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Every strategic consideration, therefore, pointed to the Dniester line as the key to the situation for the Austrian side, and Von Pflanzer-Baltin decided to stake all on the attempt. On May, 6, 1915, the machine was set in motion by a violent bombardment.

General Lechitsky, on the Russian side, probably aimed at recovering the Pruth Valley, while the Austrian commander, General von Pflanzer-Baltin, directed his efforts to establishing himself on the northern bank of the Dniester.

The position of Ivanoff's right has been shown; his right center lay west of the Lower San; the center east of the river covered Przemysl; his left center extended along the Upper Dniester, while his left, under Lechitsky, was keeping Von Pflanzer-Baltin employed. Von Mackensen's "phalanx" was slowly coming into action again, directing its course toward the Russian center.

Meanwhile, what had Von Pflanzer-Baltin accomplished with Army C the third column? His path lay through Jablonitza, Kirlibaba, and Dorna Vatra; his task was to clear the Russians out of the Bukowina, and either to force them back across their own frontiers, or to turn the extreme end of their left flank.

Army B, under the German General van Linsingen, who also had some German troops with him, was to assail the next section eastward, from the Uzsog to the Wyszkow Pass; and Army C, under the Austrian General von Pflanzer-Baltin, likewise supplied with a good "stiffening" of German soldiers, was accredited to the far-eastern section the Pruth Valley and the Bukowina.

In that region Lechitsky and Von Pflanzer-Baltin had been conducting a campaign all by themselves; they were now resting, waiting, watching. While great Germanic preparations for the capture of Przemysl were proceeding north of the town, the battle opened on Saturday, May 15, 1915, in the south, against the Russian front between Novemiasto and Sambor.

Right away eastward the purely Austrian army of Von Pflanzer-Baltin was holding the Pruth Valley. The Germanic chain was complete, with every link welded together. When the Russian offensive opened on March 19, 1915, the entire battle line still rested on the northern side of the Carpathians, and here the struggle was resumed.

Misfortune and the so-called "tradition of defeat" had dogged the steps of Austria's troops from the beginning of the war; unlucky generals Dankl, Auffenberg, and others had been relieved of their commands and replaced by "new blood" Boehm-Ermolli, Boroyevitch von Bojna, and Von Pflanzer-Baltin.

Farther south the armies of Generals von Bothmer and Pflanzer-Baltin, too, had to withstand continuous attacks of the Russians and more or less fighting went on all along the southeastern front as far down as Nova-Sielnitsa, a few miles southeast of Czernovitz at the point where the borders of Rumania, Galicia, and Bessarabia meet.

To the southeast of this entire group was another army under the Austrian General Pflanzer-Baltin, which in the early summer had driven the Russians out of the Bukowina. On August 8, 1915, the attack on Kovno was begun.