The Campaign in Russian Poland 1

The Campaign in Russian Poland 1

The Campaign in Russian Poland

Author: Percy Cross Standing

The Daily Telegraph WAR BOOKS

CONTENTS

 

 

CHAPTER I

 

PAGE

 

THE SITUATION AFTER LEMBERG 1

 

CHAPTER II

 

THE AUSTRIAN DEBACLE: FROM LEMBERG TO JAROSLAV 16

 

CHAPTER III

 

RUSSIA’S SUCCESS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE 40

 

CHAPTER IV

 

EBB AND FLOW IN EAST PRUSSIA 56

 

CHAPTER V

 

THE DEFENCE OF THE VISTULA 73

 

CHAPTER VI

 

THE SIEGE OF PRZEMYSL--THE STRUGGLE ON THE SAN 112

 

CHAPTER VII

 

STORIES FROM THE FIGHTING LINE 136

 

CHAPTER VIII

 

THE GERMAN RETREAT AND THE RUSSIAN PURSUIT TO THE FRONTIER 157

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I THE SITUATION AFTER LEMBERG

 

 

The capture of the important town of Lemberg, the capital of Galicia,

by the forces of the Tsar during the first week of September may be

said to have marked an epoch in the operations of the gigantic armies

contending for the mastery in what had come to be popularly known as

the Eastern Theatre of operations in the world-war. It was a very solid

advantage, and one which gained for the Russian Army a substantial

foothold upon Austrian territory. The struggle of the nations had

endured for some weeks, and the victory of Lemberg was all the more

welcome and popular because it happened at a time when our Russian

Allies needed a really heartening and enlivening success. For it would

be absurd to say that the so-called “Russian steam-roller” had moved on

from triumph to crushing triumph with that irresistible impulse which

the arm-chair critics had so comfortably predicted for it. Indeed,

after the threat to Danzig itself implied in General Rennenkampf’s

brilliant raid into Eastern Prussia, and his victory over the army of

General von Hindenburg in the first decisive engagement of the war

at Gumbinnen, the rushing back of masses of German troops from the

western to the eastern theatre of operations had completely changed the

situation. By admirable generalship, too, Von Hindenburg had turned the

tables on his foe, and had inflicted a signal defeat on the invaders of

East Prussia at Tannenberg.

 

From this point, then, the Russians became for the moment no longer an

attacking force. If they had inflicted, they had also suffered, immense

losses. General Rennenkampf’s brisk offensive through East Prussia had

been definitively checked, and it behoved the Tsar’s military advisers

to find, and find speedily, what the American soldier-critic described

as “another way round.”

 

Meanwhile the Austrians had projected an invasion of Russian Poland

which, successful in its initial stages, led up to a succession of

disastrous reverses. A co-operating German force under General Preuske

fared also very well for a while, its advance into Western Poland

causing the abandonment of the important town of Lodz. But it speedily

became evident that in General Russky, commander of the army designated

to checkmate this invasion, Russia possessed a leader of conspicuous

ability. The Germans were pressed back towards the Polish frontier,

while the Austrians, upon whom the heaviest stress of this fighting

fell, presently came in for a series of reverses. Thus, in what is

known as the battle of Przemysl, the Austrian General Bankal was

killed and five thousand prisoners captured. Then, in a further battle

or series of conflicts lasting an entire week (August to September),

Lemberg fell into Russian hands, and the Petrograd bulletins claimed

upwards of sixty thousand Austrian prisoners and 637 guns. It is from

this point that I take up the as yet rather obscure story of this

fluctuating campaign, first premising that the extraordinary severity

of the Russian censorship of news renders the task no light one.

 

While, during the first half of September, General Russky is gathering

up the fruits of his victory of Lemberg pending a resumption of his

successful advance through Galicia, we may be permitted to take a brief

glance at the personalities of the men on whom the Grand-duke Nicholas,

Russia’s Imperial Commander-in-Chief, could principally depend. In

the recent words of a high military authority: “There are, and always

have been, brilliant soldiers in the upper grades of the Russian Army.

At the beginning of the Great War Russia possessed three leaders of

high reputation--Rennenkampf, a cavalry general, and the commander of

one of the subsidiary armies under Kuropatkin in the Japanese War;

Samsonoff, who had also fought in the Far East, and had the reputation

of a first-class military organiser; and Russky, a scientific soldier,

with a good record as a teacher of the art of war in the Russian Staff

College. All three were among the commanders sent to the western

frontier.”

 

And what of their not less brilliant opponent, General von Hindenburg,

popularly known in Germany to-day as “the Saviour of East Prussia”?

This distinguished officer--who celebrated his sixty-seventh

birthday shortly after his victory of Tannenberg, when quantities of

“love-offerings” reached him from Berlin, where a street has already

been named after him--was promptly promoted from the command in Eastern

Prussia to that of the field-armies operating in Poland, and was made a

Freeman of three great German cities. Here is a characteristic pæan of

praise taken from one of Berlin’s leading journals:

 

“Not in contemplative peace and snug homeliness, as is appropriate to

the birthday of a general, of his own early morning coffee, but outside

in the iron field of the new battles, which thunder and lightning

between the Vistula and the Dniester will Hindenburg, Germany’s

brilliant champion, celebrate his sixty-seventh birthday. And from

Königsberg to Strassburg, from Cologne and Aix to Breslau and Przemysl,

from the North Sea to the Adriatic, all Germans and all dwellers in the

Habsburg lands whom Hindenburg now approaches in the guise of a helper

will greet the day with a heartfelt joy.”

 

In following the record of the operations it must be borne in mind that

the huge Russian land-frontier of some fifteen hundred miles towards

Austria and Germany is for the most part the frontier of Russian

Poland. This province, in its relation to the bulk of the Russian

territory, has been picturesquely likened to “a huge bastion” wedged

between German territory to north and west and Austrian territory

to the south. But it is a political rather than a natural frontier,

“marked out in somewhat arbitrary fashion when, after the turmoil of

the Napoleonic wars, the map of Europe was being resettled at the

Congress of Vienna.” One may say roughly that this mass of Russian

Poland projects between German and Austrian territories for about two

hundred miles from north to south and two hundred and fifty miles from

east to west. Russia has a group of fortresses in the plain of Poland,

three of which are sometimes known as “the Polish Triangle,” with a

fourth fortress acting as a sort of outpost or “triangle” looking

towards the German frontier. Warsaw (one of the world’s greatest

fortresses), Ivangorod, and Brest-Litovski are these three places

of strength constituting a “triangle,” the outpost fortress being

Novo Georgievsk, at the confluence of the Vistula and Narev rivers.

Then, along the latter river and the Niemen runs a chain of fortified

river-crossings, supplying “a defence line for the region north of the

Pripet marshes, and a well-protected concentration line for armies

destined to operate against East Prussia.” Finally, this well-planned

fortress system is completed by a group of fortified towns between the

marsh country and Galicia. It was the effective “screen” of this system

of strong places that enabled the mobilisation of the Tsar’s vast

armies to be carried out so successfully.

 

With regard to the natural configuration of the wild and mostly

desolate country constituting the wide area of the battle-ground, a few

words of explanation will be useful. There is little high ground until

one comes to the southern border of the great Polish plain, where the

Carpathian range forms a natural rampart. To the north the ground falls

away rapidly to the plain. There are numerous rivers and streams, and

great tracts of forest-clad land. Eastward of the Upper Vistula a low

rise of ground runs first northerly and then trends to the north-east,

forming “the water-parting” between the rivers that flow to the Baltic

and the Black Sea. Still eastward of this we come to the Marshes of

Pripet, or Pinsk, to which I have already referred. Imagine to yourself

some thirty thousand square miles of stream, pool, and swamp, by its

very character utterly unsuited to the marching or fighting operations

of a great army. In the northern region of the plain we find, between

the Vistula, the Narev, and the Baltic Sea more wide-extended tracts

of swamp-covered forest land, pools, lakes, and little rivers.

Altogether, it is one of the worst countries, physically speaking, for

the transport, much less the manœuvring, of masses of men, horses, and

heavy artillery.

 

This historic battle-ground was once the old kingdom of Poland, the

scene of some of the greatest political and military crimes and

blunders of past ages. “Across the plain,” writes the military critic

whom I have already quoted, “winds the broad, sluggish stream of the

Vistula. The great river is to this eastern land what the Rhine is to

Western Europe.... On its banks, in the midst of the plain, stands

Warsaw, the old capital of Poland and now the political, military, and

business centre of the Russian province. There is only one other large

town in Russian Poland--Lodz, not long ago a country village, now a

busy industrial centre. This paucity of large towns is characteristic,

not only of Russian Poland but of the whole Empire. The last census

shows that