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Boehm-Ermolli is said to have lost half of his effectives in his attempt to penetrate through Grodek and Dornfeld, fifteen miles south of Lemberg.
German troops were reported marching south toward Poland to assist the Austrians. The Russian successes in Galicia gave them command of the Galician oil-fields, upon which Germany largely depended for her supply of gasoline, which is a prime necessary in modern war. On September 21 the Russians began the bombardment of Przemysl, having previously occupied Grodek and Mosciska, west of Lemberg.
The "phalanx" was pressing against Rawa-Ruska, Magierow, and Janov; Boehm-Ermolli against Grodek, part of which he captured by a midnight assault on June 16. In five weeks the Russian line or front in Galicia had shrunk from 300 miles to about 100. Before Dunajec, when it was united with the northern groups, it had represented the longest battle line in the history of the world.
They also said that the gate in the grodek was ornamented with skeletons. These stories were not true. But in the barred pits dug under the house in Spychow, there were always many groaning prisoners; and Jurand's name was more dreadful than those tales about the skeletons and drowned people.
On the 3rd Lemberg was evacuated, and the retreat, which was for a time protected by the entrenched camp at Grodek, gradually became more disorderly. Over 70,000 prisoners were taken, mostly, no doubt, Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs who had more sympathy with the Russians than with their Teutonic masters, and masses of machine guns and artillery.
In the morning German aviators dropped thirty bombs on Lutsk. Light and heavy German artillery opened a violent fire on the Russian trenches in the Niemen sector, northeast of Novo Grodek. Under cover of this fire German forces crossed the Niemen and occupied the woods east of the village of Guessitschi.
Most of the troops had already been withdrawn, as well as the supplies and munitions; only a small garrison remained behind to man the guns of the forts to the last moment; the little avenue to safety on the east was still open. On May 30, 1915, the Austrian batteries began their deadly work on the Grodek line near Medyka.
For the defense of Lemberg the front ran in a concave form from along the River Tanev, five miles from Rawa-Ruska, down to Grodek and Kolodruby; then eastward behind the Dniester to Zuravno and Halicz.
The main line of that retreat was established for him, of course, by the main Galician railway, which runs back from Lemberg to Przemysl. He prepared a position some two days' march behind Lemberg, and defended with a rearguard at Grodek the belated withdrawal of his main force.
But both were still more astonished at the sight of the public buildings; the church of Panna Maryia on the square; the sukiennice; the city hall with its gigantic cellar, in which they were selling beer from Swidnica; other churches, depots of broadcloth, the enormous "mercatorium," devoted to the use of foreign merchants; then a building in which were the public scales, bath houses, cooper works, wax works, silver works, gold works, breweries, the mountains of barrels round the so-called Schrotamto, in a word, riches which a man not familiar with the city, even though a well-to-do possessor of a grodek, could not even imagine.
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