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German aeroplane squadrons repeated their activity of the day before and successfully bombarded the railroad stations at Vileika, Molodetchna, and Zalyessie. The well-known English journalist, Mr. Stanley Washburn, acted at this time as special correspondent of the London "Times" at Russian headquarters and naturally had exceptional opportunities for observing conditions at the front.
Far from thinking of making his escape through the midst of these three hostile armies, his only idea now was, that of beating Tchitchakof, and retaking Minsk. It is true, that eight hours afterwards, in a second letter to the Duke of Reggio, he resigned himself to cross the Berezina near Veselowo, and to retreat directly upon Wilna by Vileika, avoiding the Russian admiral.
A Russian aeroplane was compelled to land west of Kolodont, south of Lake Narotch, while German aeroplanes successfully bombarded the railroad station at Vileika on the Molodetchna-Polotsk railway. With ever increasing fury the battle raged along the Styr River on the following day, June 20, 1916.
The right wing, on the same day, had pushed on to the east of Lida and to a point just west of Novogrudok. A German attempt to outflank the retreating Russians from the north, made on September 23, 1915, at Vileika on the Vilia, about ten miles north of the railway junction at Molodechno, failed.
From there it bent back again in a westerly direction, but ran still toward the south, about ten miles east of Lake Narotch, and at the same distance to the west of the town of Vileika to the Vilia, just north of Smorgon.
The door had been kept from closing on Russian armies seeking to escape from the salient between Lida and Molodetchno, while the Germans were squeezed out of that which they had made to the north. They were driven out of Vileika, and gradually the lines were straightened and stabilized so as to run almost due south from Dvinsk by Postavy, Lake Narotch, and Smorgon.
Fresh divisions were apparently brought up from Courland with 140 guns; on the 16th they were at Vidzy and on the 17th at Vileika, nearly seventy miles due east of Vilna and in the rear of the Russians escaping thence.
Aeroplanes of the latter also resumed activity and dropped bombs on the stations at Dvinsk, and Vileika, as well as along the Baranovitchy-Minsk railroad. Russian artillery carried death and destruction into the German trenches on March 27, 1916, before Oley, south of Riga, and before the Uxkull bridgehead.
On the same day German aeroplanes attacked the important railroad junction at Lida on the Kovno-Vilna railway, and also Vileika on the railway running parallel to and east of the Warsaw-Vilna-Dvinsk-Petrograd railroad. In a way this signified the opening of the German offensive against Vilna. Concurrent with it the fighting on the Dvina between Friedrichstadt and Jacobstadt waxed more furious.
They were pursued by Wittgenstein, who from Kamen and Vileika hung upon our right flank, at the same time that Kutusoff and Tchitchakof pursued us. De Wrede had not two thousand men left under his command.
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