The Battle of the Masurian Lakes.

104 years ago today in 1915, in the middle of a
howling winter snowstorm that sliced through the
bones of man and beast alike,

General Paul von
Hindenburg, gave the order for the German Eighth
Army to attack the Russian tenth army, thus
beginning the harrowing Winter Battle of the
Masurian Lakes.

It would be a full fortnight before
the battle was at an end, and when it was at last
over over half the Russian army, more than 100,000
men, would be frozen to death.

At the start of 1915, the two warring sides had
found themselves where they had left off in 1914: at
stalemate on all fronts. The new German chief of
staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, rightly believed that the
Western Front was where the war could be won and
had hoped to launch an offensive that would rip the
British out of their trenches and hurl them back into
the channel. Burdened as Germany was however
with two fronts, this was unfeasible, especially with
their ally Austria-Hungary fairing so ill on the
Carpathian Front against the Russian steamroller.
After a failed attack to push into Congress Poland
from Silesia, the Germans refocused their attention
to their own territory.

In spite of their crushing
victory over the Russians in August 1914 at the
Battle of Tannenberg, the Tsar’s legions still held
sway over a portion of East Prussia, their tenth
army’s position centred upon the Masurian Lakes
region. The German Eighth Army of Otto von Below
had held the fort there until now, keeping the
Russians from delving any deeper into the Prussian
heartland. Now however they were reinforced by the
tenth army of Hermann von Eichhorn. Despite
warnings from the Baltic German general of the
Russian tenth army, Thadeus von Sievers, that an
attack was imminent, the Northwestern Commander,
Nikolai Ruzsky, paid no heed to him, the idea of the
Germans launching an offensive seeming all the
more implausible with the biting cold winter
weather.
Yet even as fresh snowstorms hailed down on the
icy pine forests, the Germans were planning to do
exactly that. The German plan was bold and simple;
outflank the Russians from the north, curl around
them, and then herd them like cattle into the Forest
of Augustów.

Hindenburg gave the order and at
once the German howitzers thundered into life, their
shells ripping through the ice and snow into the
unassuming Russians. Von Below’s left flank made
the turning maneuver, his pickelhaube-clad men
striking terror into the hearts of the Russians as
they emerged on foot and on horseback out of the
haze of the snowstorm, tearing through the ill
prepared shallow trenches that awaited them with
relative ease. The following day von Eichhorn’s men
started their advance and pushed the Russians back
into a humiliating retreat. For ten consecutive days
over two hundred thousand soldiers of the Tsar’s
army were driven through the deathly ice and snow
like clumsy beasts under the blows of a drover, yet
there was to be no reprieve for them. At all times
the teeth of the German army remained at their
heels, remorselessly shepherding them south with
pitiless might. With some snow drifts rising as high
as a man, the German advance, invigorated as it
was by the Russian supplies they had captured, was
slowed for a time but it did not take long for their
merciless momentum to kick in again and hound
the Russians down.

After days of non-stop trudging through the winter
snows under the spectre of terror posed by the
pursuing Germans, the 20th army corps of General
Bulgakov eventually found itself in the Forest of
Augustów, cut off and surrounded by the German
tenth army. Hopeless as his situation was, with his
men dying by the score around him from the cold,
Bulgakov chose to make a heroic last stand against
the Germans so that at least some of his men
could escape and live to tell the tale. On the
twenty-first of February, over 92,000 Russian
soldiers surrendered to the Germans. The other
100,000 peasant soldiers of the Tsar however
remained in the icy clutches of death, their frosted
faces frozen in a rictus of agony as they littered the
dark soils of the forest in their tens of thousands.
The horror of the campaign chilled even the great
Hindenburg himself who noted that “the name of the
Winter Battle in Masuria, charms like an icy wind or
the silence of death. Men will ask themselves ‘have
earthly beings really done these things, or was it all
but a fable or a phantom? Are not these marches in
the winter nights, that camp in the icy snow storm,

that last phase of the Battle of Augustow, but the
creation of an inspired human fancy?’

The German advance was thereafter checked by a
counter-attack launched by General Paul von Plehwe
of the Russian Twelfth Army. With their Habsburg
allies still losing ground in the Carpathians with the
fall of the fortress of Przemysl, the Germans
thereafter decided to give the Austro-Hungarians a
helping hand and later that year would inflict a more
decisively punishing defeat upon the Russians in
the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive. While the scale of
these defeat suffered was undeniable however, it
would take many more battles and many more
hundreds of thousands of dead Russian soldiers
before Russia finally buckled in on itself in the
flames of unrest and revolution.