Late that night - it was August 22 - an extra train came through with his chief of staff and bore him to the east. I had time only to get together the most necessary articles of clothing and have my old uniform put in condition for service.’ Then suddenly came a dispatch informing me that His Majesty had given me the command of the Eastern Army. The uncertainty of waiting seemed endless, and after a few weeks I had given up all hope of being reinstated in the army. ![]() Of course, I had tendered my services immediately after the war broke out but since then I had heard nothing. But the great masses of the people, like that Hamburg editor, were asking, Who is Hindenburg? The writer’s own experience illustrates the suddenness with which the name broke upon the German people: although he had lived for more than twenty years in Germany and had been a diligent reader of the newspapers during all that time, he was not able to recall, when he read the war bulletin of August 29, that he had ever heard of Hindenburg.Īnd how did ‘this man from Hanover’ come to be in command? He himself gives this answer: 'A few weeks ago I was living on my pension at Hanover. He was known very favorably indeed in the higher army circles, and civilians in towns where he had held appointments remembered him as an agreeable gentleman with a high reputation for military capacity. The incident is typical, for it was no more true of Byron himself than of Hindenburg that he awoke one morning and found himself famous. Then he addresses his visitor: ‘Tell me, how does this man from Hanover come to be in command of the Eastern Army? What has happened? Hangs his silk hat on a peg, seizes the baton of a commanding general, and beats the Russians in a trice.-Now tell me, to whom shall I telegraph to find out something about this man?’ The editor tousles his hair upon reading this, reaches for the army list to see who Hindenburg is, finds that he has been a commanding general, but is now retired and living at Hanover. ![]() ‘Our troops in Prussia under the command of Colonel-General von Hindenburg have defeated, after three days’ fighting in the region of Gilgenburg and Ortelsburg, the Russian Narew Army, consisting of five army corps and three cavalry divisions, and are now pursuing it across the frontier.’ The day’s bulletin of the General Staff had just arrived, with the following passage:. ON the night of August 29, 1914, a German writer strolled into the office of a newspaper of Hamburg to learn the news from the front.
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