CHAPTER VIII THE GERMAN RETREAT AND THE RUSSIAN PURSUIT TO THE FRONTIER

At the beginning of November, just three months after the declaration of war, it seemed that the German invasion of Poland had ended in complete failure and that the battle before Warsaw would be decisive of the whole conflict in Eastern Europe.

In August, while the Russian mobilisation was still incomplete, Rennenkampf had made his daring raid into East Prussia, with the view of helping the Allies in the west by forcing Germany to retain a large army for her own defence in the east. Though the invaders had been defeated by Von Hindenburg in the great battle of Tannenberg, or Osterode, and expelled from the invaded province, the indirect object of the raid had been obtained.

September had brought victory for Russia on both wings of the long battle-line. On the right, or northern wing, Rennenkampf, after fighting a series of rearguard actions in the frontier forest about Augustovo, had retired behind the Niemen, where he was largely reinforced, and repulsed the rash attempt of the Germans to follow him up and force the crossing of the Niemen. After this Rennenkampf had driven the Germans back to their own frontier, and was again threatening East Prussia with invasion. On the left, or southern wing, the Austrian defence of Eastern Galicia had collapsed and her army had been driven from the Vistula. Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, had been occupied, the line of the river San had been forced, Jaroslav captured, and Przemysl besieged. On the extreme Russian left raids had been made through the passes of the Carpathians into Northern Hungary, and from the left bank of the San an army was advancing to attack Cracow.

At the beginning of October two-thirds of Galicia had been overrun. In Central Poland the Russian armies were advancing in three directions. North of the Vistula an army was moving towards Thorn. On the other bank of the great river a central column moving towards the frontiers of the province of Posen had reached the valley of the Warthe. On the left centre a third force on the Upper Warthe was approaching the frontiers of Silesia; but subsequent events during this same month showed, as we have seen, that the forces thus pushed forward from the Russian centre towards the German frontier line were little more than a strong screen or outpost line, while the main mass of the central forces was still concentrated on the Middle Vistula, and in the triangle of fortresses above Warsaw.

In the second week of October came Von Hindenburg’s great invasion of Russian Poland. The dash for Warsaw was evidently intended to relieve the pressure of the enemy on Eastern Prussia and on Galicia by forcing him to draw in troops from the wings to strengthen the centre at this critical moment.

As we have seen, the Germans partly obtained this result. Their advancing force drove in the Russian detachments in Western Poland, and the Grand-duke Nicholas withdrew part of the army operating in Galicia to assist in the defence of the Upper Vistula near Ivangorod. The result was that the Austrians were able to reoccupy Jaroslav and to raise the siege of Przemysl for a while. Then came the days of hard fighting along the San and the Vistula, in which the Russians not only held their own, but, making a counter-attack in force near Warsaw, broke through the German centre and compelled a general retreat of the invaders.

This movement began in the third week of October, and it is quite evident that, though defeated, the German armies and their Austrian Allies were neither demoralised by their failure nor broken up by the Russian counter-attack. From day to day they showed an energy and tenacity to which it would be unfair to refuse the fullest praise. The retreat was a slow retirement, in which each day there was a series of hard-fought rearguard actions. The great battle-line was now surging westward across the Polish plain, but every step of the way was to be disputed. On October 24 stern fighting that gradually assumed the character and dimensions of another continuous battle or series of sanguinary combats was proceeding for the possession of this frontier. The front extended roughly for about a hundred versts, or sixty-six miles, from Rawa to the south of the river Iljanke. The roads leading to Radom and Petrikau were the scene of particularly close and bloody fighting. North of Rawa the Russian infantry established a marked superiority with the bayonet. In one miserable village (Motchidlo) they buried seven hundred German dead. Four hundred more were accounted for (captured) south-east of Rawa, and two batteries of quick-firers were taken at bayonet-point in the vicinity of Kazimerjefu.

Much of this fighting took place over marshy forest-lands, and in weather so bad that the guns often sank to their axles. The forest of Nemglovo was occupied by the Russian advanced troops. More artillery and prisoners were gathered in along the shocking roads leading to Novo Alexandrovo. Indeed, a Russian official report claimed the substantial acquisition, during this stern forest-fighting on October 24-26, of 3,000 men and 50 officers as prisoners, and 8 guns and numerous quick-firers.

Many gallant counter-attacks along the ever-widening front were repulsed with heavy slaughter. At any given point, the Russians appear generally to have possessed a preponderance of numbers, while the sense of victory kept the men in thoroughly good heart. The last days of October and first days of November saw nothing save the same succession of hard-fought rearguard actions. On November 7 Russian Poland had been almost cleared of the invaders, and at more than one point the Tsar’s vanguards had crossed the German frontier. On the right Rennenkampf was again entering the East Prussian lake region near Lyck. On the right centre north of the Vistula, from Lomza to within a few miles of the fortress of Thorn, the Russians were close up to the frontier, driving the German left before them through the marshy forest region of Northern Poland. In the centre the frontier of the Prussian province of Posen had been passed by the Cossacks south of Thorn. In South-western Poland the Germans and Austrians were still retiring through Russian territory; but they had abandoned Lodz and Kielce, and it was generally expected that their retreat would only stop at Cracow and on the Upper Oder about Breslau. On the extreme Russian left the Austrians had been forced back half way to Cracow, Jaroslav had been reoccupied by General Brussiloff, and Przemysl was again besieged.

During the retreat through Poland the Germans, under cover of their fighting rear-guards, had very thoroughly wrecked the railways, and done considerable damage to the few paved highways of the district. This work of destruction was evidently carried out deliberately by order of Von Hindenburg and the Headquarter Staff. A large force of engineers must have been used to effect it, and an enormous quantity of explosives employed in the work. Along the railways every station had been thoroughly wrecked. The buildings were burned, the rails torn up at all the junctions, curves, and crossings--the points at which the relaying of the line would require special material--the water-towers for the locomotives had been blown up, and all signals thrown down and telegraph apparatus destroyed or removed. On both railways and roads every bridge had been blown up, and the roads themselves had been very seriously damaged in a way that showed that a very large number of men must have been employed in the work of destruction. The metalled or paved surface of the roads had been broken up with the help of explosives, the surface being destroyed, not always from side to side of the road, but checker-fashion. Patches of the pavement being alternately destroyed on the left and the right side of the roadway, where explosives had been freely used, the road had thus become a kind of zig-zag line of yawning craters. This wrecking of the roads and railways seriously delayed the Russian pursuit, for the country, twice traversed by large armies, had been exhausted of what supplies it could afford, and the Grand-duke had to feed his troops during the pursuit by bringing up everything he needed from Warsaw and the Middle Vistula region.

At the time the impression given by this wholesale destruction of the means of communication in Western Poland was that Von Hindenburg and the German Staff had definitely abandoned all hope of renewing the invasion. It was argued that, if they intended to make another attempt to seize Warsaw, they might indeed have done such partial damage to the railways as would delay the Russian pursuit, but they would not have thus thoroughly destroyed them at the cost of an enormous expenditure of time and labour. If they meant to invade the country again in any force the railways would be a necessity to them. The destruction of the lines seemed therefore to be a counsel of despair, and it was expected that the next phase of the campaign would be the defence by the Germans of their fortified frontier-line.

So persuaded was the Russian Headquarter Staff that the German offensive had definitely come to an end, that preparations were made in the first days of November for the attack on the frontier fortresses of Germany. The programme for the next phase of the campaign was that on the left the advance in Galicia was to be pressed up to Cracow, and, once that place was invested, there was to be a march from the left and left centre into Silesia. The invasion of that province, one of the great industrial regions of Germany, would be a heavy blow to the Kaiser, and at the same time a menace to his Austrian Ally, for through Silesia lies the easiest way from Russian Poland to Vienna itself. Between the western end of the Carpathians and the mass of hills that form the mountain-lands of Northern Moravia and Bohemia there is a stretch of lower ground forming a wide hollow running south-westward from the Upper Oder region towards Vienna. This valley has often in the past seen the march of armies towards the Austrian capital. Thus, for instance, it was by this line that the Russian armies, then allied with Austria, marched south-westward in 1805. The object of the march was to occupy Vienna, then held by Napoleon, and the adventure ended unsuccessfully at Austerlitz.

On the right the Russian armies were to continue the new invasion of East Prussia, and in the centre there was to be a direct menace to Berlin by an attempt to break through the frontier fortress-line. The railways were being partly repaired, and a siege-train was about to be moved up from Warsaw against Thorn, the point selected for the first attack, because the possession of it would give the Russians command of the Lower Vistula.

The fortress of Thorn is situated within five miles of the frontier on both banks of the river and is the junction for five railway lines. Thus the Germans could operate on both sides of the great river. It may be said to dominate all the highways between East Prussia and the rest of Germany. In conjunction with the lesser, but still imposing fortresses of Kulm, Fordan, and Graudenz, it forms the pivot for an army acting on the defensive on the line of the Vistula. Since the opening weeks of the war six thousand labourers had been engaged night and day in strengthening Thorn’s defences.

A thousand fortress-guns and nine great forts, the latter named after Teutonic rulers and leaders, constitute its main armament. They are thus described by the Russian Colonel Shumsky:

“The defence works of Thorn comprise nine main forts--Scharnhorst, Yorck, Bülow, Wilhelm II., Heinrich von Zalzie, Grosser Kurfürst, Hertzog, Albrecht, Friedrich der Grosse, and Dohna. Between these forts there are seven intermediate works, which are separated by distances of from half to three-quarters of a mile. In consequence of the short distances separating the forts, a most destructive cross-fire can be obtained from them.

“The forts are distant between three-quarters of a mile and a mile from the outskirts of the town, which is accordingly within easy reach of the shells of the attacking force. The forts are connected in their rear by a circular highway, on which are sixteen infantry barracks and twenty-eight subterranean magazines. To this road there radiate from the town numerous sunk ways, masked with turf.

“The advanced positions before Thorn are a mile from the forts on the right bank of the river. The armament of the fortress, according to the usual German standard, will include twenty-seven long-range guns and twenty smaller pieces for repelling assaults on each of the main forts. Thus on the nine forts there will be altogether 414 guns. The seven intermediate works will each mount ten of the larger and eleven of the smaller guns: altogether 154. In the central enceinte there are understood to be 140 guns. If the reserve is added we get an aggregate of 1,000 guns, of which 60 per cent. are of long range.

“The minimum infantry garrison of Thorn is estimated at four battalions for the forts and two for the central area. The fortress is divided into four sections, for each of which there must be a reserve of three battalions. The artillery garrison, reckoning eight men per gun, must be 8,000 strong, and there must be not less than one battalion of engineers. The total garrison cannot therefore be less than 35,000 men.”

While preparations were being made for the attack on the frontier fortresses, the Tsar and Tsaritsa, accompanied by their daughters the Grand-duchesses Olga and Tatiana, took the highly popular step of paying a visit to the garrison and hospitals of the fortress of Ivangorod, so recently the scene of such desperate German attempts to break through on this part of the line of the Vistula after the smashing defeat of their rush for Warsaw. The Imperial party came from Lublin, and were received on arrival by the Commandant of Ivangorod, the Grand-duke Nicholas Michailovitch, and by General Schwarz. The Tsar gave public expression to the feeling of national exhilaration in the following brief but eloquent words: “With faith in the help and blessing of the All-Highest, and in the power of the mighty arms of united Russia, our great country will conclude no peace until the resistance of the enemy has been finally broken, and the realisation of the tasks bequeathed to us by our ancestors has been accomplished.”

In Galicia more solid Russian successes and a notable weakening in the power and solidarity of the resistance marked the growing pressure of the invaders of Austrian territory. South of Przemysl, in one day’s fighting early in November, a thousand prisoners and some guns were taken. Przemysl was quite cut off, though replying energetically to a severe bombardment by Dimitrieff’s siege-train. A sortie was beaten back with much loss of life. On the 10th Krasno was occupied, forty miles west of the fortress, and on the same day--a busy one in this particular war-zone--the Austrians were driven into the Carpathians after a further defeat on the San which enabled their relentless enemy to occupy Sanok and Turka.

Meanwhile the main invading army was pressing on towards Cracow, with a view to carrying on the siege of the place simultaneously with the investment of Przemysl. The occupation of Tarnow, an important railway centre, brought the Russians within forty-five miles of Cracow on the east side, while the passage of the river Schrenwaja from the Polish frontier advanced them almost within range of its guns.

In fact Cracow, defended by an Austro-German garrison now estimated at 100,000 men, had been steadily preparing for the worst. A fire-zone with a radius of eight miles had been cleared of all buildings, and steel cupolas had been provided for the main belt of its forts. On the Raba, a stream which empties itself into the Vistula twenty-five miles east of the city, a series of field-works was constructed, and the little town of Bochnia was also fortified.

“You may be surprised,” wrote Mr. Granville Fortescue in the _Daily Telegraph_, “at the rapidity of the advance on Cracow. It resulted from the precipitate retirement of the German and the Austrian forces through South-west Poland. I am told that this withdrawal was so rapid that the Russian pursuing cavalry almost lost touch with their foes. The enemy did not stop until he was under the walls of Cracow. The force which is to attack it from the north had an almost free passage. Another Russian force coming from Tarnow had to fight for every inch of the ground occupied. The Austrian force, which has been retreating stubbornly along the Rzeszow-Neu Sandec Railway, has given considerable trouble.”

The same journal, commenting upon the extraordinary extent of the battle-zone and the probability of the final fight for the Russo-Austro-German frontier extending over weeks rather than days, rightly remarked that the average workaday intellect failed to grasp the magnitude of the giant conflict in point of mere numbers alone. It hazarded the conjecture that over five hundred miles of front three and a half millions of Russians would be giving battle to a couple of millions of Austrians and Germans!

A tide of refugees, estimated at not less than a hundred thousand in a few days, was flying towards the city of Berlin from the East Prussian and Silesian borders. What a change from the “To Paris--to London!” of a few weeks previously. It was no longer practicable to conceal from the mass of the people the news of the total breakdown of the Polish invasion and the Austrian debacle. Events would still be slow-moving, since the mighty military machine of All the Russians, however well oiled, could only proceed at a certain regulated pace. Reports told of a new conception whereby the Germans hoped, northwards of Thorn, to concentrate masses of troops flanked by the river Vistula on the one hand and the river Warthe on the other. Here they would have the advantage of a battle-ground on a slightly raised platform as compared with the marshy wildernesses of the recent Polish operations; but the Masurian Lakes of East Prussia were by this time in Russian hands. The pace was quickening.

Mr. Fortescue, writing from Petrograd in praise of the bearing and discipline of the Tsar’s millions moving ever westward, could not refrain from an expression of his appreciation of the marked improvement discernible after the lapse of a decade in the Muscovite “Tommy Atkins”:

“A draft of recruits, headed by a band, passed through the square in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. I watched critically. They wore their ordinary clothes; the only uniforms seen were those of the non-commissioned officers. The astrakan cap was the distinctive head-covering, and every other man carried a tea-kettle. If I were a battalion commander I could not ask for a better-looking batch of recruits. All were over 5 ft. 6 in. in height. In carriage and a certain indefinable air they reminded me of the Guides from Manitoba. The more I see of these troops the more apparent the vast improvement of the Russian forces since the Russo-Japanese War becomes. That war was a liberal education for this Army, and as teachers of the art of war the Japanese are not to be despised. It is curious to note how this erstwhile enemy is now welcomed as an Ally. Japanese flags are always prominent in the colours of the nations fighting Germany. At all public occasions when the hymns of the different nations are played the solemn notes of the Japanese Anthem are loudly applauded. In the cause of humanity it may be said that Japan stands shoulder to shoulder with Russia. Russia need fear no enemy in her rear while Japan is her Ally.”

There is no doubt that the Russian Army had been in many ways improved since the war with Japan. The greatest advance had been in the matter of the working of the General Staff. The most remarkable feature of this Polish campaign was the methodical way in which the huge armies engaged on the Russian side had been concentrated and were now moved and supplied in a difficult country and on a front of many hundred miles. It was evident that the Grand-duke Nicholas and his subordinates were so confident in the reorganised army that they were even venturing to take very serious risks. It is possible that they did this with complete knowledge of the peril they were incurring. It is remarkable that at this stage of the campaign, instead of concentrating their efforts on any one point, they were using the enormous numbers at their disposal to operate in at least five different directions--in East Prussia, on the Vistula towards Thorn, in the centre towards Posen, on the left centre by Lodz towards Silesia, and on the left in Galicia. These Galician operations were again being carried on on three subordinate lines. There was an attack on the line of the Carpathians from Eastern Galicia menacing Hungary, the siege of Przemysl, and the advance on Cracow; and, besides all this, subsequent events showed that two additional armies were concentrated in Southern Russia, in view of a possible rupture with Turkey. One of these armies was in the Caucasus, the other was kept waiting about Odessa as a reserve that might be used for a descent upon the Turkish coasts. There were further large garrisons kept about Petrograd, and as a reserve for the Polish campaign in the triangle of fortresses on the Central Vistula.

This division of force between so many different objectives certainly implied some risk of the German and Austrian Allies using their elaborately organised railway system to concentrate a superior force against some part of the far-extended line. The risk was taken in order, by menacing the whole of the eastern frontiers of Germany, to create such a state of alarm as would lead to German troops being withdrawn from the western theatre of war. There is evidence that movements of this kind actually took place, though perhaps not to the extent that was reported in the French and English Press. The movements in the end of October and during November would seem to have been chiefly the transfer by rail of cavalry divisions with their batteries of artillery from west to east. The war of entrenched positions then in progress all along the western front made mounted troops, comparatively speaking, useless. They were therefore sent eastward. Cavalry and horse artillery require a large number of trains for even a force of very moderate numbers, and the movement of these trains would easily give the impression that immense numbers of men were being sent eastward.

In the second week of November there were the first signs that the Germans, instead of standing passively upon the defensive, were once more venturing upon a counter-attack based upon their eastern fortress line. This led to a second invasion of Poland from Germany, but its story belongs to a new phase of the war. The first campaign in Poland had closed with success for the Russian arms all along the enormous frontier of nearly fifteen hundred miles in length, and after more than three months of war there were no enemies on Russian territory. The concentration of the armies of the Tsar had been completed, and the Grand-duke Nicholas had under his command the greatest array of combatants that had ever been assembled by any State since the history of warfare began.

_Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._

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Transcriber’s note:

The one footnote has been moved to the end of its chapter.

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

The following change was made:

p. 80: “through” added (advance through the)