LUDENDORFF, General Von, German 'soldier: b. Posen, Prussia, 1865. He passed out of the War Academy in 1895 and was soon afterward appointed to the Great General Staff in Berlin, where his high mental attainments won him recognition and rapid advancement. A born soldier, strong-willed, endowed with an iron constitution and obsessed with but one idea — the perfection of the great fighting ma chine of which he was a nart — Ludendorff be came by far the most dominant figure pro duced on the German side during the war. At the end of 1912 he was chief of a depart ment at the General Staff with the rank of colonel ; in April 1914 he was promoted to major-general and placed in command of an infantry brigade at Strassburg. He was given another command shortly after the outbreak of war, but before the war was a month old he was sent to East Prussia as chief of staff of the 8th army under Hindenburg. The impression prevailed that Ludendorff was re sponsible for the recall of Hindenburg from his retirement to command the 8th army operating against the Russian invasion, and that Hindenburg had returned the compliment 1:7 asking for Ludendorff as his chief of staff. I•rom this stage the two men worked together and it would be difficult to assert how much the chief of staff contributed to Hindenburg's successes and made him for a time the idol of the German people. According to some authorities, Ludendorff was the brain and Hin denburg the arm of the German military power. A Russian officer declared in 1915 that Ludendorff had offered him a million francs to procure the murder of the Grand Duke Nicholas and a graduated scale of re wards for the suppression of Russky, Ivanov and Brussilov. The failure of Von Falken hayn at Verdun in 1916 led to his being super seded by Hindenburg as virtual commander in-chief, and Ludendorff became first quarter master-general. It was also alleged that the shuffle of commands was a plot between the Kaiser and Falkenhayn to discredit Hinden burg and lower his enormous popularity by giving him free rein, in the certainty that he would run his head against a wall. A more
probable explanation was that if the bitter truth had at last to be told the German people, he alone could perform the task and carry the nation with him. Ludendorff, however, was the principal power — a mysterious personality that gradually overshadowed even the Kaiser. Mr. Gerard, former United States Ambassador to Germany, credits Ludendorff with forcing the break with America, and also with order ing the Belgian deportations. "Many persons in a position to know told me that the real dic tator of Germany was Ludendorff." Silently and unobtrusively he matured strategic plans, intrigues and press campaigns in his solitary and closed office, making his calculations and solving his problems. With the collapse of German military power under the great Allied drive, the "German Napoleon,' as he was fre quently called, fell from his high estate, "a shattered idol lying in the dust.* He encour aged the Bolsheviks and bribed them with mil lions. He dominated not only Germany, but all her allies for a time. When Count Czer nin came to tell him that Austria must have peace at any price, Ludendorff threatened the Dual Monarchy with war and invasion. He labored to promote strife in the Reichstag and discord among the Allies. All over Europe his cunning, unscrupulous system spread its tentacles. In November 1918, after the crash, the National-Zeitung of Berlin confessed that Ludendorff•s malign policy had brought Amer ica into the war and caused four-fifths of man kind to feel that it was better to fight to the last man and perish than to witness the tri umph of such a combination of dishonor and brutality. Already in August 1918 Ludendorff had launched peace kites and endeavored to persuade the Kaiser of the hopelessness of the struggle; it was he, also, who prompted the re quest by Germany for an armistice. When the inner history of the war is written on the German side, the diabolical genius of Luden dorff, his rise and his fall, will stand as one of the romantic episodes in the great conflict.