Part 45

When the news was issued that the Kaiser had come east to take command of his army on this front a Cossack came in, driving before him a plump, distressed Prussian Captain whom he had gleaned during the day's work.

"I've brought him," he announced. "I knew him by his mustache," and he produced an old picture postcard from his breast showing the Kaiser with his characteristic mustache.

Near Augustowo the roads are literally blocked in many places with abandoned German transports which became trapped in the terribly muddy country. Dead horses in hundreds lie everywhere and the Russian Sanitary Corps is busy burying them. Yet the Russians who are still moving about this country retain not only their usual average health, but do not even complain.

Between Augustowo and Raigrod a small stream is actually blocked with German stores, including much gun ammunition. The German advance which ended in this debacle has been the costliest defeat in point of materials which they have yet suffered.

*The First Fight at Lodz*

*By Percival Gibbon of The London Daily Chronicle.*

WARSAW, Dec. 5, (by Courier to Petrograd.)--I have wired you previously of the German force which advanced around Lodz and was cut off south and east of the town. This consisted of two army corps--the Twenty-fifth Corps and the Third Guard Corps. The isolated force turned north and endeavored to cut its way out through the small town of Breziziny. It was at Breziziny that final disaster overtook them.

The town and road lie in a hollow in the midst of wooded country, where the Germans were squeezed from the Vistula and pressed to the rear. They had fought a battle during the slow retirement of five days and were showing signs of being short of ammunition. On the fifth day they made their final attempt to pass through Breziziny. That was where that fine strategist and fighting man who held Ivangorod on the Vistula brought off the great dramatic coup for which he had been manoeuvring.

The Germans were holding the town and pouring through when he began his general attack. Breziziny underwent nine hours of furious shelling and only half the town is now remaining. The Russian infantry again proved its sterling quality, and, supported by the tremendous fire of its own guns, drove home charge after charge, smashing the German resistance completely. By nightfall out of two army corps, numbering 80,000 men, there remained only a remnant.

The number of prisoners reaches the total of about 20,000, and of the remainder fully 80 per cent, were killed or wounded. This is the estimate supplied to me. Owing to the small area on which the fighting was concentrated, the dead are lying in great mounds and walls at points where the charges were pushed home. For miles the countryside is dotted with dead.

In the sparser grounds an unknown number of fugitives, most of whom are wounded, are lurking in the woods. From Rawa, south of Skierniwice, midway between Lodz and Warsaw, to Lodz on the line of the former German retreat and present advance, not a single village remains. All the burned-out district is utterly desolate.

On Dec. 1, 2, and 3 the force conducting the defense of the town of Lodz was all but surrounded. The German positions were at Royicie on the southern road, within four miles of the long, straggling street which comprises most of the town of Lodz, while at Zgierz, seven miles to the north, they had a battery of heavy guns with which they shelled the town itself, killing several hundred civilians. The fire was chiefly directed on the railway and station and the Russian guns were unable for some time to locate the battery. It was discovered and reconnoitred at last by an aeroplane.

Then followed an act of heroism and harebrained enterprise which is now the talk of the whole army. On Thursday night last the Colonel of Artillery made his way out and with a little group of assistants contrived to drag a field telephone wire within half a mile of the German battery. While a searchlight was swinging over the face of the country, he lay on the ground, and from there directed the Russian guns, which with his help actually succeeded in silencing the battery. The Russian guns were at this time placed in the streets of Lodz.

On Thursday night, when the attack culminated, there were 700 guns in action at one time on both sides, and throughout the night all was alight with flashes from the guns and bursting shells, and the thunder of the guns was faintly audible on the outskirts of Warsaw, sixty miles away.

Then there followed a general assault of the Germans, a charge of huge masses of men, who followed up into the glare of the searchlights under an inferno of gunfire. Here again the Siberians demonstrated the qualities which have made them famous throughout the war. They met the Germans with a rifle fire from the trenches which not only stopped them but shattered them. They again played the old trick of allowing the enemy to approach within fifty feet, meanwhile holding their fire, and then blowing them off their feet with rifle fire and their use of the mitrailleuse.

The attack failed utterly, and from the very manner of it the Russian losses could not be otherwise than light, while the German losses in the whole of the operations against Lodz and the neighboring positions exceed a hundred thousand killed. No guess at the number of their wounded can be attempted, but we know that score upon score of trains filled with them have gone west along the Kalisz line, and still continue to go.

*The First Invasion of Servia*

NISH, Servia, Aug. 31.--After the butcheries and atrocities which I witnessed during preceding battles I thought I would get accustomed and insensible to these scenes of blood, but from my last visit to the slaughter house I have brought such visions of horror that their very thought makes me shudder. The object of the Austrian Army seems to have been complete devastation.

The fierce battle which the Servians gave them incessantly for more than a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house.

I could not say which of these two conflicts was more murderous, but this admirably fertile region, with its countless fruit trees, is now sheltering the last remains of hundreds of butchered men, women, and children.

When after three days and three nights of truceless fighting the Servians succeeded in surprising the enemy in the middle of the night at Tser, the toll of dead was so colossal that the Servian troops were constrained for the time being to abandon burying the corpses.

Everywhere the fighting was of the fiercest conceivable nature, for to resist the invaders was to the Servians a question of life and death. At several points they fought right up to the last man, succumbing but never falling back.

The volunteer corps of Capt. Tankositch, the famous leader whose head Austria is so anxious to gain, was charged to defend Kroupage, situated south of the battle front, between Losnitza and Lionbovia. Considerable Austrian forces attempted to advance with the view of driving the Captain back.

For two days and three nights Tankositch and 236 volunteers held their position. At last three whole Austrian regiments surrounded them, but rather than yield to the enemy Tankositch and his gallant miniature army resolved to fight to the last. In the dead of night he sent out a small group to meet the Austrians. This group, consisting of a mere handful of soldiers, hurled a shower of bombs at the enemy, cutting up his ranks, and secured a free pass.

At the first break of day, when Tankositch counted his men, only forty-six answered the call. They surrounded more than a hundred prisoners.

It will be realized that in the course of such sharp fighting the Servian losses must have been considerable, although they were much smaller than those of the enemy.

The most pitiful and heartrending aspect of these scenes was presented by the long procession of Servian survivors from the neighboring villages, consisting of old men, women, and children, bringing in the heavy toll of mutilated human beings. At Valievo, the nearest town to the field of battle, large masses of Servian and Austrian wounded kept pouring in incessantly. About 10,000 have already arrived. All had to be examined, all had to have their wounds dressed, and at Valievo there are only six doctors.

In spite of this appalling shortage of medical aid, I witnessed yesterday a most touching spectacle. A car drawn by oxen brought to the hospital at Valievo its load of mutilated soldiers. In the first portion of the car were three wounded Austrians and in the second two wounded Servians and two more Austrians. The convoys wanted to carry the Austrian wounded to the dressing room before their own wounded. A Servian doctor stopped them.