Numerous efforts had been made to reach the beleaguered city by relieving armies, but each in turn proved unavailing, though for a time in December it appeared likely that a combined German and Austrian army would succeed in raising the siege.
The fall of Przemysl was preceded by a sortie of the garrison in a last desperate attempt to hack its way through the enemy"s lines. After a seven hours" battle they were compelled to retreat with a loss of nearly 4,000 prisoners. Only three days" rations were left. In the surrender of the city the Russians announced the taking of nearly 120,000 prisoners, including nine generals, 93 officers of the general staff, 2, officers and officials, and 117,000 soldiers.
Twenty-four thousand soldiers of the Przemysl garrison were killed during the long siege, according to dispatches from Petrograd. Twenty thousand more were wounded making the total casualties of the Austrian defenders 44,000 men. Depleted by disease, subsisting on horseflesh, and surrounded by a superior force of Russians, the garrison of Przemysl was forced to surrender, but fell with honor, the gallant character of the defense under General von Kusmanek being conceded on all sides. The Russian commander who received the surrender was General Seliwanoff. In the early days of the siege a Bulgarian, General Radko Dimitrieff, was in command of the investing forces. General Seliwanoff commanded the Russian forces at Vladivostok during the Russo-j.a.panese war of 1904-05.
The duration of the siege compared with the length of time it took the Germans to capture such strongholds as Liege, Namur and Antwerp was due to two causes, one being the desire of the Russians to keep the loss of life among the besieging army at a minimum, the other to the lack of great guns which the Germans had in Belgium.
The investment was not a close one, the garrison having had a radius of about twelve miles in which to move about. An aeroplane post was maintained almost up to the last, and it is said that even some scanty food supplies were carried in by aeroplane.
Although the victory was a big one, it cost the Russians dearly. It is estimated that 150,000 Russians were killed and wounded during the months that the siege went on. Not only were many Russians killed by the efficient fire of the Austrian gunners, but the fierce sorties where attackers and defenders fought hand-to-hand resulted in heavy casualties.
Przemysl was the greatest fortress in the Austrian empire. Hill, rock, marsh and river combined to give it strength and the work of nature had been supplemented by the labors of the finest military engineers in central Europe. The gallant defense which the garrison put up for days is recorded as Austria"s most noteworthy contribution to the war.
For a long time the fortress had faced famine.
With the fall of Przemysl the only important fortified town in Austrian Galicia which was not in the hands of the Russians was Cracow, close to the German border. A large Russian army with artillery was released for action. The Russian left wing stretched from the province of Bukowina on the southeast to Tarnow and the Vistula River near Cracow on the west.
ON THE EASTERN FRONT
On the eastern front of the stupendous battle line in March the most sanguinary fighting of the war occurred. Losses on both sides were appalling, while the gains in territorial acquisition amounted to little or nothing.
Describing the enormous losses on both sides in Poland, a neutral observer, Mr. Stanley Washburn, said in the American Review of Reviews:
"The German program contemplated taking both Warsaw and Ivangorod and the holding for the winter of the line between the two formed by the Vistula. The Russians took the offensive from Ivangorod, crossed the river, and after hideous fighting fairly drove Austrians and Germans from positions of great strength around the quaint little Polish town of Kozienice. From this town for perhaps ten miles west, and I know not how far north and south there is a belt of forest of fir and spruce. Near Kozienice the Russian infantry, attacking in flank and front, fairly wrested the enemy"s position and drove him back into this jungle. The Russians simply sent their troops in after them.
"The fight was now over a front of perhaps twenty kilometers; there was no strategy. It was all very simple. In this belt were Germans and Austrians. They were to be driven out if it took a month. Then began the carnage. Day after day the Russians fed troops in on their side of the wood. Companies, battalions, regiments, and even brigades, were absolutely cut off from all communication. None knew what was going on anywhere but a few feet in front. All knew that the only thing required of them was to keep advancing.
"Yard by yard the ranks and lines of the Austrians were driven back, but the nearer their retreat brought them to the open country west of the wood the hotter was the contest waged. The last two kilometers of the woody belt are something incredible to behold; there seems hardly an acre that is not sown like the scene of a paperchase--only here with b.l.o.o.d.y bandages and bits of uniform. Men fighting hand to hand with clubbed muskets and bayonets contested each tree and ditch. The end was, of course, inevitable. The troops of the dual alliance could not fill their losses, and the Russians could. "At last came the day when the dirty, grimy, b.l.o.o.d.y soldiers of the Czar pushed their antagonists out of the far side of the woodland--and what a scene occurred in that open bit of country with the quaint little village of Augustowo at the crossroads! Once out in the open the hungry guns of the Russians, so long yapping ineffectively without knowing what their sh.e.l.ls were doing, had their chance. Down every road through the forest came the six-horse teams with the guns jumping and jingling behind, with their accompanying caissons heavy with death-charged shrapnel, and the moment the enemy were in the clear these batteries, eight guns to a unit, were unlimbered on the fringe of the wood and pouring out their death and destruction on the wretched enemy now retreating hastily across the open. And the place where the Russians first turned loose on the retreat is a place to remember.
"Dead horses, bits of men, blue uniforms, shattered transport, overturned gun-carriages, bones, broken skulls, and grisly bits of humanity strew every acre of the ground.
ENORMOUS LOSSES ON BOTH SIDES
"A Russian officer who seemed to be in authority on this gruesome spot volunteered the information that already they had buried at Kozienice, in the wood and on this open spot, 16,000 dead. Those that had fallen in the open and along the road had been decently interred, as the forests of crosses for ten miles along that b.l.o.o.d.y way clearly indicated, but back in the woods themselves were hundreds and hundreds of bodies that lay as they had fallen. Sixteen thousand dead means at least 70, casualties all told, or 35,000 on a side if losses were equally distributed. And this, figured on the basis of the 16,000 dead already buried, without allowing for the numbers of the fallen that still lie about in the woods. And yet here is a battle the name of which is hardly more than known in America, yet the losses on both sides amount to more than the entire army that General Meade commanded at the Battle of Gettysburg.
"He who has the heart to walk about in this ghastly place can read the last sad moments of almost every corpse. Here one sees a blue-coated Austrian with leg shattered by a jagged bit of a sh.e.l.l. The trouser perhaps has been ripped open and clumsy attempts been made to dress the wound, while a great splotch of red shows where the fading strength was exhausted before the flow of life"s stream could be checked. Here again is a body with a ghastly rip in the chest, made perhaps by bayonet or sh.e.l.l fragment. Frantic hands now stiffened in death are seen trying to hold together great wounds from which life must have flowed in a few great spurts of blood. And here it is no fiction about the ground being soaked with gore. One can see it,--coagulated like bits of raw liver, while great chunks of sand and earth are in lumps, held together by this human glue. Other bodies lie in absolute peace and serenity. Struck dead with a rifle ball through the heart or some other instantly vital spot.
These lie like men asleep, and on their faces is the peace of absolute rest and relaxation, but of these alas! there are few compared to the ones upon whose pallid, blood-stained faces one reads the last frantic agony of death.
"The soldiers themselves go on from battlefield to battlefield, from one scene of carnage to another. They see their regiments dwindle to nothing, their officers decimated, three-fourths of their comrades dead or wounded, and yet each night they gather about their bivouacs apparently undisturbed by it all. One sees them on the road the day after one of these desperate fights marching cheerfully along, singing songs and laughing and joking with one another. This is _morale_ and it is of the stuff that victories are made. And of such is the fiber of the Russian soldier, scattered over these hundreds of miles of front to-day.
He exists in millions and has abiding faith in his companions, in his officers, and in his cause."
TERRIFIC FIGHTING IN MIDWINTER
Writing of the desperate fighting in Poland in midwinter when the Germans made a tremendous effort to pierce the Russian lines on the Bzura and Rawka front, with Warsaw as their objective point, an American correspondent, Mr. John F. Ba.s.s, said: "The fighting was terrific.
The detonations of the cannon came in such rapid succession that they sounded like giant machine guns and the windows of the dressing stations for the wounded shook as if from an earthquake. It was not possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the Battle of the infantry fire. All were mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night, as in a furious thunderstorm, the darkness was pierced with the unintermittent flashes of the guns, while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the fighting lines. The wounded brought in filled the hospitals to overflowing.
"It was estimated by the Russians that the Germans lost 60,000 men. I was told by an officer that the bodies of German soldiers were piled up before the Russian trenches in many of the a.s.saults so high that German sh.e.l.ls bursting among them threw mangled pieces of human beings into the trenches among the Russians.
"At night, under the glare of search-lights, the undulating ma.s.s of wounded made efforts to extricate themselves. Then, toward 2 o"clock in the morning, they moved no more." The winter cold had done its deadly work.
FRENCH MAKE GAINS IN MARCH
In the Champagne country of northern France the month of March was marked by almost continuous fighting of the fiercest character. French advices from Chalons-sur-Marne on March 29 were to the effect that 11,000 German dead had been taken from the trenches won by the French in the previous twenty days and that the total German losses during that time in the Champagne district exceeded 50,000 in killed, wounded and prisoners.
STIRRING EVENTS OF THE SPRING
All through the month of April the days were crowded with important occurrences east and west along the battle lines. The Russian movement across the Carpathians was pressed with vigor and some of the fiercest fighting of the war resulted, as the combined German and Austrian troops resisted the Russian advance into Hungary.
Early in the spring the British forces gained a notable victory at Neuve Chapelle in the western theater of war. Then the German forces in Flanders were heavily reinforced until it was estimated that they numbered not less than half a million men, gathered for the purpose of smashing the line of the Allies at the strategic point where the British and the Belgian troops were in touch with one another. Here, for three days, the Germans succeeded in pushing forward, driving a wedge for several miles into the line of the allied armies of England, France and Belgium. And here, too, the Canadian division of the British army covered itself with glory and once more demonstrated the value to the British empire of the "lion"s whelps." On one notable occasion, destined to be recorded in history as a red-letter day for Canadian arms, the gallant fellows from the great Dominion "saved the situation," to quote from the report of Field Marshal French, by a splendid charge, during which they recaptured from the Germans four of their field guns that had been lost the day before.
HOW CANADIAN COMMANDER DIED LEADING YPRES CHARGE
_From Sir Max Aitken"s official account of the battle of Ypres._
"It did not seem that any human being could live in the shower of shot and sh.e.l.l which began to play on the advancing troops. They suffered terrible casualties. For a short time every other man seemed to fall, but the attack was pressed even closer and closer. The 4th Canadian battalion at one moment came under a particularly withering fire. For a moment it wavered.
"Its most gallant commanding officer, Lieut.-Col. Birchall, carrying, after an old fashion, a light cane, coolly and cheerfully rallied his men and at the very moment when his example had infected them, fell dead at the head of his battalion.
"With a cry of anger they sprang forward as if to avenge his death. The astonishing attack which followed, pushed home in the face of direct frontal fire made in broad daylight by battalions whose names should live forever in the memories of soldiers, was carried to the first line of German trenches. After a hand-to-hand struggle the last German who resisted was bayoneted and the trench was won.
"It was clear that several German divisions were attempting to crush or drive back the Third Brigade and to sweep around and overwhelm our left wing. The last attempt partially succeeded. German troops swung past the unsupported left of the brigade and, slipping in between the wood and St. Julien, added to our torturing anxieties by apparently isolating us from the brigade base.
"In the exertions made by the Third Brigade during this supreme crisis, Major Norsworthy, already almost disabled by a bullet wound, was bayoneted and killed. Captain McQuaig of the same battalion was seriously wounded.
"General Curry flung his left flank around and in the crisis of this immense struggle held his trenches from Thursday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. He did not abandon them then. There were none left. They had been obliterated by artillery.
"He withdrew his undefeated troops from the fragments of his field fortifications and the hearts of his men were as completely unbroken as the parapets of his trenches were completely broken.
"The Ninetieth Winnipeg Rifles, which held the extreme left of the brigade position at the most critical moment, was expelled from the trenches early Friday morning by an emission of poisonous gas, but recovering in three-quarters of an hour it counter-attacked, retook the trenches it had abandoned and bayoneted the enemy.
"General Alderson, commanding the reinforcements, directed an advance by a British brigade which had been brought up in support.
"As the troops making it swept through the Canadian left and center, many of them going to certain death, they paused for an instant with deep-throated cheers for Canada, indicating the warm admiration which the Canadians" exertions had excited in the British army.
"On Monday morning General Curry was again called upon to lead his shrunken Second Brigade, reduced to a quarter of its original strength, into action at the apex of the line, which position the brigade held all that day. On Wednesday it was relieved and retired to the rear. "Not a Canadian gun was lost in the long battle of retreat.""
Concluding his account, Sir Max wrote: "The empire is engaged in a struggle without quarter and without compromise against an enemy still superbly organized, still immensely powerful, still confident that its strength is the mate of its necessity. To arms then, and still to arms!
The graveyard of Canada in Flanders is very large."
GERMAN DRIVE TO THE COAST
Before the beginning of the spring campaign, it was realized by the Allies that the German general staff was preparing for a determined drive to the coast through the British and Belgian lines that protected the approach to Calais. It was for this reason that the British took the offensive at Neuve Chapelle and at the important strategic point known as Hill 60. The purpose of Field Marshal French was to strike the first blow, and the attacks were seemingly successful; but later news from the front showed that "something went wrong" at Neuve Chapelle, which in a large measure upset the British plans.
At Hill No. 60, though the British captured that important position, they were held back from further advance. Then came the long-expected German attack in the direction of Ypres, which was considered as one of the keys to the French seaport of Calais. By this attack the Allies were forced back from the Ypres ca.n.a.l, and the positions gained by the Germans brought them within twenty-five miles of the coast at Dunkirk.
The fighting at Neuve Chapelle, Hill 60 and Ypres was probably the most sanguinary of the entire war up to that time. The losses on both sides were enormous. Germans, British, Belgians and French were killed literally by the thousand, the British losses at Neuve Chapelle alone being estimated at 20,000, while the German casualties in forcing the pa.s.sage of the Ypres ca.n.a.l a few days later exceeded 9,000 men.
PRAISE FOR THE CANADIANS
It was in the most furious conflict of the western campaign--a battle between Langemarcke and Steenstrate, in Flanders--that the Canadian troops saved the British army from what seemed almost inevitable defeat.
The Canadian division was in the front line of the British forces on April 23, when the Germans made their sudden a.s.saults and broke through the line for a distance of five miles. Only the brilliant counter-charges of the Canadians saved the situation. They had many casualties, but their gallantry and determination brought success and, in the language of the official report of the prolonged battle, "their conduct was magnificent throughout."