“During the night the Russians made a sortie, and, marching by roads and paths of which the enemy were completely ignorant, they completely enveloped both the German wings. Imagining that they held all the practicable roads, the Germans had concentrated their attention on the fortress and neglected their flanks. When the enveloping movement became apparent, a fierce engagement ensued, the enemy being completely at a disadvantage. The fortress guns mowed them down on the open road, while the Russian infantry poured a devastating fire into their wings. The battle lasted thirty-six hours, and ended in the complete rout of the Germans, who fled in disorder along the Graevo road. All the German guns which had stuck in the marshy ground were captured.” Retiring through the frontier woods Rennenkampf fell back upon and recrossed the Niemen. It would have been well for Von Hindenburg if he had contented himself with having driven the invaders out of East Prussia. But, flushed with victory, and underrating the fighting power of his opponent, he endeavoured to force a way across the Niemen. By this time, however, the Russian mobilisation had long been completed, and Rennenkampf was reinforced by several army corps when he reached the right bank of the river. The German attempt to cross it in the face of superior numbers ended in a disaster. The attack was pushed with reckless daring, and simultaneously at many points attempts were made to construct pontoon bridges under the fire of the Russian artillery. Every attempt ended in failure. Hundreds of dead bodies floated down the stream, and the efforts of the German gunners to crush out the fire of the enemy’s batteries were unavailing. At last, after incurring much useless loss, Von Hindenburg abandoned the attempt under the pressure of a Russian attack on his flank from the southward. Once more there was fighting day after day in the forests of Augustovo, as Von Hindenburg’s army fell back through the woods towards the borders of East Prussia, pursued by the victorious Russians. Rennenkampf claimed that during these operations the losses of the Germans amounted to 60,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners. The scenes of desolation around Suwalki and Augustoff after this sanguinary fighting were pitiful in the extreme. Practically everything had been destroyed, so that they resembled towns of the dead. All bridges had been blown up, and but for embankments and broken telegraph-wires it was hardly recognisable that there had been a railway at all. Wrote a _Daily Telegraph_ war correspondent of the unholy scene: