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What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod. A German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of Infantry Arz attacked the centre. The Russians sent the entire civil population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value they could take, and set fire to the city.
Eight thousand Russian prisoners, 15 machine guns, and 4 ammunition wagons were taken. By the 23d of July, 1915, the Teutonic troops were close up to the encircling forts of Ivangorod and stood on the Vistula all the way between the fortress and the mouth of the Pilica. On the 24th the Teutons announced a victory over the Fifth Russian Army by General von Bülow at Shavli.
Thus, on the forenoon of July 17, 1915, the army of General von Woyrsch, whose objective was the mighty fortress Ivangorod, operating just to the west of the upper Vistula, broke through the Russian wire entanglements and stormed the enemy's trenches on a stretch of 2,000 meters. The breach was widened in desperate hand-to-hand combat.
I long worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a double line a matter of some importance last July. I have since found that it was single. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be described as rapid.
In an earlier part of this work we heard at some length of the arrangement of Russia's girdle of fortresses which to repeat only the most important stretched from Kovno in the north through Oliha, Grodno, Ossovetz, Lomza, Osholenka, and Novo Georgievsk to powerful Warsaw and from there to the south and east to Ivangorod and Brest-Litovsk.
The fall of Ivangorod and Warsaw was the signal for advance for which the southern group under Von Mackensen had been waiting. General von Woyrsch's forces pressed on between Garvolin and Ryki, northeast of Ivangorod. Other forces threw the Russians back beyond the Vieprz and gradually approached the line of the Bug River.
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.
Austro-Hungarian troops too were battling their way close up to the fortress directly from the west. Line after line was giving way before the Teutons. The Russian retreat over the bridge at Novo Alexandria to the south of Ivangorod was carried on under the fire of German artillery.
The chief danger to the Russians at this stage still threatened from the south, where the archduke and Mackensen had pushed forward irresistibly in their advance to the east of the Vistula toward the railway running from Warsaw through Ivangorod, Lublin, Cholm, and Kovell to Kiev and Moscow.
Von Woyrsch's troops that had crossed over were irresistibly pursuing still farther east on the 30th, defeating troops hastily brought up to stop their advance. By August 1 two entire German army corps reached the right bank of the Vistula. Ivangorod, now threatened from all directions, could evidently not be held much longer.
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