CHAPTER IV EBB AND FLOW IN EAST PRUSSIA

General Rennenkampf’s brilliant raid into East Prussia--which admirably served its immediate purpose of causing the Germans to transfer great masses of men from the west to the east, thereby relieving the pressure upon the Franco-British allies in Northern France--had closed with the brave Rennenkampf’s heavy defeat of Osterode, or Tannenberg, on the last day of August. Two days later had happened, as a counterstroke, General Russky’s capture of the capital of Galicia with its thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns, so that, in familiar language, “honours were easy.”

In point of fact, Rennenkampf, approved soldier in Europe as in Manchuria, recovered with astonishing rapidity from the severe set-back suffered by his army in the swamps of Osterode on August 31. While, as we have seen, that victory was causing General von Hindenburg to be acclaimed as the popular hero of the hour in Germany, Rennenkampf had the satisfaction of knowing that his defeat had not appreciably relieved the pressure upon the Austrian armies in the south.

On September 9 the army victorious at Osterode ten days before (and believed to consist of eleven corps) commenced a general advance along the East Prussian front into Russian Poland. For several days subsequent to his retreat, Rennenkampf had remained stationary along a line traversing the railway at right angles between Königsberg and Insterburg. This position he clung to tenaciously until noon of September 10, when the long-ranging shell-fire of the German fortress guns which were being used for the purpose, together with a powerful turning movement around their left flank, obliged the Russians to continue their retreat. They fell back on the 11th-12th in a northerly direction slightly east of Wirballen, where a fresh stand was made. Although the scene of action had now been transferred from German to Russian territory, the advantage was by no means wholly with the Teutons. They found themselves operating in a strange and unfriendly region, and one in which the railway system could not be of much use to them for the rapid transit of men and material, seeing that the German and Russian lines have different gauges. Moreover, Austria’s military misfortunes might now be deemed to have eliminated that Power from the problem. And Rennenkampf was resolved not to fight another pitched battle until he could do so under favourable auspices.

Local incidents along this Russian-Polish frontier included the dropping of German bombs and proclamations into the town of Suwalki. By these bombs the railway-station and schoolhouse were damaged and one child was killed. The frontier town of Filipovo also suffered a partial bombardment. While Rennenkampf’s headquarters were at Insterburg, certain of the inhabitants of that place were caught red-handed in the act of signalling movements of troops to their “friend the enemy,” while in a few cases Russian troops were fired on from houses of the townspeople. Several of these irregular belligerents were put to death by sentence of a court-martial. Next morning a German aeroplane dropped in the Russian lines this audacious message addressed to Rennenkampf: “Your troops are shooting peaceful citizens. If this is done without your knowledge, stop it at once! If the troops are carrying out your orders, then know, General, that the blood of these innocent people falls on your head, and on yours alone.”

It was not until September 17 that the Russian general’s clever manœuvring was rewarded by his being able to resume the offensive after the enemy had not penetrated more than twenty-five miles into Russian Poland. On the evening of that day the Germans realised that their attempted outflanking of Rennenkampf’s right was being checkmated by a vigorous counter-offensive. Very severe fighting took place at or near the junction of the railways between Kovno and Vilna, and at Stednicki, where the Niemen is joined by the Dubissa. The Russians held the banks of the latter tributary in force. By the 18th the enemy were falling back from Suwalki and four other townships which appear to have been the high-water mark of their advance. They lost four guns and many prisoners.

Having regard to the fact that a large proportion of the men of the German army corps employed here were troops that had been withdrawn from the western theatre of war, it is interesting to note that they are accused of having behaved with much lack of discipline along the line of route. Such accusations are common enough to all warfare, and the only point of interest here is that they certainly were for the most part troops drawn from the area of operations where so many allegations of “atrocities” have been preferred against them.

Roughly speaking, one continuous battle raged along the East Prussian borderland from September 25 to October 3. This has been styled the “Battle of Augustoff,” otherwise Suwalki, from the name of the province or “government” covering the battle-ground. The battle began in the vast forest that covers miles of country on the Russian side of the frontier. Through these woodlands Rennenkampf retired, fighting a series of rearguard actions on a broad front. An episode of the battle was the attack of the German right on the fortress of Ossovetz, a place of some importance, as it guards a crossing of the river Bobr in the midst of a region of marshy forest.

The garrison met the attack by a night sortie against the German advance, which had got into difficult ground among the swamps and woods. A correspondent who was with the Russian force gives this account of the fighting:

“The Germans had not proceeded more than nine miles when they found that they could not move their guns a yard farther owing to the marshy nature of the ground. In this predicament they opened fire with their artillery, and then sent forward their infantry with numerous machine-guns. The latter got within four miles of the fortress, but they made no further progress.

“During the night the Russians made a sortie, and, marching by roads and paths of which the enemy were completely ignorant, they completely enveloped both the German wings. Imagining that they held all the practicable roads, the Germans had concentrated their attention on the fortress and neglected their flanks. When the enveloping movement became apparent, a fierce engagement ensued, the enemy being completely at a disadvantage. The fortress guns mowed them down on the open road, while the Russian infantry poured a devastating fire into their wings. The battle lasted thirty-six hours, and ended in the complete rout of the Germans, who fled in disorder along the Graevo road. All the German guns which had stuck in the marshy ground were captured.”

Retiring through the frontier woods Rennenkampf fell back upon and recrossed the Niemen. It would have been well for Von Hindenburg if he had contented himself with having driven the invaders out of East Prussia. But, flushed with victory, and underrating the fighting power of his opponent, he endeavoured to force a way across the Niemen. By this time, however, the Russian mobilisation had long been completed, and Rennenkampf was reinforced by several army corps when he reached the right bank of the river. The German attempt to cross it in the face of superior numbers ended in a disaster. The attack was pushed with reckless daring, and simultaneously at many points attempts were made to construct pontoon bridges under the fire of the Russian artillery. Every attempt ended in failure. Hundreds of dead bodies floated down the stream, and the efforts of the German gunners to crush out the fire of the enemy’s batteries were unavailing. At last, after incurring much useless loss, Von Hindenburg abandoned the attempt under the pressure of a Russian attack on his flank from the southward.

Once more there was fighting day after day in the forests of Augustovo, as Von Hindenburg’s army fell back through the woods towards the borders of East Prussia, pursued by the victorious Russians.

Rennenkampf claimed that during these operations the losses of the Germans amounted to 60,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners. The scenes of desolation around Suwalki and Augustoff after this sanguinary fighting were pitiful in the extreme. Practically everything had been destroyed, so that they resembled towns of the dead. All bridges had been blown up, and but for embankments and broken telegraph-wires it was hardly recognisable that there had been a railway at all. Wrote a _Daily Telegraph_ war correspondent of the unholy scene:

“On the fields one sees the ravages of artillery projectiles--deep, conical holes five or six feet in diameter. Here, too, one finds shrapnel cases, splinters of shells, skeletons of horses, fragments of blood-stained clothing, cartridge-pouches, blue-grey coats of German soldiers, empty schnapps and beer-bottles. In one trench there was a particularly large number of empty bottles. It is evident that the German soldiers invigorate themselves with alcohol before battle. Near one of these batteries of bottles was a soldiers’ common grave. Along the road are many burnt houses and plundered farms.

“Of entire villages, in some cases only blackened ruins remain. Inside the houses that have not suffered in this way nothing remains whole. Pillows and quilts have been ripped open and the down scattered about. Samovars, dented by heels of heavy boots, are lying about on the floor. Cupboards and drawers have been rummaged with bayonets.

“What the Prussians could not carry away they have spoilt. Whole forests have been hewed down or burnt. Wide areas have been cleared for fields of fire. Peasants’ gardens have been stripped of their produce. Potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables have been dug up wholesale and carried off. Local inhabitants, mostly Lithuanians and White Russians, have been so terrified by the Germans that they hardly realise what has happened to them.”

The enemy next endeavoured to entrench and maintain himself upon a line running from Wirballen to Lyck; but on October 8 his flanks were enveloped after a fierce struggle, and the Russians marched into Lyck. They were now for the second time establishing themselves upon the soil of East Prussia--and this time with little likelihood of a somewhat demoralised foe being able to expel them in a hurry. For the German offensive along the Niemen had utterly failed.

At the time (October 8) when Rennenkampf followed up this triumph by driving the enemy out of Lyck, his troops had already been fighting for seven days and nights without a rest. But they were flushed with victory. This engagement of the 8th is likely to be known as the battle of Ratchka, from the name of the village on which the German right rested. It was ascertained that they had been reinforced with men and guns (several batteries being captured) from Königsberg. The rapidity of the advance seems to have had a staggering effect, and the enemy lost hundreds of his horses in the marshy boglands of the Suwalki province, leaving his heavy artillery, or much of it, to its fate.

A wounded Russian officer, in a description of the battle of Augustoff contributed to a Petrograd journal, pays a deserved tribute to the coolness, intelligence, and enthusiasm of the Slav soldier under fire. The troops, he says, were simply “chuckling with delight” on receiving an order to turn the enemy out of a position which could only be carried by great expenditure of life. With the utmost _sang-froid_ they put the Germans to rout, then leaving them to the tender mercies of a particularly vigorous and merciless pursuit by the Cossack cavalry. Fresh enthusiasm was aroused by the appearance of General Rennenkampf, who rode on to the position to thank his gallant soldiers for the extraordinary exertions that had given them the well-worn field. The music of several bands then joined in the celebration, playing the beautiful Russian National Hymn to a perfect tornado of cheers from the weary but satisfied troops.

What a change had come over the scene within one month! A proud and unbroken enemy no longer retained a foothold upon Russian territory. Whether regarded as a serious invasion, or as a movement of co-ordination with the vaster invasion of Russian Poland now about to be described, the attempt had been signally beaten back in blood. “Whether,” wrote an English critic of the situation, “the Russians intend to aim at Berlin or Vienna, is of minor consequence. The great point is that they seem able to do what they like and to choose their particular objective as they please. Nothing has been more exhilarating than the brilliant strategy of Petrograd. The Russian soldiers have proved not only their steady persistence--a quality which we always knew to be one of their principal assets--but also a rapidity of movement and a dashing spirit of attack with which the world was hardly prepared to credit them.”