The Campaign in Russian Poland

by Percy Cross Standing

CHAPTER IV
EBB AND FLOW IN EAST PRUSSIA

General Rennenkampf’s brilliant raid into East Prussia—which admirably served its immediate purpose of causing the Germans to transfer great masses of men from the west to the east, thereby relieving the pressure upon the Franco-British allies in Northern France—had closed with the brave Rennenkampf’s heavy defeat of Osterode, or Tannenberg, on the last day of August. Two days later had happened, as a counterstroke, General Russky’s capture of the capital of Galicia with its thousands of prisoners and hundreds of guns, so that, in familiar language, “honours were easy.”

In point of fact, Rennenkampf, approved soldier in Europe as in Manchuria, recovered with astonishing rapidity from the severe set-back suffered by his army in the swamps of Osterode on August 31. While, as we have seen, that victory was causing General von Hindenburg to be acclaimed as the popular hero of the hour in Germany, Rennenkampf had the satisfaction of knowing that his defeat had not appreciably relieved the pressure upon the Austrian armies in the south.

On September 9 the army victorious at Osterode ten days before (and believed to consist of eleven corps) commenced a general advance along the East Prussian front into Russian Poland. For several days subsequent to his retreat, Rennenkampf had remained stationary along a line traversing the railway at right angles between Königsberg and Insterburg. This position he clung to tenaciously until noon of September 10, when the long-ranging shell-fire of the German fortress guns which were being used for the purpose, together with a powerful turning movement around their left flank, obliged the Russians to continue their retreat. They fell back on the 11th-12th in a northerly direction slightly east of Wirballen, where a fresh stand was made. Although the scene of action had now been transferred from German to Russian territory, the advantage was by no means wholly with the Teutons. They found themselves operating in a strange and unfriendly region, and one in which the railway system could not be of much use to them for the rapid transit of men and material, seeing that the German and Russian lines have different gauges. Moreover, Austria’s military misfortunes might now be deemed to have eliminated that Power from the problem. And Rennenkampf was resolved not to fight another pitched battle until he could do so under favourable auspices.

Local incidents along this Russian-Polish frontier included the dropping of German bombs and proclamations into the town of Suwalki. By these bombs the railway-station and schoolhouse were damaged and one child was killed. The frontier town of Filipovo also suffered a partial bombardment. While Rennenkampf’s headquarters were at Insterburg, certain of the inhabitants of that place were caught red-handed in the act of signalling movements of troops to their “friend the enemy,” while in a few cases Russian troops were fired on from houses of the townspeople. Several of these irregular belligerents were put to death by sentence of a court-martial. Next morning a German aeroplane dropped in the Russian lines this audacious message addressed to Rennenkampf: “Your troops are shooting peaceful citizens. If this is done without your knowledge, stop it at once! If the troops are carrying out your orders, then know, General, that the blood of these innocent people falls on your head, and on yours alone.”

It was not until September 17 that the Russian general’s clever manœuvring was rewarded by his being able to resume the offensive after the enemy had not penetrated more than twenty-five miles into Russian Poland. On the evening of that day the Germans realised that their attempted outflanking of Rennenkampf’s right was being checkmated by a vigorous counter-offensive. Very severe fighting took place at or near the junction of the railways between Kovno and Vilna, and at Stednicki, where the Niemen is joined by the Dubissa. The Russians held the banks of the latter tributary in force. By the 18th the enemy were falling back from Suwalki and four other townships which appear to have been the high-water mark of their advance. They lost four guns and many prisoners.

Having regard to the fact that a large proportion of the men of the German army corps employed here were troops that had been withdrawn from the western theatre of war, it is interesting to note that they are accused of having behaved with much lack of discipline along the line of route. Such accusations are common enough to all warfare, and the only point of interest here is that they certainly were for the most part troops drawn from the area of operations where so many allegations of “atrocities” have been preferred against them.

Roughly speaking, one continuous battle raged along the East Prussian borderland from September 25 to October 3. This has been styled the “Battle of Augustoff,” otherwise Suwalki, from the name of the province or “government” covering the battle-ground. The battle began in the vast forest that covers miles of country on the Russian side of the frontier. Through these woodlands Rennenkampf retired, fighting a series of rearguard actions on a broad front. An episode of the battle was the attack of the German right on the fortress of Ossovetz, a place of some importance, as it guards a crossing of the river Bobr in the midst of a region of marshy forest.

The garrison met the attack by a night sortie against the German advance, which had got into difficult ground among the swamps and woods. A correspondent who was with the Russian force gives this account of the fighting: