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

26:13I think it was the fault of our Czech troops, actually. They're very disloyal. the 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 Potjorek 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 the 14th of September, he has a second go.

26:44Once 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.

27:17And the Serbs have to abandon Belgrade. And they take up a new defensive line on a river called the Kolobara, 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 Potiorac 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. 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.

27:52Because that guy who they'd released, the bloke with the beard, an emphysema, Radomir Putnik, his emphysema has gotten far worse under the pressure wall, 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.

28:26And actually, the weather has now changed. 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 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.

29:01He's got 400 guns and he has a secret weapon. And what's that, Dominic? The secret weapon is a man. It's Petar Karadzorjevic 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 moustache 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.

29:44And 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 the 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 counter attack 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?

30:30I 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 the 3rd of 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.

31:03The 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 centre of Belgrade, being cheered as liberators, Potjorek is writing to Vienna saying, I'd love to have another go.

31:37Oh 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 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.

32:12Well, 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?

33:10So yet more massive Teutonic moustache 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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34:02This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. Now, Thomas, you know, in the Middle Ages, it could take you years if you're a monk to create a manuscript. You'd have to copy it out word by word. And then after all that, the margins would be ready and you'd put all kind of decorative elements and all kinds of gilt and stuff in the margins and it would look fantastic. So it might take often years to finish, but the finished product would then last for centuries. And that is pretty much what the Folio Society does today, only, of course, with slightly less parchment and fewer quills. Yes, the Folio Society takes some of the greatest works ever written, things like George Orwell's 1984 or the quests in J.R.R.

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35:53them, 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 reflected Tolkien's experiences in the First World War, how it reflects the sensibility of the 1920s and 1930s, how Toggin drew on all kinds of different influences from the imperial fiction of the Victorian era to the Norse epics that he loved so much.

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36:56Hello, 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 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.

37:29And 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, the 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 with another three million in reserve. This is what had always terrified the Germans and the Austrians.

37:57There 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 kind of 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 his kind of hound. Very aggressive.

38:29Okay. That's clear enough, hasn't it? Good. So he would take these borzoi hounds 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?

39:04Unexpected 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 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 sort of dreary romance to it, I think.

39:41So 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, as so often, the French are the real villains in all this. The 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 Missourian Lakes, this kind of chain of little lakes.

40:14And 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 Renenkampff. Kampf. 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 moustache 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.

40:52he's he's great i think he's great he's not a very good general but he's 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 uh 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 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 nice detail with these guys.

41:29Samsonov has horrendous asthma. He has really, really bad asthma. What is it with generals and terrible breathing? So he can't really breathe either. Anyway. Shouldn't laugh. On the 17th of August, the Russians set off. Renan Kampf goes first and Samsonov will follow further south from Warsaw. they're a colourful 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 there's 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.

42:23So 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 Nikolai 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 East Brussia is not very densely populated.

43:02They 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, oh, these people are clearly partisans. One in 20 of the people killed by the Russians was riding a bike.

43:34Very glad that great-uncle Charlie was on the Eastern Front. Yeah. He wouldn't have fared well. It's rare that you hear people say they wish that their ancestors had been on the Eastern Front in either world war. Anyway, at first the Russians advanced and they think, oh this is going brilliantly. East Prussia has this army guarding it called the Eighth Army, German. They're hugely outnumbered. They have an elderly commander called General von Pritzvitz. Does he have breathing problems and a large moustache? I think he has commanding problems actually rather than breathing problems. Because when his men first meet the Russians at a place called Gunbinun, a village, the Germans end up retreating in confusion and Pritzvitz says, oh we're doomed.

44:10We're never going to beat the Russians. The Russians meanwhile are cock-a-hoop. So Renenkamp'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 cavalryman is used to many odors, but never did we smell as we did then. So they stink of cheese. Now at this point, the Russians make some terrible mistakes.

44:43First of all, Renenkamp, he's the guy who's gone north with the First 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 Renenkamp. 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 the Germans are finished. And indeed, the German commander, Pritwitz. He thinks that. He thinks that. He rang Moltke and on the 21st of August, he said, my men are as good as done.

45:15But 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, Pritwitz said, you know, we're doomed. Let's all withdraw. This is a terrible disaster. The very next afternoon, von Moltke sent a message to Pritwitz's headquarters, which pleasingly was at Marienburg, beside the vast fortress of the Teutonic Knights. So today that's Malbork in Poland.

45:47I'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. Pritwitz 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 of classic Junker stock. That means he's part of the kind of Prussian landowning classes.

46:24He'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 Malker sends him this telegram. It reached Hanover in 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, I'm ready.

46:56And then at four o 'clock in the morning, he went down to Hanover Station. There was a special train waiting for him on a darkened platform. 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 a bit like General Joffre in France. He's completely unflappable. He will never panic. He's very good-humoured. His men like him, and he will never, never collapse in a kind of hissy fit. But actually, Mulca only wants Hindenburg as a figurehead.

47:28There'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, Erik Ludendorff, 49 years old, also a key figure, conquering Liège. Who we met earlier, didn't we, in the series? Yes, exactly. He is not a Junker. He's not from the landowning classes. is he was 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?

48:07Because he sees him as a parvenu. 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 the 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 a serious person.

48:32His 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. He captured Liège. The Kaiser, just before he got on the train, actually gave him the highest award for gallantry, Poulo Merit, the Blue Max, as it's called.

49:11And Molka 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 have 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.

49:44No, never on this show. But I'm going to. Yeah. Would it be fair to say that it is a clash between Prussian efficiency and Russian chaos? Yes, it would 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 Renenkamp thinks they're coming north and he won't keep coming. Meanwhile, they'll use the trains to move all of the rest of their men against Samsonov 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.

50:17They're using their trains to their best ability. They have good intelligence. Yeah. So it's looking good for them. Completely. So on the 23rd of August, they get to the Marienburg, the castle of the Teutonic Knights. Hindenburg goes for a walk around the castle. And actually, 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.

50:50There's columns of black smoke rising over villages in the distance, all of this. They go past this village called Tannenburg. And both generals know their 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 Tannenburg, they get brilliant news. The Germans have intercepted two Russian radio messages. Russian communications are terrible. They're not properly disguising their messages. Renenkamp and Samsonov are now so far apart that they cannot support each other. And Hindenburg says, well, this is our chance.

51:23We'll go for Samsonov. We won't just beat him. We'll annihilate him. And when he gets back home, Hindenburg is very General Joffre-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.

51:55He says, go deeper, go deeper, keep going. Now, back at Marienburg, 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 moustache 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.

52:30He still doesn't realise, even as the Germans are attacking him on his flanks, what he's doing. And then on the 28th of August, so about 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.

53:04Right. And so what happens now is a total bloodbath. Thousands upon thousands of the Russians are killed. The 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 they're just sitting in the woods with the hands in the air, hands on 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.

53:41But 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. 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.

54:18The 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 Corland Peninsula in Western Latvia and starve them all to death? And actually even Hindenburg and Lindor were saying, I think that's a bit much. Samsonov, so 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. It's basically like sort of Duke of Edinburgh award thing that's gone horribly wrong.

54:50Gone horribly wrong, yeah. Samsonov can't breathe. He's very depressed. He says to his bodyguards, you know, the emperor trusted me, Nicholas II. and 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 and he's shot himself. Oh God, so like Varys 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?

55:25Because 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 Renenkamp in the north, his first army. They try a similar trick, actually, the same trap. This time, Renenkamp is expecting it. He is able to withdraw. And so the Russians will 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.

56:01As 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 Popovon. There was a schoolteacher, 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 prefiguring there of the events of the Second World War and its aftermath. Exactly. Well, here's a real prefiguring. 10 ,000 Germans in total were rounded up and deported east in cattle trucks in horrendous conditions when the Russians left East Prussia.

56:40And 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 most of us, 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.

57:21The Battle of the Vistula, the Battle of Łódź. The Battle of what? Łódź. 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, Tom. I think not, Tom. Łódź. This is the way the Eastern Front works. Now, putting that on one side, Hindenburg and Ludendorff 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.

57:57This 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'd 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 and 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.

58:35He 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 his jovial and stuff and his pipe smoking, he's the perfect foil. So it's 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 Mawes and Lewis or Holmes and Watson.

59:11Yeah. The quiet, unflappable old pro puffing on his pipe and the eager young deputy who knows all about kind of microscopes and bloodstains and fingerprints and things. And the trouble is, of course, they've been tarnished by their later conduct in the 1920s and 30s when they did behave disgracefully. Well, Ludendorff worse than Hindenburg. Yeah. Ludendorff worse than Hindenburg. Exactly. However, I think that makes it a tough sell 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.

59:47And they set up something called Oberost. And that basically meant that they were now military dictators, these two guys, of the Baltic and of Belarus and 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.

1:00:23Yeah, exactly. They're killing people for military reasons. Now, the Kaiser pretended he was thrilled by all this. He visited Oberost to give them promotions, so Hinderberg became a field marshal and so on. But the Kaiser is absolutely smouldering with jealousy. He's really jealous of Vindenburg, 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.

1:00:57Because that's the real legacy 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 their war would have been over more quickly perhaps with some form of negotiation who knows and in the very long run tannenberg has a property bail for afterlife because in 1927 the germans built this huge memorial on the battlefield with eight towers, was modelled on a cross between a Teutonic castle and the castle of Frederick II in Apulia in Italy.

1:01:37Hindenburg 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. We were on the right side. For the Nazis, Tannenberg was a huge deal. In the first year, Hitler went, all the big names went, they had torch-lit parades. When Hindenburg died in 1934, he was buried there. An even bigger deal, more torch-lit parades. There was a shrine, basically a Nazi shrine with these two huge granite soldiers called the Eternal Watch. Oh, so like the Valley of Los Cados. Yeah. The kind of fascist memorial to Franco in Spain.

1:02:15Or like the Towers of the Argonath in the Lord of the Rings. You know, those two figures over the river Anduin. But they're goodies, aren't they? They are goodies, so it's a terrible comparison. 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 tommen it's the most dramatic story of all it is a titanic struggle in eastern poland and ukraine between the Austrians and the Russians.

1:03:15And at its centre 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 to 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. I'm looking forward to hearing it. Restless History Club members can hear it right away. If you would like to hear it yourself and you're not a member, then you can sign up at therestishistory.com. But for now, Auf Wiedersehen.

1:03:50Auf Wiedersehen.

1:03:58Hello, 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.

1:04:11he sees someone light a fire in the wood beyond the water for a moment he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet hill and kindling it all to flames he shuddered very quickly he was playing mr baggins a 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 pain-free, all of that stuff.

1:04:50Tolkien 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 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.

1:05:27And he famously says, 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.

1:06:02So 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. 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.

1:06:34And 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 Hobbit. 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 Shippey 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.

1:07:01He'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 was 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 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 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.

1:07:57There'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 us. 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 humour to him, a lot more twinkle.

1:08:28He's more fallible. But yeah, I would say in the way that Merlin guides the quest, so does Gandalf. 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.

1:08:59So 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.

1:09:13And if you want to hear the full episode, you just need to sign up to the Rest is History club at the rest is history.com. And not only will you get access to this thrilling new show, but 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.