MACKENSEN PRESSED BACK
On November 6, 1916, came the news from Bucharest that the Rumanian
and Russian forces in northern Dobrudja had again assumed the
offensive and that Mackensen's line was giving way; and that in
retiring his troops had burned the villages of Daeni, Gariot, Rosman,
and Gaidar. Full details of these operations were never issued, but as
day after day passed it became obvious that the Russo-Rumanian armies
were indeed making a determined effort to regain the ground lost in
Dobrudja.
On November 9, 1916, it was announced through London that the Russian
General Sakharov had been transferred from Galicia and was now in
command of the allied forces in Dobrudja; that he had succeeded in
pushing Mackensen's lines back from Hirsova on the Danube, where a
gunboat flotilla was cooperating with him, and that Mackensen was now
retreating through Topal, twelve miles farther south, and was only
thirteen miles north of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad. On November
10, 1916, an official announcement from Petrograd stated that "on the
Danube front our cavalry and infantry detachments occupied the station
of Dunareav, three versts from Cernavoda. We are fighting for
possession of the Cernavoda Bridge. More than two hundred corpses have
been counted on the captured ground. A number of prisoners and machine
guns have also been captured. We have occupied the town of Hirsova and
the village of Musluj and the heights three versts south of Delgeruiv
and five versts southwest of Fasmidja." On the following day the
Russian ships began bombarding Constanza and set fire to the town
which, according to the Petrograd reports, was burned to the ground.
At the same time a Russian force advancing southward along the right
bank of the Danube occupied the villages of Ghisdarechti and Topal. On
that same date Sofia also reported heavy fighting and an enemy advance
near the Cernavoda Bridge. Two days later, on the 13th, an indirect
report through London stated that the Russians had crossed the Danube
south of the bridge, behind Mackensen's front. This was not officially
confirmed, but apparently another attempt was made to strike
Mackensen's rear from across the river.
Meanwhile the Russo-Rumanian line was pressing Mackensen's front back,
hammering especially on his left wing up against the river, until he
was a bare few miles north of the railroad and thirty miles south of
the point farthest north he had been able to reach. Here he seems to
have held fast, for further reports of fighting on the Danube front
become vague and contradictory. At any rate, the Russo-Rumanian
advance stopped short of victory, as the recapture of the
Cernavoda-Constanza railroad would have been. That Mackensen's
retreat may have been voluntary, to encourage the enemy to advance and
thereby weaken his front on the Transylvanian front, seems possible in
the light of later events. Also, it was possible that his forces had
been weakened by Bulgarian regiments being withdrawn and sent down to
the Macedonian front, where Monastir was in grave danger and was
presently to fall to the French-Russian-Serbian forces. From this
moment a silence settles over this front; when Mackensen again emerges
into the light shed by official dispatches, it is to execute some of
the most brilliant moves that have yet been made during the entire
war.