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.
A yell of savage fury rose from the storming columns of the Russians,
who had thus been stopped in their career and baulked of their objective
in this most bloody and calamitous manner; and though the impact of
succeeding waves of assailants soon levelled all the wire fencing with
the ground, still the mass momentum of their charge had been diminished,
their dogged courage had also been shaken by the busy doings of Death
among their huddled ranks during their temporary check; but worst of
all, before the Russians could recover the force of their forward rush,
the Germans were out of their entrenchments and upon them with the
bayonet.
A few moments of grim and ghastly hand-to-hand fighting then ensued—and
let it never after this be said that the bayonet has been entirely
supplanted by the bullet; but I had only time to observe that Gourko’s
brave,—I was almost going to say indomitable,—troops were beginning to
waver, to go down, to yield before the forceful push of the Teutonic
pike, when suddenly again the electric lights of the Russians were
turned off, and the dark curtain of night, in mercy to the vanquished,
fell upon the bloody drama.
Pursuit by the Germans in such circumstances was quite impossible, but,
recovering their ranks with singular precision, they sent salvo after
salvo of artillery and musketry in the direction of the retreating foe,
until the ‘Cease firing’ was sounded all along our victorious line as
the faint and startled dawn began to blush—as if for very shame at such
infernal work; and the bugle-sounds were supplemented by the shrill
whistles of the company commanders, reminding me of the days when I
loved to listen to the clear piping of the darting water-ousel among the
rocky streams of the Grampians, amid scenes unsullied by the bloody hand
of war.
When the day broke the results of the nocturnal battle revealed
themselves in all their ghastly horrors; but, beyond saying that about
10,000 dead and wounded Russians lay in front of our extended lines, and
nearly a third of that number of Germans in and about our own
entrenchments, I will not disgust your readers with a realistic
description of the ghastliness of the battlefield—the first of its kind,
and one which has resulted from an endeavour to neutralise, or at least
minimise, the destructive effects of the murderous magazine-rifle.
REPULSE OF THE GERMAN ARMY.
(_By Telegraph from our Special Correspondent, Mr. Charles Lowe._)
ALEXANDROVO, _May 5_, 7 P.M.
This first great victory of ours over the Russians has been somewhat
damped by the news, just received, that our army of Silesia, which had
begun to marshal around Czenstochau preparatory to a further push
forward, has suffered a rather serious reverse at the hands of the Grand
Duke Vladimir, commanding the 14th and 15th Russian Corps d’Armée, who
fell upon Prince George of Saxony before he had completed his
concentration, and compelled him to fall back.
On hearing, however, of Gourko’s crushing defeat by us, and his retreat
towards Warsaw, the Grand Duke Vladimir, like the victorious Wellington
at Quatre-Bras (who desired to effect a junction with Blücher, on the
latter being worsted by the French at Ligny), resolved to forego the
immediate fruits of his triumph and retire to a point that would enable
him to join hands with the retreating Gourko, and thus give combined
battle to the Germans. This point will probably be Skierniwiçe, the
junction-point of the railway lines from Alexandrovo and Czenstochau to
Warsaw, famous in modern history as the pacific meeting-place of the
three Emperors and their Chancellors several years ago.
Skierniwiçe, therefore, will probably be the Waterloo of the
Russo-German portion of the campaign, whoever proves its Wellington; but
Skierniwiçe is very much further from Alexandrovo and Czenstochau than
Quatre-Bras and Ligny were from Mont St. Jean, and some little time,
therefore, must necessarily yet elapse before I shall have it in my
power to chronicle the Waterloo of the present war.
EXCITEMENT IN BRUSSELS.
(_By Telegraph from our Special Correspondent._)
BRUSSELS, _May 5_.
Brussels to-day is rent by conflicting emotions. Frenzied rage, poignant
anxiety, and boiling excitement are struggling not so much for mastery
as for satisfactory expression. The news of the forthcoming occupation
of Antwerp by a British Army Corps has not been received here with
expressions of unmixed satisfaction. The very fact that the negotiations
were kept wholly secret, with the result that the announcement of so
important a decision first reached us through the public report of the
debate in the House of Commons, has, whether justly or otherwise matters
not, set a vast number of well meaning people by the ears. When the news
reached Brussels yesterday it produced an extravagant sensation which
grew as the night advanced. By tacit consent people refused to go to
bed—clubs and cafés were kept open till morning, and all through the
principal thoroughfares the noise of heated discussions might be heard
in full blast round the tables outside the cafés and at every street
corner. A large section of the population, in which ranked many of the
better classes, were greatly incensed against the King’s Government. ‘It
is not astonishing,’ they said, ‘that the measure was kept secret;
otherwise the people would never have permitted so infamous a traffic!’
All the old arguments of 1859 and the half dozen succeeding years were
revived, and in every group of angry disputants the name of Adelson
Castiau continually recurrent, was flung passionately on the night with
every varied accent of which the human voice is capable. ‘_Il l’a bien
dit, Castiau._ He knew, he foresaw what must happen, and idiots that we
were, we would not listen.’ This was the prevailing cry.
It must be explained that M. Adelson Castiau—who is just at present
given posthumous rank as a hero and patriot—was an eminent lawyer and
ex-deputy, who, from the first, vehemently opposed the fortification of
Antwerp. From the day when in 1859 a committee of twenty-seven officers
were appointed to discuss the subject until the completion of the
immense work some six years later, M. Castiau waged war against the
scheme. He spoke, wrote, organised committees, and headed deputations
protesting against the plan. His argument was that, from a military
point of view, the project involved in principle the abandonment of the
country and a shameful flight by the army towards the ‘Polders de
l’Escaut,’ where certainly no one would ever come to molest it, but
would be quite content to leave it to be destroyed by marsh fevers. The
fortification of Antwerp, he said later, meant the destruction of our
neutrality. Antwerp offers to-day, with her forty kilometres of
heavily-armed works, her citadel and her dozen attached forts, a
standing invitation to invasion. It was handing over the country to the
first comer, and building up one of the finest military and commercial
positions in the world, only for the benefit of England, which had
coveted it for over a century.
And to-day the good people of Brussels, and, I fear of Belgium
generally, are regretfully recalling his words and indorsing his
opinion. Hence the frenzied rage of which I have spoken leaping
flame-like all the length of the Boulevards.
BRUSSELS, _May 7_, 10 A.M.
[Illustration:
BRITISH TROOPS IN THE PLACE VERTE, ANTWERP.
]
I have just heard that the British Army Corps, under Sir Evelyn Wood,
has reached Antwerp, and that disembarkation is rapidly going forward.
Until the transports with their escort of cruisers and torpedo boats
actually steamed up the river, people here affected to believe that they
would not come. Chatterers in the clubs boasted loudly that the wind of
popular opinion would drive the English vessels back from the shores of
the Scheldt. The obvious absurdity of this anticipation is but
emphasised by the fact that the worthy Antwerpers have received the
invaders, if not with enthusiasm, at any rate with a demeanour at once
friendly and business-like. Telegrams in the clubs here comment rather
bitterly on the fact, that instead of visiting them with haughty
resentment, the townsfolk are doing a lively trade with the alien
soldiers in light beers and other cheap beverages, which the troops are
freely purchasing beneath the Rubens Statue in the Place Verte, where
they are being rendezvoused before proceeding to their billets.
The fear has now grown into dread certainty that what we have always
expected is about to happen. France intends to invade Belgium, and we
have before us the prospect of another Waterloo. Why have the German
troops delayed? It has been set forth again and again by strategists
that Germany’s most obvious plan would be to concentrate her Army Corps
of the North upon the Belgian frontier of France, that it would
therefore be to her advantage either to make use of the two railway
lines which, from Cologne and Aix-la-Chapelle, run to Luxembourg,
Thionville, and Virton—one by way of Trèves and the other by
Verviers—or, and by this even more important results might be obtained,
she might combine with this movement the seizure of the line of the
Meuse, when, by debouching a part of her forces by Chimay into the
Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse, she would be able to attack in flank the French
forces engaged in preventing the Northern Army Corps forcing the passage
of the Meuse between Dun and Mezières.