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This meant a retreat not for days, but perhaps for weeks. It meant that Przemysl must be given up, and Lemberg, and even Warsaw, but the safety of the Russian army was of more importance than a province or a city.
In the fourteenth century Casimir the Great and other Polish princes endowed it with special civic privileges, and the town attained a high degree of commercial prosperity. In the seventeenth century its importance was destroyed by inroads of Tatars, Cossacks, and Swedes. Przemysl is situated on the River San, and was considered one of the strongest fortresses of Europe.
They captured in succession Czernowitz, Kolomea, and Stanislau. They did not succeed, however, in driving the Russians from the province. The Russians retired slowly, waiting for reinforcements. These reinforcements came, whereupon the Austrians were pushed steadily back. The passes in the Carpathians still remained in Austrian hands, but Przemysl was not relieved or Lemberg recaptured.
General Boehm-Ermolli, with Army A, was making desperate efforts to extricate himself from the Russian grip round Uzsok, Lupkow, and Dukla; he did not get beyond Baligrod, as the crow flies, thirty miles south of Przemysl. On March 13, 1915, the Russians stormed and captured the village of Malkovise, on the northeast, breaking through the outer line of the defense.
While the struggle was going on in the north, the Austrian armies in Galicia were also moving, Russia was still holding the three great passes in the Carpathian Mountains, but had not been able to begin an offensive in Hungary. The Austrians had been largely reinforced by German troops, and were moving forward to the relief of Przemysl, and also to drive Brussilov from the Galician mountains.
Counting the troops operating in East Prussia and along the Carpathians, and the garrison of Przemysl, the Teuton army must have had two and a half million soldiers. Russia, on the other hand, though her mobilization was still continuing, at this time could not have had as many as two million men in the whole nine hundred miles of her battle front.
The plan does not appear to have worked successfully, for, before the war was many days old, the Russians had taken Lemberg, swept across the Dniester at Halicz, across the San at Jaroslav, just north of Przemysl, and had already besieged the fortress, which at no time imposed any serious obstacle in the path of their progress.
The end was at hand. On March 18, 1915, a Petrograd "official" laconically reports that: "In the Przemysl sector the fortress guns continue to fire more than a thousand heavy projectiles daily, but our troops besieging the fortress lose only about ten men every day."
What it meant to the Austrians has been stated; to the Russians its possession offered the only opportunity for a counteroffensive in the east that could possibly affect the course of the main operations on the Wisloka, San, and later the Przemysl lines. But however successful such a counteroffensive might prove, it could not have exerted any immediate influence on the western front.
He therefore fell back between Rawa-Ruska and Lemberg, yielding the former to Von Mackensen and the latter to Boehm-Ermolli, who was able to lead his battered troops into the town on June 22, 1915, without further resistance. Brussilov now had to withdraw from the Dniester. As at Przemysl, the Russian garrison departed with all stores and baggage before the victors arrived.
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