A German Battery overwhelmed by Cossacks.
This grim picture illustrates the fate of the Germans who were trapped in the "pocket" as described on page [255].
An extraordinary state of things soon occurred. At first the Russians beat off attacks on the causeway, and held the German army in the villages north of the marshes. But on 19th November von Mackensen made a huge effort. He crossed the causeway, and pushed the Russians well south of Piatek. For the next four days his troops tramped across the causeway, and the Russians fell back more and more, till there was a deep sag in their line east of Lodz. Von Mackensen pushed this sag deeper and deeper, and wider and wider, until it resembled a pocket, and on 23rd November the bottom of the pocket fell out, and the Russian army was split into two parts, as shown in the diagram on the next page. The Germans burst through the gap, and the Russians were now in a most dangerous plight, especially as the enemy was bringing up strong forces both from the south-east and the south. Lodz was now being attacked from the front, from the flank, and from the rear. The Germans appeared to have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip," says the old proverb. The Germans now expected to envelop the divided forces of the Russians, and make an end of them altogether. But when the cup was almost at their lips, the slip took place. The Russians had hastily summoned guns and men from Asia, and troop trains had been rolling for weeks past at top speed along the Siberian railway. The Siberians were detrained at a station on the railway south of Lowicz, just as reinforcements from the south were at last coming up. On the 24th the Siberians appeared on the field; another day, and they would have been too late—the Russian left would have been destroyed for ever.
Ruzsky, now reinforced, did his utmost to close up the mouth of the pocket, and thus cut off the 90,000 Germans who were within it. For two days he pressed together the edges of the top of the pocket, and more and more shut in the trapped corps. More troops were needed to close it completely, and Rennenkampf, on the extreme right, was ordered to push forward with the utmost speed. Unhappily, he arrived a day too late, and the pocket was never wholly shut up.
Von Mackensen strove hard by bringing up reserves to force back the Russians who were pinching him on either side, and by doing so managed to provide an exit for his trapped troops. From 24th to 26th November a furious struggle continued night and day. Battalions were broken into fragments, and the men roamed about the frozen and deserted land "like a pack of hungry wolves." By the 26th something like 40,000 men had escaped, and had reached their own lines. Amongst them was a remnant of the Prussian guards. Not only had thousands of Germans been killed and wounded, but multitudes of prisoners were in Russian hands. A few days later Warsaw was swarming with them. But for Rennenkampf's late arrival Russia would have accomplished a new Sedan.