The Campaign in Russian Poland

by Percy Cross Standing

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.