The Story of the Great War, Volume 3: History of the European War from Official Sources
History
The Story of the Great War, Volume 3: History of the European War from Official Sources
World War, 1914-1918
The armies to the south of this group, cooperating in the drive under
Field Marshal von Mackensen which had gained the Teutons Przemysl and
Lemberg, had as their left flank the forces of Generals von Woyrsch
and Koevess between the Pilica and the Vistula mouth of the San. The
troops of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand were pushing forward on the right
of these, and the army directly under Mackensen himself came next in
line to the eastward, joining up with the armies still operating in
Galicia at the extreme right of the great German battle line.
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.
The advance of these Austro-German armies, which had operated in the
neighborhood of Lemberg, was extremely rapid in the last days of June,
1915. In four days they covered from thirty to forty miles in pursuit
of the Russians. By the 1st of July, having swept out of Galicia,
their right, under Mackensen, entered the upper valley of the Wieprz,
a marshy country which presented considerable difficulty to the
advance of troops where a tributary of the Wieprz, the Por, afforded
the Russians a natural line of defense. Drasnik, on the Wyznica, which
here extended the Russian defensive line westward, was occupied by the
archduke's forces on Mackensen's left on the 1st of July, 1915.
The drive of the Austro-German armies through Galicia has been dealt
with in the account of the Austro-Russian campaign. As we carry
forward the account of the activities of the greatest part of the
forces concerned in that series of operations from the point where
they crossed over the boundary between Galicia and Poland out of
Austrian territory, it will be well to glance backward a moment to
enumerate here briefly the gains of these armies on Polish soil up to
the 1st of July.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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