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Transcriber’s note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face(=bold=).
An additional transcriber’s notes is at the end.
THE CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIAN POLAND
* * * * *
The Daily Telegraph War Books
THE CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIAN POLAND
At the Front Series
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=HOW THE WAR BEGAN.= By W. L. COURTNEY, LL.D., and J. M. KENNEDY.
=THE FLEETS AT WAR.= By ARCHIBALD HURD.
=THE CAMPAIGN OF SEDAN.= By GEORGE HOOPER.
=THE CAMPAIGN ROUND LIÈGE.= By J. M. KENNEDY.
=IN THE FIRING LINE.= Battle Stories told by British Soldiers at the
Front. By A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK.
=GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD.= By STEPHEN CRANE, Author of “The Red
Badge of Courage.”
=BRITISH REGIMENTS AT THE FRONT.= The glorious story of their Battle
Honours.
=THE RED CROSS IN WAR.= By M. F. BILLINGTON.
=FORTY YEARS AFTER.= The Story of the Franco-German War. By H. C.
BAILEY and W. L. COURTNEY, LL.D.
=A SCRAP OF PAPER.= The Inner History of German Diplomacy. By E. J.
DILLON.
=HOW THE NATIONS WAGED WAR.= By J. M. KENNEDY.
=AIR-CRAFT IN WAR.= By ERIC STUART BRUCE.
=HACKING THROUGH BELGIUM.= By EDMUND DANE.
=FAMOUS FIGHTS OF INDIAN NATIVE REGIMENTS.= By REGINALD HODDER.
=THE RETREAT TO PARIS.= By ROGER INGPEN.
=THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE.= By MARR MURRAY.
=SUBMARINES, TORPEDOES, AND MINES.= By C. W. DOMVILLE FIFE.
=MOTOR TRANSPORTS IN WAR.= By HORACE WYATT.
=THE SLAV NATIONS.=
=FROM HELIGOLAND TO KEELING ISLAND.= By ARCHIBALD HURD.
=WITH THE FRENCH EASTERN ARMY.= By W. E. GREY.
=THE ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS AT THE FRONT.= By E. C. VIVIAN.
=THE SCOTTISH REGIMENTS AT THE FRONT.= By E. C. VIVIAN.
=THE CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIAN POLAND.= By P. C. STANDING.
HODDER & STOUGHTON
* * * * *
THE CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIAN POLAND
by
PERCY CROSS STANDING
Hodder and Stoughton
London New York Toronto
MCMXIV
Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and
Aylesbury.
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 in European Russia there are only twenty-four places that
claim a population of over a hundred thousand. Russia is a country of
agricultural villages. There are more than 150,000 of them between the
Vistula and the Ural! The plain of the Vistula is not an absolute dead
level, but there is nothing that can be called a hill. There are wide
stretches of woodland, the refuge of the insurgent bands in the Polish
risings of 1830 and 1863. Between the woods are open lands with many
villages, rich lands with a deep soil somewhat primitively tilled.” So
much for the appointed battle-ground and the “lie of the land.”
The victors of Lemberg did not long rest on their laurels. An order
of the Day, promulgated by the Grand-duke Nicholas and phrased with
all that regard for the cherished Slav ideals and traditions which has
helped to make this war so popular in Russia, complimented General
Russky and the gallant army under his orders. Another Order, addressed
by the Grand-duke to the _Sokols_,[1] the Polish bands of partisans
organised in Galicia, sternly admonished them for the use in warfare of
dum-dum bullets, and informed them that in future they would be liable
to be treated rather as malefactors than as _bona fide_ combatants
according to the usages of war.
The Tsar and Tsaritsa set a fine example by spending much of their
time in visiting the hospitals and devising helpful schemes for the
amelioration of the sufferings of the thousands of sick and wounded. Of
the conduct of the military operations as a whole, the correspondent
of a New York journal wrote home that “the Russians evidently have
their heart in their work. They have profited greatly by the lessons of
their operations in Manchuria, both as regards strategy and tactics.
Every day in the field increases their efficiency, and will perfect the
co-ordination between their invading bodies.”
By a coincidence as dramatic as it must have been intensely
interesting, the announcement in Petrograd of the brilliant victory
of Lemberg synchronised with the Feast Day of Saint Alexander Nevsky,
Russia’s wonderful hero of the thirteenth century, who was also the
first to beat back a Teutonic invasion of his country. Only on the
previous evening, in fact, the people kneeling before the shrines in
the churches had prayed to this saint: “O Alexander the Blessed, come
to the aid of your kindred and give us victory over our enemies.”
And when, on the following day, the victory was celebrated with that
impressive ritual which the Greek Church knows so well how to employ,
doubtless many among the Slavs saw an immediate answer to their
prayers.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _Sokol_ is a Slav word for “a hawk,” or “a falcon.”