The British and the Japanese watched in amazement as the Wehrmacht occupied Qingdao, which they had failed to capture with great effort, but they had no way to criticize the Chinese. First, China is to regain its territory. Second, the German military presence in the Far East had indeed come to an end, and even the German prisoners of war were handed over to the British army to be escorted to prisoner of war camps in India.

Britain's goal of uprooting the German Far East forces has been achieved, although it is not good-looking, but at this moment Europe has been slaughtered with blood, and there is still a problem of face that can be taken care of. Japan is the most disgraced, trying to spend military spending, losing troops and losing generals, but gaining nothing. Lin Quanzhu, a veteran diplomat who had made a bet with the Chinese side, had to take the blame and resign, and after returning to China, he was almost punished by the generally excited junior officers, and Lin Quanzhu had to move abroad and live in the United States temporarily, and a generation of foreign affairs elites stayed away from the political arena.

Britain and Japan all know that the current China is not easy to get along with, as for the Qingdao place, since the other party swallowed it, it is better to admit it generously, and it is okay to care about it after the war, in any case, China cannot be forced to the side of Germany and Austria at this time, otherwise Russia may have to take into account the Far East, and Britain and France's India, Burma, and Annam are within the scope of China's army attack, and even Japan has to consider the safety of its Korean colony and Kwantung Prefecture, so the Qingdao issue is so vague under the acquiescence of several powers, The resumption of China's sovereignty over Tsingtao became a tacit fact, and even the Germans were grateful that China had not burned the jade with that terrible incendiary shells, and Kempf could not forget the scene when the South Fort flew into the sky, and if there were enough incendiary shells, even Constantinople would have been burned to death.

At the same time, the Battle of Tennanberg (also known as the Battle of Tannenberg, the Battle of Tannenberg) was fought on the other side of the globe, between August 17 and September 2, 1914. The Battle of Tennanberg was the first battle on the Eastern Front.

The Germans had their own Schlieffen plan, while the Austrians had two plans. One plan was to envisage a war with Serbia only, with three of the six Austrian armies to attack Serbia and the remaining three armies to Galicia to hold off the Russians. The other plan was to fight Russia and Serbia, in which case only two armies would be sent to attack Serbia and four armies would be stationed on the Galician front, and in any case the Habsburg IQ would be less than six plus or minus.

East Prussia was defended by a fortress strip that was intended to prevent the Russian army from advancing across the Polish border. Strong strongholds were built along the upper reaches of the Vistula River and around the provincial capital Königsberg. Across the eastern border is the 50-mile-wide Masurian Lake, which became a natural obstacle to the severe restriction of the Russian invasion. Austria took advantage of the Carpathian Mountains and set up fortifications from Krakow through Lemberg (now Lviv) to the Romanian border. Between Russia and its Polish province, and around the center of Pinsk, is the Pripyat Marsh, with 38,000 square miles of marshland, overgrowth, and several dirt roads.

General Ivan 61 Gilinsky, who served as chief of staff of Russia until 1913 and would command the troops participating in the war, assured France that two weeks after mobilization, 800,000 Russian troops would be ready for battle. By mid-August, more than 650,000 people were ready, a performance that shocked and worried the Germans. The brilliant victory of Germany on the Western Front in the early days caused the French to plead with Russia to strike at the enemy.

Just two days after the outbreak of the war, the French emissary Maurice 61 Paleologe urged the Russians to launch an offensive in East Prussia. The Tsar's uncle, the commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, was a dedicated Francophile, and he assured the ambassador that "I can not even wait for all my armies to be assembled." As soon as I feel strong enough, I attack. The zealous Russians, however, neglected to prepare adequate food, supplies, or transport for their troops, or rather, they always felt that the grey animals could make do with a little grass.

Gilinsky's forces consisted of thirty infantry divisions and eight cavalry divisions, divided into two armies, under the command of General Alexander 61st Samsonov and Pavel General 61st Rennankampf. Rennankampf commanded Army Group 1 (Vilna) and Samsonov commanded Army Group 2 (Warsaw), both named after their city bases.

In order to invade East Prussia, both armies had to follow a fixed route on both sides of the Masurian Lake area, with Rennaikampf advancing along the northern border and crossing the border on 17 August, and Samsonov scheduled to follow two days later, passing through the southern periphery. The Germans were not idle, they used the telecommunications equipment imported from the Chinese standard industry to start listening to the radio signals of the Russian army, and the result surprised them, not that the Russians' ciphers were too sophisticated, but, but that these guys did not use the cipher at all, and it was completely civilian standard code to send telegrams, did the Russians not tell them about the secrecy of radio communication when they bought radio transceiver equipment? In fact, the telegraph equipment of the Russians was provided by the British, and the British have always played a role in keeping one hand in international trade, and they did not mention the cipher machine to the Russians at all, so the Russians used high technology stupidly, completely unaware that the battle plan in the hands of the Germans was more complete and timely than that in the hands of their commander-in-chief, and even the grammatical errors were corrected by the careful and rigorous German staff officers.

Reports that the Russians were transmitting non-coded telecommunications were deeply suspicious of high-ranking German officers. Only Hoffman believed that this was not a strategy - he had seen enough of the sloppiness of the Russians in Manchuria. The documents found on the body of a deceased Gilinsky staff officer, the Russian officer, revealed a designed route and deployment consistent with the intercepted telecommunications. The Russian field army did not have a cipher or a cipher man. It seems that the Russian High Command did not think of the need to train operators for such tasks.

Hours later, Prittwitz returned, listened to and approved Hoffman's plan; The order to retreat behind the Vistula River has been forgotten. The next day, Samsonov's army stopped advancing. Two days later, while Prittwitz was busy adding the final details to his campaign against Samsonov, news from the German High Command in Koblem struck the Eighth Army. A telegram from Moltke informed Prittwitz that he and Waldzer had been replaced by the new commander-in-chief, General Paul 61 von 61 Hindenburg, and the new chief of staff, General Erich 61 Ludendorff. Half an hour later, a second telegram informed the numb Prittwitz and Waldzer of their retirement, as if an afterthought.

The secret was quickly solved. After leaving his men on 20 August, Prittwitz called Mackensen to say that he wanted to retreat behind the Vistula River, and then called Moltke again to report his decision. After he returned to the command, he forgot to tell his staff officer that he had called. In this way, not a single person called Moltke about Prittwitz's decision to attack Samsonov. Moltke had long wanted to get rid of Prittwitz, a courtly favorite who was so famous for his good habits of food than his military prowess that he earned the nickname "The Fat Fellow." Prittwitz's high position was the Kaiser's reward for this storyteller and obscure gossip.

On 24 August, General Friedrich 61 von 61 Scholz's Twentieth Army was defeated in a skirmish with Samsonov's forces, and then one division retreated to a more fortified defensive position. Mistaking this movement for a full-front retreat of the Eighth Army, Samsonov ordered a desperate pursuit, and his non-coded telegram was intercepted by the German signalmen. In fact, Scholz did not face a direct threat, since Samsonov's troops were too tired to pursue. According to intercepted radios, one corps had trekked more than 150 miles over 12 days through ankle-deep dirt "roads."

Realizing that this was a decisive blow, Mackensen and Scholz retreated to the south, leaving only a symbolic cavalry division to face the twenty-four infantry divisions of Rennaikampf. Within two days, large numbers of German troops were transported by efficient rail to the southwest, more than 100 miles away, and more than nine divisions regrouped on a seventy-mile arc facing southeast. Samsonov marched towards the deliberately weakened center and continued to pursue the enemy forces in the "retreat". By the time Samsonov marched into the weak, retreating center, the Germans had strengthened their flanks and were about to strike a blow to his two flanks that would surprise him.

The report of the Russian cavalry reconnaissance said that the German front hinted at a flank attack, which allowed Samsonov to slow down the pursuit. He sent a telegram to Gilinsky, suggesting a pause in the advance. Convinced that the Germans were retreating according to Prittwitz's plan, Gilinsky saw Samsonov's warnings as cowardice. He sat peacefully in Volk Vorsik's headquarters, nearly two hundred miles from the front line, and ordered Samsonov to stop "playing the role of a coward and go on the offensive."

Samsonov's right flank, which had advanced toward the center of the German army on the night of 25-26 August, left the rest of his forces about thirty miles away and made contact with the two German corps from Combinam. The German army, tired but well-fed, faced a tired and half-starved Russian army. After a short and chaotic battle, the Russians staggered back, while the Germans stared with relief, too tired to pursue.

Several companies of a Russian division, with their backs to Lake Bershaw, dizzily walked into the water, and some drowned. German propagandists portrayed it as legendary, saying that Hindenburg drove Samsonov's army into the swamp, killing tens of thousands. Ludendorff, who always took care to keep the record accurate when it came to his own prestige, dismissed it as a "myth...... There are no swamps nearby at all".

The beginning of dawn on August 27 was the end of the world for the Russian army, when the 1st Army of General François 61 of Erman 61 von 61 shelled Samsonov's left flank in the Usdao defense area. The German signalmen intercepted Samsonov's call for help, but Gilinsky and Rennankampf ignored his pleas. The hungry and demoralized Russian troops, inevitably broke up and fled in panic. Despite the danger to his troops, Samsonov ordered his central forces to attack, causing a brief period of unrest for the Germans. But the hungry and confused Russian army made them hunt like a flock of sheep. The Germans, who stretched for forty miles, had only to point the circle of prisoners to these brave men, who had fought to the point beyond their endurance. The total loss of the Russian Second Army; Of the commanders of the five corps, two were captured, and three were summarily removed from their posts for incompetence. Samsonov did not suffer the same fate as theirs. On the evening of 28 August, he went into the forest alone, raised his pistol to his temple, and pulled the trigger (fortunately he was not using a Southern pistol). His body, which was buried by the Germans, was handed over to his wife through the Red Cross in 1916 for burial in his homeland.

The small village of Tannenberg is a testament to the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the Poles and Lithuanians in the 13th century, the massacre of the Slavic armies by the Germanic Iron Cavalry five hundred years later, and perhaps more blood and fire in the near future. Between the clear water and blue sky, the human struggle is always short-lived, and perhaps only those lands that endure the smoke and blood are the best at forgetting, although this similar scene is repeated repeatedly.