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Along the Galician front and in the Carpathians I had seen mile after mile of such trenches, timber-work, wires, and Spanish riders left behind, good as new, until it began to seem as if war were a peculiarly absurd game, consisting principally in chopping down good trees and digging ditches, and then going somewhere else. In front of Ivangorod great preparations had been made.
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.
Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct road to Moscow.
In the preceding chapters we have followed, day by day, the military events of the Russian retreat and of the German advance after the fall of Warsaw and Ivangorod. With admiration we have heard of the deeds of valor accomplished by the various armies of the three belligerents.
It is at this time one of the strongest citadels of Europe, and around it lies the group of fortresses called the Polish Triangle. The southern apex is Ivangorod on the Vistula; the eastern, Brest-Litovsk; the northern being Warsaw itself. To the northwest lies the advanced fort of Novo Georgievsk.
It was fine hunting-ground men, horses, stores, and the new bridge but he sailed away, and we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New Alexandria, burned during the enveloping movement on Ivangorod.
By noon of July 21, 1915, the Silesian troops of Von Woyrsch had stormed the bridgehead on the Vistula between Lagow and Lugawa-Wola, with the result that Ivangorod was now inclosed from the south, while to northwest of the fortress Austro-Hungarian troops were fighting on the west bank of the Vistula.
Already the Russians were beginning to yield their positions to the west of Grojec, which meant that the Teuton armies were about to push into the opening between Warsaw and Ivangorod and divide the Russian forces. The armies of Von Woyrsch on July 20, 1915, seized a projecting bridgehead to the south of Ivangorod, and captured the lines that had been held by the Russians near Wladislavow.
Warsaw had obvious attractions; Josefow was selected because it was far from Russia's railway lines but near to Ostrowiec, the terminus of a line which led from the German frontier; and the object of crossing the Vistula was to take in the rear the great fortress of Ivangorod lower down, and then to get behind Warsaw.
It was plain to any one, however, that although this outer fortress had been taken by storm and a certain amount of damage done to the attacking force by mines laid in front of it, scarcely more than nominal resistance, considering the original preparations, had been made. Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through a stream of wagons and peasants' carts almost as thick as the day before.
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