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peasants who make up the largest part of East Prussia's population. By thousands they fled from their villages and hamlets, carrying on their slow oxcarts or on their shoulders whatever they had gathered as their most precious possessions in their first hours of fear and terror. To them the word "Cossack" still called up pictures of the wild hordes that had overrun their country during the Seven Years' War, and later again in the Napoleonic wars. The large, strongly fortified cities of Koenigsberg and Danzig seemed to hold out the only hope for life and security, and toward these they flocked in ever-increasing masses. Even Berlin itself had brought home to it some of the more refined cruelties of war by the arrival of East Prussian refugees. We have already seen that at the outbreak of the war only five active German corps were left on the eastern front. Two, the First and the Twentieth, had, so far, had to bear the brunt of the Russian advance; one other, the Sixth, had been sent from Breslau to detract, as much as possible, the Russian onslaught against the Austrian forces in Galicia; and the other two, the Fifth and Seventeenth, stationed in Danzig and Posen, were too far back to be immediately available. CHAPTER LXXV BATTLE OF TANNENBERG AND RUSSIAN RETREAT When on August 22, 1914, the full strength of the Russian attack became evident, the German General Staff decided on heroic measures. An immediate increase of the German forces to the point where they would match the Russian seemed out of the question, and the solution of the problem, therefore, clearly lay in the ability of the general staff to find a general who could, with the forces on hand, meet the requirements of the situation--free East Prussia of the invader. Fortunately for Germany, its hour of need on the eastern front brought forth this man. There had been living for a number of years in the west German city of Hanover a general who had been retired in 1911 as commander of an army corps. His name was Paul von Hindenburg. He was at that time in his sixty-seventh year, but having been an army officer since his youth, he was "hard as nails," and from a military point of view still in the prime of his years as a leader. It was well known in military circles that Von Hindenburg had acquired the most thorough knowledge of the difficult lake district south of Koenigsberg. He had devoted his time and energies for years to a most exhausti
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