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Napoleon only went to Warsaw, and advanced towards the Russians entrenched behind the Narew and the Ukra. Already his lieutenants, Davout, Augereau, Ney, had taken up positions for attack. Furious battles at Czarnovo, at Pultusk, at Golymin, at Soldau, obliged the Russians to fall back upon the Pregel, without disaster to their corps d'armee, although they had been constantly beaten.
When it began the German lines all along the front burst into fresh activity. It was the signal for a simultaneous assault along nearly a thousand miles of battle front. In the Mlawa sector to the north of Przasnysz the Russians had developed an exceedingly strong system of fortified positions between their advance lines and the Narew fortresses.
In these early days of July, 1915, considerable uncertainty prevailed among those who were watching the progress of the campaign in Poland as to where the heaviest blow of the Teutons would fall, whether from the south or the north. The decisive stroke came with lightning suddenness. A tremendous attack was launched in the direction of the Narew by the army of General von Gallwitz.
Since the German failure in December a Russian army had been pushing slowly down the right bank of the Vistula in front of Plock. This movement was checked in February, and the Germans hoped by an advance from Mlawa to get across the Narew south of Pultusk.
The Russians also had collected large forces on the Narew, and were hurrying them toward Przasnysz on roads covering a wide front. Two full Russian corps from this line were flung upon the German left wing. The forces of Von Gallwitz which had carried out the encircling movement from the east and south of Przasnysz now found themselves caught between two Russian armies.
Napoleon, marching from the Narew by Allenstein upon Eylau, had behind his left Thorn, and farther from the front of the army the tête de pont of Praga and Warsaw; so that his communications were safe, while Benningsen, forced to face him and to make his line parallel to the Baltic, might be cut off from his base, and be thrown back upon the mouths of the Vistula.
The Russians were dislodged from Warsaw, and Thorn was besieged; the Vistula, Bug, Wkra, Narew, and other rivers were bridged; and a commissary department was organized. The seat of war was different indeed from any of those to which Napoleon had hitherto been accustomed.
This prince was not at all complaisant towards the enemy; he believed him not upon his bare word; at every position he was about to yield, he would actually satisfy himself with his own eyes, that he only yielded it to a superior force, ready to combat him. In this manner he arrived upon the Bug and the Narew, from Nur to Ostrolenka, where the war terminated.
The German account speaks with admiration of the ride to death of a Russian cavalry brigade which attacked the German infantry southeast of Opinozura without achieving any results. Cossacks and Hussars were mowed down in an instant. The German advance taking several intermediate places did not halt until it stood before the fortification of the Narew line itself.
All the section to the northeast of Warsaw between the East Prussian frontier and the Bug, Narew, and Niemen rivers has suffered even a worse fate, as the bitterness engendered by the devastation worked by the Russians in East Prussia led to reprisals that not even the strict discipline of the German army could curb.
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