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Life No. 2. On the morning of Aug. 22, 1914 General Paul von Hindenburg, retired, awoke in his house at Hanover in a sad mood. The War had come too late for him. "I wondered whether my Emperor and King would require my services," he wrote in his memoirs. "No hint whatever of the kind had reached me during the last twelve months." Suddenly came a dispatch informing him that His Majesty had given him command of the Eastern Army. He had only time to get together the most necessary articles of clothing and have his old uniform put in condition for service.
At 3 o'clock next morning, a special train roared into Hanover, equipped as a General Staff Headquarters and from it alighted a grim, middle-aged officer who stepped briskly across the platform to Old Paul.
"You are General von Hindenburg?"
"Yes."
"I have been appointed your Chief of Staff. My name is Ludendorff. . . . Erich Ludendorff."
The train roared away to the East Prussia in which Hindenburg was born and in which last week he died. It was being ravaged and invaded by the Tsarist armies of Generals Samsonov and Rennekampf. The Russians outnumbered the German defenders under General von Prittwitz nearly two to one. They had scared him so badly that he had telephoned to the German Supreme Command a panicky proposal for withdrawal which cost him his post.
On General von Prittwitz' staff was a brilliant Lieut.-Colonel named Max Hoffman. When the new commander arrived from Hanover, Col. Hoffman explained to Hindenburg and Ludendorff a supremely bold plan of counterattack which they proceeded to make their own. In Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War Col. Hoffman had seen the appalling lengths to which Tsarist inefficiency could go. He was able to believe and convince Ludendorff that the Russian wireless which kept flashing to St. Petersburg the intended moves of Generals Samsonov and Rennekampf "in clear" was not attempting to deceive the enemy, as other German generals thought, but was blunderingly giving away the whole Russian show.