heart the shortest, that is, as measured by the time necessary for concentrations and for rebuilding routes but it offered hopes of driving a large mass of the enemy into the marsh region round Slonim, where the avenue of escape was nar- rowest (whereas at the latitude of Vilna-Molodechno the cor- ridor broadens out considerably). However, he chose, in the end, to follow the current scheme of operations, as offering " annihilation " of the enemy as a prize, though admittedly that prize might escape him. On the 28th, therefore, with the expressed or implied consent of Falkenhayn, the X. Army was ordered forward on Vilna, with centre of gravity on the north wing, north of the Vilya. Reinforcements were collected from the troops lately besieging Novogeorgievsk and from the VIII. Army, which, after the fall of Grodno, would evidently be crowded out of the line. The Niemen army was directed to press up to the Dvina bridgeheads and, especially, up to Dvinsk, to cooperate with its left wing in the operations of the X. Army north of the Vilya, and to prepare a mass of cavalry to break through the thin line of the Russians near Swentsiany and seize or destroy the railways at Molodechno and Minsk.
The last great battle of the campaign, known as that of Vilna-Molodechno, began after the Grodno episode had been closed on Sept. 9. At that date Linsingen was advancing on Pinsk, Woyrsch and Prince Leopold driving the enemy slowly from one river-line to the next, over the Jasiolda, in the direction of Slonim; and Gallwitz and the remnant of the VIII. Army were pressing slowly forward up the Niemen in the same direc- tion. The Niemen army was, by its activity between Riga and Dvinsk, forestalling and perhaps diverting the attack of new Russian forces which were coming up from the Baltic provinces. From Wilkomir, north of the Vilya, to Orany, the X. Army engaged the very heavy forces that the Russians had collected for the last effort to hold the flank of their corridor the final act of command of the Grand Duke Nicholas before the Tsar took over the control from his able hands. The German offensive progressed slowly, like all offensives against the Rus- sian flanks in this campaign, but after some days it was judged that the forces on the Dvina and amongst the Dvinsk lakes had obtained sufficient security for the left flank, and on Sept. ir the German cavalry divisions broke through the cordon west of Novo Swentsiany and made for Swentsiany and Molodechno. On Sept. 14 the horsemen reached arid broke the Vilna-Molo- dechno line at Smorgon. At Wilejka and farther north at Glubokoye they cut the vital Lida-Plotsk line. A party even reached the Minsk-Orsha line at Smolewice.
This last crisis was also the most dramatic. The first wave of cavalry was followed by others till about seven divisions were collected about Wilejka, Smorgon and Molodechno. But, recovering from their first surprise, the Russians quickly sent troops from Vilna and from Minsk, as well as from the south- east of Dvinsk, to clear their intercepted lines of retreat. These had to be recovered at all costs, for, while the forces retiring before Gallwitz, Leopold and Woyrsch still had the lines fo- cussed on Baranovichi at their disposal, these could not help the northern masses, and it was in the north, towards Vilna, that the centre of gravity lay.
Thus a race to build up forces about Smorgon, Molodechno and Wilejka set in. The Russians, having the better com- munications and consequently the larger forces, won it. They drove back the German cavalry, after a continuous skirmish of five days, to the west of Smorgon and the northwest of Wilejka. Two days later the first infantry divisions arrived on the Ger- man side from the left of the X. Army. The detour of these troops along the north bank of the bending Vilya had enabled the Russians, moving on the shorter line, to reopen their line of communications; and, with this, the battle of Vilna became, like the battles farther south, a slow frontal drive. There- upon Falkenhayn ordered operations to be broken off and more divisions to be withdrawn for other theatres, and fixed in gen- eral the line to be taken up as a winter line. The concluding operations of the campaign, mostly completed in early October, consisted in the methodical advance of all armies to this line,
which, so far as the Hindenburg, Leopold, and Linsingen groups were concerned, ran from Tuckum, on the gulf of Riga, past the south side of Riga and parallel to the Dvina to Novo Alexan- drovsk, and thence southward by Lake Drisvyaty and Lake Naroch, Smorgon, Krewo and Baranovichi to Pinsk, south of which point Linsingen's right came into touch with the left of the Austrian operations in East Galicia.
Autumn Campaign in East Galicia. In East Galicia the pursuit of the Russian VIII. and IX. Armies, after the Grodek- Lemberg break-through in June, had been left by Conrad and Falkenhayn to the Austrian II. Army, the German-Austrian South Army, and to Pflanzer-Baltin. Although the first impressions of the victors in that battle had been that the Russian armies remaining in East Galicia were incapable of more than retreat and rearguard fighting for a long time to come, in fact it cost the Austrians and Germans much fighting and manoeuvring to establish themselves on the line of the upper Bug and the Zlota Lipa; and Pflanzer-Baltin was at one time subjected to a heavy counter-attack by General Lechitsky's Army, for in this quarter the Russians had an ample supply of reinforcements in their Odessa army. Towards the end of July, however, the fighting in Galicia died down.
Towards the end of August, as a part of the same final offen- sive act which produced the battle of Vilna-Molodechno in the other flank, Conrad initiated a campaign which was intended to confirm the separation of the northern and southern groups of the enemy and to clear the latter out of Austro-Rumanian territory definitively. The thinness of the defensive cordon in the Pripet marshes, revealed by the lack of serious opposi- tion to the movements of Puhallo's I. Army on and beyond Vladimir Volhynskiy, and the advance of Heydebreck's Cavalry Corps across the swamps and forests to Linsingen's Drohiczyn battlefield, led the Austrian command to make its effort on the north side of the Lemberg-Brody watershed. Profiting by the general shortness of the line between the Bug and Vistula, Conrad withdrew the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand and the IV. Army from the Brest-Litovsk field of operations in the last few days of August, concurrently with the withdrawal, mentioned p. 906, of the German XL Army for Serbia. During the gradual with- drawal of the IV. Army, Puhallo began his offensive from the line Vladimir-Volhynskiy-Kovel in a south-easterly direction.
The fighting which followed is described in the article ROVNO, BATTLE OF. The incoming of the Austrian IV. Army on Puhallo's left, on the one side, and the arrival of reinforcements for Ivan- ov's VIII., XL and IX. Armies, on the other, led to the battle spreading along the whole front from the Pripet to the Pruth. In sum, the Austrians, after advancing from Kovel to the rivers Goryn and Putilowka N.W. of Rovno, and from the Zlota Lipa to the Galician Sereth, were checked and driven back by a coun- ter-attack group formed by Brussilov's VIII. Army in the region of Rajalowka. The rest of the Russian front taking up the movement, the Austrians were driven back from the Sereth to the Strypa, and from the Horyn-Stubiel line to the upper Styr and Stokhod, while the centre held practically all its gains. From the fourth week of September the battle, after some fur- ther fluctuations on the left, became a stabilized trench-warfare conflict which dragged on till mid-November, when both sides settled down in their winter lines. These ran from the Pripet along the Styr and the Kormin and thence past Dubno to Zborow and so along the Strypa. From the Strypa mouth to the Sereth mouth, the Austrians retained positions north of the Dniester, and from that point Pflanzer-Baltin's front sub- stantially followed the frontier to Rumanian territory E. of Czernowitz. Thenceforward up to the opening of the great Russian offensive in 1916 the only important operations which took place in East Galicia were the relief offensive known as the " New Year battle " (see STRYPA-CZERNOWITZ) initiated by the Russians in the hope, which was not realized, of calling off Austrian troops from Montenegro, and the Russian capture of the Dniester bridgehead of Uzcieszko on March. 19 a divert- ing attack in aid of the spring offensive of the north.
(C. F. A.)
