriously, but he's bit like General Joffre in France.

He's completely unflappable, he will never panic, he's very good humored. His men like him and he will never, never collapse in a kind of hissy fit. But actually Molke only wants Hindenburg as a figurehead. There's a claim that actually Hindenburg only got the job because his house was on the same train line that the Chief of Staff would be taking, because it's the Chief of Staff that Moltke really wants. And this is a younger man, Erich Ludendorff, 49 years old, also a key figure conquering Liege, who we met earlier.

Didn'T we, in the series?

Yes, exactly. He is not a Junker, he's not from the landowning classes. He's from a merchant family in what's now Poland and he'd become this brilliant military prodigy.

The reason that he's not appointed is because he's not of the right class. And the Kaiser doesn't like him, does he? Because he sees him as a parvenist.

The irony, of course, the Kaiser thinks that he's the kind of man who.

Would wear the wrong shoes and he probably does. But it doesn't matter because he's a very good general.

Everybody has always said of Ludendorff, he is the great star of the German army. He is the rising star. He's a sort of future England captain. Isn't that what people say about cricketers? Yes, yeah. They'd also said, however, that he's an incredibly glacial and ruthless person.

Well, the two aren't contradictory, surely.

No, no, no, of course not. Of course not. He is him and he is a serious person. His wife said of him she'd never known him to laugh or make a joke of any kind. She also always called him Ludendorff by his surname.

I like that.

But that said, actually, we can overdo this because his men were very loyal to him and they adored him.

A general can be glacial and never laugh and have his wife call him by his surname. Yeah, but if these are qualities that make it likelier that you as a private soldier, are going to survive a battle, of course you're going to love him.

Yeah, of course. As you said, Ludendorff has been the big star of the war's first weeks. Captured Liege. The Kaiser, just before he got on the train, actually gave him the highest award for gallantry, Pour Le Merit, the Blue Max, as it's called. And Molke said to Ludendorff, you are the only man who can save East Prussia. You're the only man I trust. Go and do it. So he and Hindenburg get on the train, they go off to East Prussia. Now, meanwhile, Samsonov is still coming with 180,000 men south around the lakes. It will amaze people to hear there's an atmosphere of general chaos in the Russian advance. They don't have enough trucks, half the men of barely trained. They've got terrible intelligence, so they've got no idea where the Germans are or basically where they are, where they're going. Any of this.

I don't want to engage in national stereotyping.

No, never on this show, but I'm going to.

Would it be fair to say that it is a clash between Prussian efficiency and Russian chaos?

Yes, it'd be completely fair. So actually, Hindenburg and Ludendorff have come up with a plan on the train. They'll basically send some cavalry north. So Rennenkampf thinks they're coming north and that he won't keep coming. Meanwhile, they'll use the trains to move all of the rest of their men against Samsonoff in the south, because the.

Germans are doing everything that the Austrians don't. The German High Command have removed an incompetent commander, replaced him with an efficient commander. They're using their trains to their best ability.

Exactly.

They have good intelligence.

Yeah.

So it's looking Good for them completely.

So on the 23rd of August, they get to the Marienberg, the castle of the Teutonic Knights. Hindenburg goes for a walk around the castle. And actually, if you. Again, if you Google it, you can see some of the propaganda postcards that were produced of Hindenburg kind of outside this castle, thinking about the Teutonic Knights. Whether he did this or not, I don't know. Anyway, the next day, they tour the front, Hindenburg and Ludendorff. There's a proper war zone. There's refugees everywhere, there's columns of black smoke rising over villages in the distance, all of this. They go past this village called Tannenberg, and both generals know the history because it was here in 1410, that the Teutonic Knights had lost a titanic battle with the Poles and the Lithuanians. And as they're driving back from Tannenberg, they get brilliant news. The Germans have intercepted two Russian radio messages. Russian communications are terrible. They're not properly disguising their messages. Rennenkampf and Samsonov are now so far apart that they cannot support each other. And Hindenburg says, well, this is our chance. We'll go for Samsonov. We won't just beat him, we'll annihilate him. And when he gets back home, Hindenburg is very.

General Zhoff like, says to his officers, gentlemen, our preparations are so well in hand that we can all sleep soundly tonight.

And he likes a good night's sleep, doesn't he, Hindenburg?

He loves a good night's sleep, as we will discover. So on the 25th of August, it begins. Samsonov is pushing these Russians deeper and deeper into the kind of lakelands, into the forests, but he has no idea what's out there. When he hears the first reports of German attacks on the flanks, he doesn't realize that this is a trap. He says, go deeper, go deeper, keep going. Now, back at Marienberg, Ludendorff, as always, despite this glacial reputation, he's a nervous wreck. So he's beside himself with nerves. And actually, at one point, Hindenburg has to take him out of a meeting, take him for a walk to calm him down.

Yeah, because Hindenburg's just puffing on his pipe.

Yeah.

His mustache is drooping. He's mellow.

Exactly. Ludendorff is always sort of sweating and getting very overexcited. Anyway, everything is actually going according to plan. Samsonov is walking deeper and deeper into this trap. So two or three days he keeps going. He still doesn't realize, even as the Germans are attacking him on his flanks, what he's doing. And then on the 28th of August, so about four days, three or four days into this battle, he realizes that something is wrong. Samsonov rides forward to see what's going on, and he leaves his communications technology behind, which is a complete disaster for him. Now, meanwhile, the Germans are closing the trap and they're basically closing in on this army in the forest. Samsonov's men could have maybe got out if they'd immediately withdrawn. Instead, very foolishly, they stand and fight. And that means the Germans are able to cut their lines of retreat and completely surround them.

Right.

And so what happens now is a total bloodbath. Thousands upon thousands of the Russians are killed. Forests are strewn with bodies. For the next two days. They tried to break out, they couldn't. They're lost, they're disoriented, they're terrified. And by the 30th of August, Samsonov's men are surrendering in their thousands, often that they're just sitting in the woods with the kind of the hands in the air, hands in their heads, thousands of them waiting to be captured.

The Schlieffen plan had been all about trying to recreate the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal's great victory over the Romans. That consisted in surrounding an army and completely annihilating it on the Western front. But as it turns out, the Battle of Cannae is replicated on the Eastern front at Tannenberg.

Yeah, very nice.

Exactly the tactic, isn't it?

Yeah, Closing the pincers of the trap. Yeah, works brilliantly. So Hindenburg and Ludendorff, we haven't actually mentioned yet our plan to do an investigative police drama with them as the detectives.

They're going around on trains and they're smoking pipes, and then when the need for action comes, they do their stuff. I think they'd be brilliant.

Yeah, but if there's also a crime, they'll solve that on the way. Anyway, they have taken 92,000 prisoners, and they had never imagined such a haul. The Kaiser rather lets himself down at this point. The Kaiser has a charming plan for the prisoners. He says, I've got a brilliant idea. Why don't we corral them all on the Courland Peninsula in western Latvia and starve them all to death? And actually, even Hindenburg and Linda will say, I think that's a bit much. Samsonov said, with his asthma, he escaped in the woods with his entourage, with his Cossack bodyguards. They left their maps behind. Very foolishly so they got completely lost in the woods and they Tried to navigate using a compass, like basically like sort of Duke of Edinburgh award thing that's gone horribly wrong.

Gone horribly wrong, yeah.

Samsonov can't breathe. He's very depressed. He says to his bodyguards, you know, the Emperor trusted me, Nicholas ii. How can I ever face him after this disaster? And then he basically goes off for a walk into the woods and they hear a gunshot shot and he's shot himself.

Oh God, they're like Varus after using the three legions.

Exactly, exactly. Back in Germany, total ecstasy. Because this is the point at which the Battle of the Marne has started. The Western offensive is faltering and the public are desperate for good news. Hindenburg says to the Kaiser, could we please name this after the Battle of Tannenberg? Because of course they went past the village and that gives it tremendous resonance. In Germany though, the Teutonic Knights have avenged their historic defeat. They've thrown back the Asiatic hordes. The homeland has been saved all of this. The job's not completely done. Ten days later, they turn to Rennenkampf in the north, his first army. They try a similar trick, actually the same trap. This time Rennenkampf is expecting it. He is able to withdraw. And so the Russians end up withdrawing from East Prussia. However, they don't leave empty handed. This is another aspect of the story I think that people don't know about by and large in English speaking countries. As the Russians retreated, they rounded up thousands of people basically as hostages. So Max Hastings tells a very moving story about a family called the Shukas who lived in a village called Popovan. There was a school teacher, his wife and two daughters.

Basically. I won't tell you the whole story, but they were taken by the Russians as hostages. They were taken off to Siberia and they didn't get home until 1920.

Okay, so again, a pre figuring there of the events of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Exactly. Well, here's a real pre figuring. 10,000 Germans in total were rounded up up and deported east in cattle trucks in horrendous conditions when the Russians left East Prussia. And what is more, I mean, this was a real revelation to me actually. Inside the Russian Empire there were about 200,000 ethnic Germans, Russian subjects, Russian citizens. They were deported east as well. Some historians think maybe as many as half of them died from disease, cold, starvation and so on in the years that followed. I mean, this is a story that, you know, most of us have, I guess, have never heard of. Well, this is not the end at all of the campaign in the east.

No, we've got three years to go, right?

Yeah. And the really confusing thing about all this is that a few weeks later the Russians came back and they actually won some really big victories that nobody's ever heard of. The Battle of the Vistula, the Battle of Lodz.

The Battle of what?

Woodz. It's an industrial town in sort of south central Poland.

No, I've literally never heard of that.

It's spelled L, O D Z. You've seen that word, Lodz? Yeah. You've seen that written down.

I think Lodz is how you pronounce it.

No, I think not, Tom. This is the way the eastern front works. Now, putting that on one side, Hindenburg and Luzendorf are the huge winners. From this, Hindenburg becomes a national idol, almost unmatched, I think, in any other country. So in Berlin, people put up a 39 foot wooden statue of him. This is one of the nail men. This is so interesting. You'd put up these statues made of wood and then you'd pay to hammer in a nail and the money would go to the armed forces. So there were hundreds of these nail men across Germany and Austria. You would have Siegfried, you'd have Charlemagne, you'd have Roland, you'd have Henry the Lion, Otto the Great. Exactly. And you'd hammer in your nail, you know, raise money for the war efforts. Now, some German officers thought this was mad to give Hindenburg so much credit. They said he's basically a clapped out, pipe smoking walrus who's taking the credit for other people's successes. And Ludendorff's deputy later on used to give tours of the Battle of Tannenberg. He was called Max Hoffman and he would say, this is where Field Marshal Hindenburg slept before the battle, this is where he slept after the battle, and this is where he slept during the battle.

Is that fair?

No, actually. So clearly Ludendorff is the real genius. Ludendorff is the master of detail. But Ludendorff is flaky and neurotic. Hindenburg, with his unflappability and he's jovial and stuff and his pipe smoking, he's the perfect foil. So the way they work together and.

This is what makes them such a brilliant crime busting team.

Correct. It's like Poirot and Hastings or Inspector Morse and Lewis or Holmes and Watson.

Yeah, the quiet, unflappable old pro puffing on his pipe and the eager young deputy who knows all about kind of microscopes and blood stains and fingerprints and things.

And the trouble is they've been tarnished by their later conduct in the 1920s and 30s when they. They did behave disgracefully.

Well, Ludendorff, worse than Hindenburg.

Yeah, Ludenborf, worse than Hindenburg. Exactly. However, I think that makes it a tough seller to a streaming giant.

Yes, yes.

Anyway, by the end of the year, Erich von Falkenhayn, who became the German supreme commander, he gives them a completely free hand in the east. And they set up something called Ober Ost. And that basically meant that they were now military dictators, these two guys of the Baltic and of Belarus, in eastern Poland, of the areas that were occupied by the Germans. And some historians say this is a dry run for Nazism because they behave very harshly and repressively and they have total contempt for the Slavs. I don't think that's fair. I don't think it is a dry run for Nazism. I think although they are repressive and ruthless, they're not genocidal. They don't have any program of kind of racial hygiene, as the Nazis would have called it.

They're killing people in the east, but not for Nazi reasons.

Yeah, exactly. They're killing people for military reasons. Now, the Kaiser pretended he was thrilled by all this. He visited Oboz to give them promotions. So Hinderberg became a field marshal and so on. But the Kaiser is absolutely smoldering with jealousy. He's really jealous of Hindenburg, and he absolutely despises Ludendorff. He says he's a dubious character eaten away by personal ambition. What great things is he supposed to have accomplished? I mean, that's rich coming from the Kaiser.

Well, I mean, defeat the Russians.

Yeah, defeat the Russians, Exactly. And, of course, the great irony is that by the end of the war, the Kaiser will become their puppet, because that's the real legacy of. Of the Battle of Tannenberg. It gives power to these two men who think the war can be won on the battlefield, not with a negotiated settlement. So you could argue that in the long run, Tannenberg is a disaster for Germany. It would be better for the Germans not to have won it in a way, because the war would have been over more quickly, perhaps with some form of negotiation, who knows? And in the very long run, Tannenberg has a properly baleful afterlife, because in 1927, the Germans built this huge memorial on the battlefield with eight towers. It was modeled on a cross between a Teutonic castle and the castle of Frederick II in Apulia in Italy. Hindenburg dedicated it personally before thousands and thousands of veterans and he gave this incredibly nationalistic speech in which he said the First World War was a noble crusade. You know, we were on the right side. For the Nazis, Tannenberg was a huge deal in the first year.

Hitler went all the big names when they had torchlit parades. When Hindenburg died in 1934, he was buried there. An even bigger deal, more torchlight parades. There was a shrine, basically a Nazi shrine with these two huge granite soldiers called the Eternal Watch.

Oh, so like the Valley de los Cados. Yeah, the kind of fascist memorial to Franco in Spain.

Or like the towers of the Argonath in the Lord of the Rings. You know, those two figures over the River Anduin.

Anyway, but they're goodies, aren't they?

They are goodies. So it's a terrible comparison.

Yeah.

But as the Germans were retreating from East Prussia in 1945, the entire complex was blown up by the German soldiers. And then every single trace was erased by the Polish Communists afterwards. So that today, nothing of it remains at all.

That is looking far ahead into the future. But for now, we're still in 1914. So in today's episode, just to sum up, the Austrians have really messed things up in Serbia. The Germans have held the Russians off in East Prussia. But, Dominic, is there more drama to come on the Eastern Front? And will it provide us with one final episode in this series on the war in 1914?

It will indeed, Tom, and it's the most dramatic story of all. It is a titanic struggle in Eastern Poland and Ukraine between the Austrians and the Russians. And at its center is the longest siege of the entire conflict, the Stalingrad of the First World War. And this, Tom, will be the beginning of the end for the Habsburg Empire.

I can't wait to hear it, because I'm not going to be contributing anything because I literally have no idea what the Stalingrad of the First World War is. But, Dominic, you know all of this like the back of your hand.

It.

I'm looking forward to hearing it. Rest Is History. Club members can hear it right away. If you would like to hear it as yourself and you're not a member, then you can sign up@therestishistory.com but for now, feeders in.

Hello, everybody, it's Dominic here. Now here is an extract from our thrilling books episodes from J.R.R. tolkien's fantasy classic, the Hobbit. Enjoy. He sees someone light a fire in the wood beyond the water. For a moment, he thought a plundering dragon settling on his quiet hill and kindling all to flames. He shuddered Very quickly, he was playing Mr. Baggins at bag End Under Hill again. Now, the thing is, Tolkien's writing this in the 1930s, and I think that paragraph perfectly captures the sensibility of so many British people in the 1920s and 1930s. In other words, the First World War has happened and they've come home. And for people like Tolkien, the First World War means that they never think of war again. As romantic, as glamorous, as, you know, pain free, all of that stuff, Tolkien just wants to stay at home and tend his garden and not get involved. Now, there is a bit of him that feels pulled towards adventure and excitement, but at the same time, they're worried that if they get involved in matters far from home, dragons will come and, you know, set fire to their homes, their villages, their towns.

And you had a fleeting mention earlier in this podcast of Stanley Baldwin. And Stanley Baldwin, who's very Hobbit like, he likes a waistcoat. He's from this part of the world, from Worcestershire. He is very much a new kind of politician who's unromantic, I suppose, unglamorous. And he famously said, you know, the bomber will always get through, as in be worried about bombing. You know, a new war would be apocalyptic and all of that kind of thing. And I think Bilbo, he absolutely embodies that tension. You know, there's part of him that is pulled towards adventure and pulled towards excitement, but at the same time, he's anxious, he's home loving, he's frightened. He's a kind of perfect representation, I think, of the mentality of so many people of Tolkien's generation at the time that he was writing.

But I also think it's interesting that obviously the Lord of the Rings was written a bit later. So when this is being written, the storm clouds of war are kind of they're on the horizon, but they're not yet gathering above. And Bilbo isn't forced out of his comfortable life in Hobbit Hole because he knows that he has to do something to save his homeland. He doesn't go because he knows there's darkness beyond the gates that he could play a part in quelling and destroying. In the Hobbit, the stakes aren't that high. There isn't an existential threat at the door yet. No, it's just about reclaiming something that was lost. Whereas Frodo in the Lord of the Rings has to go out and save the world. And Lord of the Rings was probably written at a time when, you know, the threat of the Nazis was unavoidable. The wolf was at the door.

Yeah. It's much less existential in the Hobbits. It's actually the love of exploration and adventure and I guess, to some extent, the story of the Hobbit. It's all about Bilbo finding his courage, really. Not physical courage because he never really fights in battles and does all those things. In fact, there's a lovely moment, actually. The critic Tom Shippy mentions it and I thought, gosh, this is so true. The bravest thing that Bilbo ever does is much later on he's on his own and he's in a tunnel and he's going to see Smaug. The dwarves have sent him. And the narrator says this was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous thing that happened afterwards were nothing. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. And I thought the man who's written those words is a man who stood in a trench with his mates waiting for the whistle. They had no idea what was on the other side. But that dark night of the soul, that kind of moment when you know you're about to go into battle but you don't know what's waiting and you have to go.

You have to overcome it, overcome yourself. Yeah, totally. So that, to me, is some of the modernity of the Hobbit that it's written by somebody who doesn't think that war is all exciting and glamorous.

That's a really interesting thing that Tolkien does throughout. He situates you in an imaginary world in order to tell you something about the realities of our world. In other words, adventures are not heroic and exciting. They're often just really uncomfortable. There's a lot of sitting in the rain and there's a lot of not getting dinner. The goodies don't necessarily come out of winning. Better people winning often makes them worse people. Heroes don't instinctively run headfirst into battle. They have a sense of their mortality and fear as much as the rest of the.

They do.

Anyway, Bilbo is nevertheless dragged into the adventure by Gandalf. And Gandalf must be one of the most iconic characters of any fantasy series ever.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, he is the original Dumbledore. Right.

He's a version of Merlin, though, don't you think?

He's less dark, he's got a lot more humor to him, a lot more twinkle. He's more fallible. But, yeah, I would say, in the way that Merlin guides the quest. So Does Gandalf? Yeah, he's like the Dwarves manager.

He is. And he's basically recruited Bilbo very much against his will to be a burglar for them. And actually sometimes people frankly who I think don't know what they're talking about say, oh, I don't think Tolkien's a very good writer because actually they don't like the songs or whatever it might be. Actually, when you look at those first chapters, Tolkien's a great writer because he completely captures the different characters and almost the different kind of temporal registers of the characters through the way they speak. So Bilbo is very modern. Bilbo speaks in a modern middle class way. So we see in Bilbo, as you said, he's a bridge to this world. And if you want to hear the full episode, you just need to sign up to the Rest Is History club@the restishistory.com and not only will you get access to this thrilling new show where you get all the usual benefits, you get the ad free listening, the early access to episodes, the bonus episodes. And if you're not a massive fan of the Hobbit, don't despair because in the next couple of weeks we'll be doing Bram Stoker's chilling Dracula and we'll be doing Margaret Atwood's dystopian fable, the Handmaid's Tale.

Bye bye.