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In the positions defending the railway between Cholm and Lublin, Russian resistance was once more marked, and was checking the progress of the armies of Von Mackensen and Archduke Joseph Ferdinand.
The Russian retreat toward the Narew River in particular was regarded by the military critics as threatening momentarily to crumble up the right flank of the positions of the Russians before the capital of Poland. Cholm and Lublin on the southern line of communication of the Russian armies were now in imminent danger.
But so foreign were these things to Ivan's own simplicity of nature, that he ended by repudiating his first doubts of the boy before him who had borne so much. "My name," began the youth, "is Joseph Kashkarin. I was born in Poland, in the spring of 1848, just after we had moved from Lodz to the outskirts of a little village near Chölm. All my life we have been horribly poor.
On the evening of the 29th they attained the Warsaw-Kiev railway at Biskupice, about halfway between Lublin and Cholm, thus crowning their efforts to get astride their important line of communications. The Russians were destroying everything of value in the country as they retired, even burning grain in the fields.
Similarly Mackensen found himself held up between Zamosc and Krasnostav, and for a week the struggle for the Lublin- Cholm railway resolved itself into an artillery duel. The attack was resumed on the 16th simultaneously with Von Gallwitz's movement against the other side of the triangle.
But I begged so long that at last he sent to Chölm for a little outfit, and I took them up to an empty room in the castle, where Marie and I always played in winter, when the family were in Warsaw; and there I worked in secret, at my picture." Here Joseph paused to finish his wine, and then lay back rather wearily, while Ivan replenished the glass.
The bulk of Russia's forces were concentrated in the Polish triangle of which the apex was at Warsaw, the base ran from Kovno by Brest-Litovsk to the Galician frontier, the north-western side in front of the railway from Kovno to Warsaw, and the southern in front of that from Warsaw to Lublin, Cholm, Kovel, Rovno, and Kiev.
Within a few days of the fall of Lemberg they had crossed the Russian frontier, turning the Vistula and advancing in two columns, one under the Archduke Joseph towards Krasnik on the road to Lublin, and the other farther east under Mackensen towards Krasnostav on the way to Cholm.
The territory that fell into German hands exceeded 50,000 square miles, with millions of inhabitants, containing some of the most valuable railway lines from a strategic point of view, and including besides Warsaw such important places as Mitau, Kovno, Vilna, Grodno, Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Ivangorod, Cholm, Kovel, Pinsk.
On the afternoon of July 30, 1915, Lublin at last was occupied by the army of the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, and on the 31st the Germans of Von Mackensen passed through Cholm. Thus the Teutonic armies were now across the important railway from Warsaw and Ivangorod to Kiev, on a broad front, running all the way down to the Vistula at Novo Alexandria.
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