Part 7

The Cossacks being thus flung back on their infantry, whose movements were of an unaccountably slow and confused kind, our guns dashed up to the top of the bluff, which had formed the bone of contention between us and the Muscovites, and, unlimbering like lightning, began to blaze away at the retreating horsemen with shrapnel which seemed to do further execution amongst them. Then, laying their pieces at long range and loading with percussion-fuse shells, Donnerkeil’s gunners hastened to rain a terrific torrent of destructive projectiles on the railway station of Alexandrovo, behind which Grodnovodsky’s infantry had retired for temporary shelter. His guns planted on a rising bit of orchard ground on his left, were energetically enough worked against our batteries, but did us little or no harm, as the Prussian artillerists, always very careful in their selection of a firing position even in the tumult of action, showed little more than the mere muzzles of their guns over the crest of the land-wave, in the rear dip of which the infantry of the 6th Division were lying prone and scatheless in eager readiness to rush on as soon as the cannon of the Russians should be reduced to silence.

Nor had they long to wait for this result, for the furious artillery duel had barely lasted an hour when Grodnovodsky’s guns were seen to limber up—such of them as had escaped dismounting—and lumber off; and then our impatient battalions, throwing out their first fighting line, fanlike, in skirmishing order, with supports behind and reserves following, all in as machine-like and magnificent order as at a field-day on the Tempelhof Common, began to push forward, the guns firing over their heads all the while as they swarmed down the Russian-ward slope of our eminence and across the rye and potato fields, still rather wet and cloggy from last night’s rain, in front of Alexandrovo. The Russian infantry attempted to debouch from their shell-shattered position behind the railway station and other adjacent buildings, and deploy in line of purpose to stem our steadily advancing tide; but our guns, which were still able to pound away over the heads of our own battalions, played dreadful havoc with their shrapnel charges among Grodnovodsky’s out-manœuvred troops, who were also mown down in great numbers by the fearful fire of our magazine-rifles, of which the murderous volleys appeared to inspire our opponents with a feeling of panic as unfamiliar to them as the effects of smokeless powder; and, for the first time probably in all the military history of Russia, the soldiers of the Czar positively turned tail and fled before superior numbers and unaccustomed terrors.

Yet the dead and wounded whom they left behind amply attested the tenacious bravery with which they had fought; and the losses on our side were not insignificant, including, as they did, the death of Colonel von Degenzieher and Lieutenant Prince Zu Sonnenwalde-Drachenfels-Schinckenstein, a young man as brave as he was handsome, both of the 8th Brandenburg (Prince Frederick Charles’s) Infantry Regiment.

Still, the loss of these two gallant officers, and other brave men on our side, was more than compensated for by the capture of Alexandrovo (into which we marched, or rather rushed, with colours flying, and drums beating) with its rich accumulation of railway rolling stock, which will be far more precious to us than acres upon acres of military stores.

How in the Heaven’s name the Russians could ever have failed to concentrate, at the very outset of this war, a more formidable defending force around so very important a strategic point as Alexandrovo, is a bewildering puzzle even to those who have busied themselves with the systematic study of the Russian character; but, at any rate, there _they_ were and here _we_ are, thanks to the incredible supineness of our foes, their contemptible outpost service, the audacity and sudden swiftness of our movements, and the disastrous surprise which we then sprung upon them.

My courier returns with this despatch to Thorn, where I trust he will be able to commit it to the wires.

OCCUPATION OF ALEXANDROVO BY THE GERMANS.

ALEXANDROVO, _May 3_.

It is not yet twenty-four hours since the victorious 6th Division of the German Army occupied this place, and already it is bristling on the Warsaw, or south-eastern side, with a most formidable line of earthworks, thanks chiefly to the marvellous exertions of the Engineer Battalion of the 3d Corps, which was quick to arrive here by rail yesterday, within an hour of our triumph—the first of the campaign. But, indeed, the spades of all our infantry have also been incessantly at work since they piled their rifles here, it being thought certain that the Russians will endeavour to get a double amount of work out of their cranky, creaking mobilisation machine, and hasten to deliver a desperate counter-attack, with the view of repairing the disastrous error they have committed—an error that has placed us in possession of a railway base of operations of incalculable price. Among other spoils we captured 123 railway waggons of various kinds, and nine locomotives, which, added to the rolling stock that is hourly pouring in from the direction of Thorn, with the remainder of the German Army of the Vistula, now rapidly massing here, render us certain of the means of transport in the event of our deciding to carry the torch of invasion deeper into the heart of Russia.

It is true that the railway from here to Warsaw consists of only a single track, but the gauge, unlike that of all Russian lines on the right bank of the Vistula, is of the ordinary European size, and that in itself is a tremendous advantage for us. Our Army of the Baltic, under Count Waldersee, will be hampered in its forward movements into Russia, if it decides to push across the frontier also, by the fact that the line from Eydtkuhnen is a broad-gauge one, though, indeed, it is understood that the General Staff—prescient in all things—has also made provision for adapting the axles of German lines to the broader gauge of Russian; but, on the other hand, the Army of Silesia, under Prince George of Saxony, will enjoy the same transport facilities as ourselves, if it can only manage to effect, like us, a _pied à terre_ on the Warsaw and Vienna line, and we are anxiously awaiting news of its movements.

CAPTURE OF CZENSTOCHAU BY PRINCE GEORGE OF SAXONY.

PRINCE ALEXANDER OF BATTENBERG A PRISONER.

(_By Telegraph from our Special Correspondent, Mr. Charles Lowe._)

ALEXANDROVO, _May 4_.

There is great jubilation among the troops here, for, following hard on the telegram announcing the Emperor’s departure from Berlin to the Rhine amid an unparalleled scene of excitement and enthusiasm, came a despatch reporting that Prince George of Saxony, by dint of forced marches of immense difficulty through the devious moors and marsh-grounds east of Rosenberg and Tarnowitz on the Kreuzburg-Tarnowitz line, had also succeeded in surprising the Russians at Czenstochau, on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, and, capturing that important place, after a desperate but unavailing resistance on the part of its defenders, who, incredible to relate, consisted of not much more than its usual garrison—a brigade of infantry and two brigades of cavalry. But the German losses here were much more serious than with us yesterday, one infantry regiment in particular—the 22d Silesian—being more than decimated in its desperate, yet successful, endeavours to drive the enemy from a clump of wood, surmounted by a battery—a proof that it still continues to be animated by the heroic spirit of its name-chief, Field-Marshal James Keith, whilom of Inverugie and Dunnottar, in the Kingdom of Scotland, who, at its head, met his own death, under the eye of Frederick the Great, when saving the surprised right flank of the Prussian Army from utter annihilation by the Austrians at Hochkirch in the Lausitz.

These two engagements, then, though on a smaller scale, have been the Wörth and Spichern of the present war; and it now only remains to be seen whether we shall be able to improve upon these initial successes—which were due to a great extent, I repeat, to the exceeding swiftness and daring of our own movements, as compared with the incredible slowness of our foes, and the faultiness of their mobilisation process, no less than to the fact that the Russians, imagining the Germans would never dare invade Poland, but remain upon their guard and form a flanking reserve support in Silesia to their Austrian allies, directed the main stream of their mobilisation further to the east, towards Dragomiroff’s line of hostile advance upon Lemberg and the Carpathian Passes to the south thereof at Stryj.

How Gourko, who is known to be still at Warsaw, though the bulk of his forces must now be well in front of him, will endeavour to cope with the situation thus so suddenly created for him, is naturally the question which occupies all minds here, and it cannot be very long before his intentions are made manifest.

Meanwhile the telegrams from Galicia, where our Austrian allies have concentrated the bulk of their forces, are not quite so encouraging, indicating, as they do, less initiative and promptitude of action on their part, as well as considerable difference of opinion in the minds of the Corps and Army Commanders as to whether they ought to remain on the defensive, or espouse an audacious policy of invasion like ourselves, and essay to beard the lion, or rather the bear, in his den.

Count von Schlieffen, who proves to be as amiable a man as he is an able Chief of the Staff, tells me that news reached the German Headquarters this afternoon of a tremendous conflict between no fewer than five Cavalry Divisions, three on the Russian side and two on the Austrian, somewhere near Brod, on the Volhynian frontier—a conflict which resulted, as it could scarcely otherwise have done from the relative proportion of numbers, in the total defeat of the Austro-Hungarian horsemen. The latter, it seems, were covering the movements of the 3d Austrian Corps, which had been appointed to head an advance in the direction of Dubno; and when they had been overthrown in a _mêlée_ which, in its colossal magnitude, recalled the mounted conflicts of the Crusaders, the victorious Russians, rallying and reforming line, swept down upon a detached portion of the Austrian infantry, regardless of the smokeless volleys from the Mannlicher repeating rifle, and made awful havoc among the sturdy men from the Steiermark, taking one whole battalion prisoners, including, it is rumoured, the colonel of the regiment, the 27th, who is none other than Count Hartenau, better known as Prince Alexander of Battenberg, ex-Prince of Bulgaria—a wonderful piece of luck, indeed, for the Russians, if the rumour proves true.

LATER.

Later despatches confirm the rumour of Prince Alexander’s capture by the Russians, and add that, when the news became known at Dragomiroff’s headquarters—which are said to be at Dubno—there was almost as much jubilation as when the intelligence of Napoleon’s surrender flew like wildfire around the German lines at Sedan.

The ex-Bulgarian Prince is to be sent to St. Petersburg, where rooms are being already prepared for him at the Katherinenhof, and meanwhile he has been allowed to retain his sword in order that his unforgiving and exultant cousin, the Czar, may have the satisfaction of receiving it from the humiliated captive’s own hands—a picture that will eclipse in interest all the romantic incidents which have already marked the Prince’s strangely chequered career.

NIGHT ATTACK BY THE RUSSIANS.

FIGHTING BY THE ELECTRIC LIGHT—ROUT OF GENERAL GOURKO—RETREAT UPON WARSAW.

(_By Telegraph from our Special Correspondent, Mr. Charles Lowe._)

ALEXANDROVO, _May 7_, 5 A.M.

The German Army of the Vistula has just inflicted on the Russians another Plevna, and they are now in full retreat towards Warsaw. Such, in brief, is the result of the sanguinary night battle of which I have just been a witness. The Russians were the first to practise night attacks as a means of obviating the dreadful losses certain to result from magazine-rifle fire during the day, but they will long have cause to remember their first serious application of the nocturnal principle of modern warfare.

By seven o’clock last night the 3d and 4th German Corps had completed their concentration at and near this place, and, after extending the lines of entrenchment begun by the 6th Division on capturing Alexandrovo, had gone into fireless bivouac on both sides of the railway line, their tents extending for about a couple of miles in either direction. Several reconnaissances executed by us during the day had elicited that the Russians were marshalling in great force at a place called Waganiek, and were receiving reinforcements from the right bank of the Vistula, by means of a pontoon bridge which had been thrown across the stream a little higher up, at Dobrowniki; but, owing to the dense masses of cavalry which hovered on their front, concealing their movements as a stage curtain hides from view the shifting of the scenes in a theatre, it was impossible for our scouts to bring back more definite information. One item, however, of their intelligence, gathered from a captured Cossack, had a special interest for us, to wit, that the Russian forces immediately in front of us consisted mainly of the 5th and 6th Corps, with part of the 4th (including the relics of Grodnovodsky’s Brigade), and were under the personal command of General Gourko, the hero of the Balkans. On the strength of this information it was decided to attack Gourko before he got his preparations complete, and for this purpose to break bivouac, and start in quest of him at the dawn of day, as Prince Frederick Charles had done with Benedek at Sadowa.

I had spent the evening with a particular friend of mine, Captain von Jagdkönig, of Stülpnagel’s Brandenburg Infantry Regiment, and was just on the point of setting out with him on a visit of inspection among the fore-posts, when a Uhlan dashed up with the intelligence that there were signs of a mysterious commotion in front, and that something was audible in the otherwise noiseless night like the distant rumbling of waggon and cannon wheels. Anon other messengers from the front came spurring in with similar news, and as the general purport of all these ‘_Meldungen_’ could no longer be doubted, the bugles were at once set to work, and presently all the silent bivouacs, taking up the shrilling war-note one after the other, like the multiplication of a distant echo, were resonant with the thrilling call to arms; and thanks to the severe training in the discipline of ‘alarms’ which the German army has been put through by the present Emperor since his accession to the throne, the army of the Vistula had all started from its sleep and was standing in perfect battle array, with its face to the suspected foe, within ten minutes of the first trumpet summons.

The night was intensely dark, the moon having just gone down behind an impenetrable bank of pitchy clouds, and all fighting seemed to be utterly out of the question. Presently, however, the inky darkness all around us was pierced, one may almost say scattered, by a sudden blaze of light, which, appearing to possess all the illuminating power of the mid-day sun, flashed lightning-like upon us its blinding beams from the murky forehead of the midnight sky. ‘The electric light!’ ran from mouth to mouth, after a moment’s bewildered pause, while every one instinctively shaded his eyes from the glare of this all-irradiating and all-penetrating lamp which modern Science had thus hung up to facilitate the work of slaughter, as if the very sun refused to look any longer upon human carnage. For some moments the more than mile-long rays of this blinding ball of light, this detective bull’s-eye of modern science, swept round the horizon in front of it, as if uncertain where to fix its focus—now shooting beyond, now falling short of us, and anon settling on us and suffusing us with a sea of dazzling light. Presently another, and yet another such luminary burst forth from elevations of pretty equal distances in front of us, and the process of their groping about for our lines revealed to us dense masses of grey and dark-green coated battalions picking their cautious way down the distant slopes in front of us. For the electric light has this disadvantage, that in flinging its beams about to discover the locality of foes, it frequently at the same time unveils the whereabouts of friends. This was the case here, but our gunners were on the alert, and next time the focus of the light, in its jerky search-movement, fell on the Russian troops in the course of their stealthy advance towards us, we opened the concert with a screaming chorus of shells, accompanied by a rattling orchestration of small-arms. Nor had we long to wait for the antiphone; for next time the search-light managed to flood us with its blinding effulgence, the Russian batteries, which had been planted on the same elevations, gave lusty voice, and bellowed away at us in most leonine fashion, though their projectiles, being aimed at much too long a range, flew high over our heads and left us scatheless. Not so, however, the rifle-rain of our enemies, which, first in intermittent showers, and then in a steady downpour, began to fall among our ranks with deadly effect; and the word was passed from flank to flank for all the infantry to lie down and court the shelter of our field entrenchments, which crested the ridge of our line of battle.

Between us and the Russian infantry there intervened a depression in the ground, a little deeper than that which separates Mont St. Jean from Belle Alliance; but what enhanced the value of this ground to our foes was the fact that their batteries in the rear, planted as they were on the electric light elevations overlooking the terrain, could fire over the heads of their infantry till the latter was pretty well within storming distance of our position, much in the same way as the guns of the 6th Division had been able to do the other day on the occasion of our first engagement, which resulted in the capture of Alexandrovo.

The Russians advanced against us with a steady, stolid courage worthy of the men who had essayed to capture the Sand Bag Battery and storm the redoubts of Plevna; and as the fitful flashes of the electric light revealed to us, for a few moments at a time, their dense battalions advancing and deploying into the fighting-lines demanded by modern tactics and the rules of fire-discipline, I could not help thinking of that cold and dark November morning when, without the aid of the electric light, they crowded to their doom, with the same dreadnought and devoted bravery, up the slippery slopes of Inkerman.

It was not long before the roar of the cannon on both sides became outvoiced almost by the reverberating rattle of musketry, which was all the more bewildering, as only the very faintest flashes of flame from the smokeless powder of both sides served to indicate the exact position of the opposing lines of infantry fire; and it was only when a new turn of the electric light (which, by-the-bye, might have changed the course of Egyptian history, had Arabi enjoyed the advantage of it at Tel-el-Kebir) registered the progress of the Russian advance, that we could make out the development of a battle in which unity of command was simply impossible, and each captain had to be his own general officer. The development of a modern battle is a very slow process, and this one was doubly so from the fact, due to the utter darkness in which each side was occasionally enveloped, that there was much random and ineffective firing on both parts. But there came a point of time in the Russian advance when the manipulators of their electric lights found it impossible to illumine our lines without also including the Russians within the Asmodean sweep of their rays, and then it was that our men, seizing their opportunity, plied their magazine rifles with infernal industry and effect.

But this opportunity did not last long, for suddenly the four midnight suns of Science, of far more dazzling splendour than the tourist orbs of the North Cape, which had been rendering possible the work of slaughter, disappeared from our firmament as completely as if they had been blazing torches plunged into a pool of ink; and their disappearance was followed by a brief period of almost painful silence which overspread the broad and lengthy field of battle.

We never doubted that this pall of pitchy darkness had thus been suddenly thrown around the battlefield to enable our foes to make another rush towards us, unimpeded by the accurate aim of shell and bullet; and a curious thrill, half of pleasure, half of undefined dread, went shooting through our veins when, as we were listening intently, peering into the impenetrable darkness beyond, our ears were struck by a faint peculiar tinkling as if of jangled metal rods, and the meaning thereof at once became clear to us. The Russians were fixing bayonets, preparatory to a charge on our position; and the sound was quickly answered by the loud and stern command: ‘_Aufpflanzen!_’ which ran all along our lines, and was likewise followed by a repetition, on our side, of the clinking and sharp clicking above alluded to.

Scarcely had silence in the ranks been again restored when another order: ‘Load for magazine-fire!’ rang out in stentorian tones, and at the same time, almost, the electric lights were again flashed full upon us, converting darkness into open day, and showing us the Russians striding swiftly towards us in successive irregular waves of ever-increasing volume, the nearest to us being hardly more than a hundred and fifty yards off. On they came firing all the way, equally regardless of the awful volcanoes of shrapnel which our batteries belched forth against them and of the terrific torrent of our small-bore bullets, aimed from behind the comparative shelter of field-trench parapets, which incessantly tore through their stolid ranks, mowing them down and massacring them by thousands. It was impossible for them to preserve anything like their proper formation under these trying circumstances, and disorder was spreading rapidly among their irregular ranks; but the swaying, struggling masses of the grey and green-coated soldiery of the Czar still came surging stubbornly up the slope, ever lessening the distance between them and our entrenchments, till the moment at last seemed come when they should hurl themselves upon us and try conclusions with the cold steel. And then, as if by instinct more than pre-concert, the whole surging masses raised a tremendous shout, and rushed full upon us with the bayonet.

But when only about twenty paces in front of us, their onward career was suddenly stopped short by some invisible barrier, which made them crowd upon each other like penned cattle, passive targets for the bullets of our repeating rifles that rained upon them thick and fast as hail, knocking them over like so many rabbits in a ride. This barrier, which thus strangely stemmed the rush of their storming tide, was composed of fencing wire of several coils, strongly stretched and impaled, which had been run along all the front of our entrenched lines as an additional measure of defence against the contingency of such an attack, and formed one of the most recent innovations in the field warfare of the Germans—an innovation which had commended itself to the Emperor, who himself put it to a practical and approved test at the autumn manœuvres of last year.