The Rest Is History - 598. The First World War: The Eastern Front Explodes (Part 5)

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

While the Western front was raging following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, what was unfolding on the Eastern Front? Why was it an even bloodier and more brutal arena than the West? As Austria took on its great antagonist - the spark of the entire war - Serbia, why were its early campaigns constantly blighted by disaster? What terrible mistake did Russia, with its behemoth of an army, make? How would its dramatic war with Germany unfold? And, would this be the beginning of the end of the Habsburg Empire? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the outbreak of the First World War on the Eastern Front, and its early clashes. _____ Try Adobe Express for free now at https://www.adobe.com/uk/express/spotlight/designwithexpress or by searching in the app store. Learn more at https://uber.com/onourway Explore the world’s most loved stories in their most beautiful form - only at https://www.foliosociety.com. _____ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is the rest is history.com. This episode is presented by Adobe Express, the quick and easy create-anything app. What does that mean? Well, say you need to make a presentation or a presentation. video or a social media post or a flyer, maybe even a video. To some, certainly to me, that sounds intimidating. But Tom, with Adobe Express's intuitive features like templates, generative AI and real-time collaboration, it has never been easier. Adobe Express. Try it for free.

Search Adobe Express in the App Store. Rava Ruska, a burned-out station building, a sign hanging a skew from the façade, 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. 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

Zomberi 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 Sandbrook. 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,

you talk a little else with the circles of Interested. 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? Discussing the history of Middle Europa. Well, this book, The Boney 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. 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 Tom is 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 Tommy's, 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 wondering 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 flavour 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 of Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28th of June, 1914 by Gavrilo Prince, 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 forever. And to remind

people about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it's a dual monarchy under the 170-year-old Franz Joseph. 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, 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 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 Hastings' 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 Hertzendorf. 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 moustache. 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 take out the pheasuras running out of superlatives.

Massive, gigantic, colossal, stupendous, stupefying. Each time you think you've seen the biggest moustache, you're wrong because there's another one to come. Yeah. So basically, the further east you go in the story, I think the moustaches get bigger. And this guy, Conrad, 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 right about 1907, he met this woman at a dinner party. She was called Gina von Rininghouse. She was 27, and she was the wife of an Austrian businessman. And Conrad immediately said to himself, well, 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. So, you know, I enjoyed meeting at the dinner party. Would you consider leaving your husband and marrying me? And amazingly, 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 Society. 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 Berchttold, 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 Ferdin. 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 will be interested in the second and half of the show. They can investigate that.

That's the season finale, surely. That is exciting news for listeners. What's coming in the second half? You'll be surprised. Well, you won't have you've heard the previous episode, but newcomers will be surprised. Right. So the Austrians send their ultimatum on 23rd of July. The Serbs rejects the key demands.

And on the 28th of July, Franz Joseph 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 Austria going to get a win?

I mean, this is the weird thing. The Austrians haven't really given any thought whether they 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 an 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 or Croat, 8 speak Polish, 8 are Ukrainians, 7 in Romania, 4 are Slovak's and 2 are Syvenians. And I'm sure there's also a Cateria that 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 ragbag, kind of, it's a tower of Babel, Tom. It's a travelling 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 incredibly slow decision-makers. And as I remember, they also have a massively complicated railway system. 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 organise 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. They have this river warship called the Bodrog. Great name. Which begins firing shells across the Danube into the centre 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 sithes. Yeah, and like it's Thomas Hardy novel. They're kind of sithing 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 July. 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'd 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 aqua, heavy, balkan cigarettes. The kind of you love when you're hanging out in the cafes of Bucharest. 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 spa called Bad Glykenberg, 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 Joseph hears about this, he says, oh, this is very poor form. You can't arrest this guy.

Let him go home. It's chivalrous. Yeah. So do you know what they do? 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 Valera and then let him go. Then he locked him up in Lincoln jail. Yeah, but later on, they arrested him by accident and let him go when the truth was going on,

all the truce negotiations. Oh, well, that's fair enough, if it's a truth. Yet another opportunity to praise our beloved country, Tom. Wonderful. Well done. You handled that beautifully. Anyway, putting it takes some 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. So the historian, Nick Lloyd, who's just written a brilliant book on the Eastern Front. He quotes one guy. 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, like, 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 degenerating to absolute sort of bulken stereotype 101, but, yeah. The Michael Palin of. Yeah, exactly. The Serbs are a proud, rugged people. Basically, you're just fine. 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 post-Eugoslav wars, music was a huge part of Serbian nationalism, something called Turbofolk, 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 Oscar Pottyurek. He is the man who had invited Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo, being 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 had actually been a brilliant trip otherwise. It's gone really well. Now, Poitioic 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's book, Catastrophe. Pottyorik 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, Pottyurek 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 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 Mattie and Malasich. 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 not 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 our 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 de Ruhrers of sort of partisans. But this is on a different level because the service, they love a. I mean, the Serbs love a partisan. And so from the very beginning, they waged this partisan campaign. And it's 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. 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 Liborius, 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 civilian, 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 gentlemen'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. 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. Agent hatreds, exactly.

That's exactly what happens. And having said, oh, what the Serbs sowed there now reaping, even so, there are some really, really grim stories. So here's a good example. It's a told by the Austrians themselves. So this is from a young Hungarian officer called Alexander Palavaccini. 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, Palavacchina 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, 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 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 play. 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 Vallevo. And in the way, there is this kind of heavily forested ridge called Mount Sir. And they reached the top on the late afternoon in 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 problem. that's the point that 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 Pottyurek has spent the whole time in Sarajevo, 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 the 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. 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. The Pottyurek is well connected at court. He gets his friends to lobby the Emperor Franz Joseph. 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. 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. Austrians are thrown back. Oh, no. It will not quite as chaotic 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 running out of artillery. They can't really rest their troops because they're running out to mem. 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 Colobara, which is deep inside central Serbia. So at this point, the Austrian, the

Austrians, foolishly, I think, Tom, decide to celebrate victory. They have premature victory celebrations. The emperor sends potty or echo message of congratulations. Lots of towns name him an honorary citizen. A street in Sarajevo is renamed in his honour. 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 a beard and emphysema, Radimir Putnik. His emphysema's got 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, but their fancy uniforms are in rags. They're very miserable, and 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.

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 Sononica, Thessaloniki. They're the wrong size for the Serbian gun, 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. And what's that, Dominic? A secret weapon is a man. It's Petar Karajorjevich, 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, I'm guessing he's very melancholy, 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 shall stay to the end. And a French reporter who is 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 defence is vastly greater than the ability of attacking forces to break through those defences, 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, so Nick Lloyd or Alexander Watson or whoever in their books, they unanimously agree that the Austrian performance is absolutely happening. Recival. 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, but 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 chutes 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, pottyurek is right into 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 I think it's maybe Max Asteen's 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 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. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most? We all need that sometimes, and Uber knows it.

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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 guilt 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. Tolkien or Frank Herbert's Dune and their team of editors and designers and artisans.

They craft books that are so beautiful. They're like works of art in their own right. So each one is carefully designed with slipcases, award-winning illustrations, and covers that honor the stories inside. It doesn't just protect them. So if like me and like Tom, you think that a book should look as good as it reads, then the Folio Society very much speaks your language. Explore the world's most loved stories in the most beautiful form, only at foliosociety.com. That is foliosociety.com.

Hello everybody, it's Dominic here. Now, I'm absolutely delighted to announce that, as of now, every Friday for the next few weeks, I'll be joined by our Restis History producer and resident book lover Tabby Siret, and we'll be discussing a different book. And members of the Restis 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 Graham 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. 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 Hobbit, we'll be doing something very different. We're doing Margaret Atwood's book, The Hammaid'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 at the rest ishistory.com. You'll 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 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 that they couldn't give ground. And so they've got involved in a war, a war, which 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 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 kind of later. But at first he appoints his uncle, Grand Duke Nicolai, 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 bozoi hounds. What's a bozoi hound? That's his kind of hound, very aggressive. That's clear that up, isn't it? Good. So he would take these

Borsoy 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 I second 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's 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 their 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's kind of got an odd kind of, 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, 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 Missouri 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 Renenkamp. 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 musk rat. He's great. I think he's great. He's not a very good general, but he's got a... to go on the moustache front. 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 Sampsonov. 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. Sampsonov 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 Sampsonoff will follow further south from Wilson. 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 kafftans and kind of there's boots that go up at the end. So for fans of exotic orientalism, 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 cross 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 these pressures 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 that on the Eastern Front?

Yeah. You wouldn't have fared well. It's rare that you hear people say they wish that their ancestors happening on the Eastern Front in either world war. Anyway, at first the Russians advance and they think, oh, this is a good. 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 Pritvitz. 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 Gunbun, a village, the Germans end up

retreating in confusion and Pritvitz says, oh, we're doomed. We're never going to beat the Russians. The Russians, meanwhile, are cock a hoop. So Renencamp'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. So a stink of cheese. Now, at this point, the Russians make some terrible mistakes. First of all, Renen Camp, 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, Sampsov is going around the lakes to the south. He has a very tense relationship with Renan Kampf, 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 Pritvitz, he thinks that. He thinks that. He rang Malka 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. It 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, Pritvitz said, you know, we're doomed, let's all withdraw. This is a terrible disaster. The very next afternoon of a Volcker

sent a message to Pritvitz's headquarters, which pleasingly was at Marionburg, 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. Pritvitz kind of opens the message. And the message basically says, you're fired. Because in his place, Mulk 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 Hindenborg. Right, yes, who will play a key role in the story of the Nazis. So Hindenburg is of

classic Juncker stock. That means he's part of the kind of Prussian land-owning classes. He'd fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He then taught at the War Academy and he had 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 Malka 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, I'm ready. And then at four o'clock in the morning, he went down to Hanover station. There was a special train waiting for him, 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, He's very meticulous. He takes his work seriously, but he's a bit like General Jophe 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, Mulker only wants Hindenberg as a figurehead. There's a claim that actually Hindenberg 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 Malka really wants.

And this is a younger man, Eric 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 younger. 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 parvenu. The irony, of course, the Kaiser thinks that he's the kind of. a man who would wear the wrong shoes. 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. 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 likely 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 at the war's first weeks. He captured Lijge. The Kaiser, just before he got on the train, actually gave him the highest award for Gallantry. Paul Omerit, the Blue Max, as it's called. And 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, Sampsonoff 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. 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, basically, it would be completely fair. So actually, Hindenberg and Ludendorf have come up with a plan on the train. They'll basically send some cavalry north. So Renen Kampf thinks they're coming north and he won't keep coming. I mean, well, they'll use the trains to move all of their rest of their men. against Sampsonoff in the south.

Because the Germans are doing everything that the Austrians don't. The German high command have removed an incompetent commander, replaced them 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 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 Hindenberg. 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 tore the front, Hindenburg and Ludendorf.

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 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 Tannenberg, they get brilliant news. The Germans have intercepted two Russian radio messages. Russian communications are terrible. They're not properly disguising their messages.

Renencamp and Sampsonoff are now so far apart that they cannot support each other. And Hindenberg says, well, this is our chance. We'll go for Sampsonoff. We won't just beat him. We'll annihilate him. And when he gets back home, Hindenberg is very General Jof-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 sleep, as we will discover. So on the 25th of August, it begins. Sampsonoff 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 Marienburg, Ludendorf, as always, despite this glacial reputation,

he's a nervous wreck. So he's beside himself with nerves. And actually at one point, Hindenberg has to take him out of a meeting, take him for a walk to calm him down. Yeah, because Hindenberg's just puffing on his pipe. Yeah. His moustaches drooping.

He's mellow. Exactly. Ludendorff is always sort of sweating and getting very overexcited. Anyway, everything is actually going according to plan. Sampsonoff 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. Sampsonov 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. Sampsonov'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. The forests are strewn with bodies. For the next two days, they try 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 Schleifen 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 Ludendorf, we haven't actually mentioned yet our plan to do an investigative police drama.

Yeah. 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 hall.

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 Corland Peninsula and Western Latvia and starve them all to death. And actually, even Hindenburg and Lundor so, I think that's a bit much. Samsonoff, 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, like it's 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. Nicola the second, 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 shot himself. Oh God, so 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. Hinnenberg 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.

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. 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 Popovin. 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 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. 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, 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 has ever heard of. the Battle of the Vistula, the Battle of Wudge. The Battle of what? Woodch. It's an industrial town in sort of south-central Poland.

No, I've literally never heard of that. It's spelled LODZ. You've seen that word. Lodz. Yeah, you've seen that written down. I think Lodz is how you pronounce it, Don't know. I think not, Tom. Wudge.

This is the way the Eastern Front works. Now, putting that on one side, Hindenberg and Lusendor for the huge winners from this. Hindenberg 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'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 effort. 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. It was called Max Hoffman. And he would say, this is where Phil Marshall and Hinderberg 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. Hindenberg, with his unflappability and he's 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 Poirotin-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 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, Ludendorf, worse than Hindenburg. Yeah, Ludendorf, worse than Hinderberg. Exactly. However, I think that makes it a tough sell to a streaming giant.

Yes, yes. Anyway, by the end of the year, Eric von Falkenheim, who became the German Supreme Commander, He gives them a completely free hand in the East. And 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.

Yeah, exactly. They're killing people for military reasons. Now, the Kaiser pretended he was thrilled by all this. He visited Obos to give them promotions. So Hinderberg became a field martian and so on. But the Kaiser is absolutely smoldering with jealousy. He's really jealous of Vindenberg, and he absolutely despises Lutendorf. he says he's a dubious character eaten away by personal ambition.

What great things has 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 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. They 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 properly bailful afterlife. Because in 1927, the Germans built this huge memorial

on the battlefield with eight towers, was modelled on a cross-Feternia-tutonic castle and the castle of Frederick II in Apulia in Italy. Hindenburg dedicated it personally before thousands. thousands and thousands of veterans. And he gave this incredibly nationalistic speech in which he said, the First World War was the 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 went. They had torchlit parades. When Hindenburg died in 1934, he was buried there. An even bigger deal,

more torchlit parades. There was a shrine, basically a Nazi shrine with these two huge granite soldiers called the Eternal Watch. Oh, so like the Valia de los Caedos. 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, said 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 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 Starlingrad 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. Restis 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 the rest of history.com. But for now, Fida Zane. Afida Zane. Hello, everybody. It's Dominic here. Now, as a treat for listeners, here is an extract. We promised you earlier on. From our thrilling books episodes, from our first episode. J.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic, The Hobbit. Enjoy. For a moment, he thought of plundering dragons, settling on his

quiet hill and kindling all to flames. And very quickly, he was playing Mr. Baggins, a bag end underhill 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. Tolkien just wants to stay at home and tend his garden and not get involved. Now, there was 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 early then 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, un-glamorous. And he famously said, you know, the bomber will always get through, as in be worried about bombing, you know, 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 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, he's in a tunnel, and he's going to see

Smauk. The dwarves have sent him. The dwarfs are so mean to Bilbo throughout. I was so struck by that. Yeah. And the Raider 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. 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. Yeah. 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 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 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 and he has coffee and he has pantries and all of this and he's likened at one point, his streak is likened to the whistle of a train coming through a tunnel. So we see in Bilbo, as you said, he's a bridge to this world. He's a modern figure. like us. And if you want to hear the full episode, you just need to sign up to the Restis History Club

at the Restis 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. Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci from the racist politics, US. If you're looking for something to play next, Caddy Kay and I just launched a new mini-series about Ronald Reagan. We're digging into the real Reagan story, the rise, the drama, how his world has been turned upside down in the age of Trump.

We trace his rise from Hollywood to the White House, from his role in ending the Cold War to reviving the economy. And we also confront those scandals, Iran-Contra, his assassination attempt, and his failure around the AIDS epidemic. Just search the rest of politics, US, wherever you get your podcast. Here's a clip from the series. Ronald Reagan knew how to go big and go bold. He truly was the great communicator. Together, we're going to do what has to be done.

He regrounded the GOP and conservative principles. Free markets, small government, and an unshakable faith in American exceptionalism. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. Ronald Reagan shook the country. People keep looking to government for the answer, and government's the problem. President Reagan was shot in the chest by a gunman outside the Washington Hotel. We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages. Uncomfortable as it is to admit, the 40th president inadvertently prepared the ground for the 45th.

It's not Reagan's party anymore. Donald Trump destroyed Ronald Reagan. I thought he was great, his style, his attitude, but not great, entree. Will we be the party of conservatism? Or will we follow the siren song of populism? Only one man has the proven experience we need. Together, we'll make America great again. Thank you very much.

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