from bursting
shrapnel. The peasants from the villages to the west and south streamed
into the city in vast numbers. Thousands of wounded coming from all
directions added still more to the horror and excitement.

The hardest fighting around Blonie occurred from October 13 to 17, 1914.
On the 13th the Germans were forced to evacuate Blonie, and on October
14 Pruszkow, a little farther south and still nearer to Warsaw. On
October 15 the Russians made a wonderful and successful bayonet attack
on another near-by village, Nadarzyn. The next day, the 16th, saw almost
all of this territory again in the hands of the Germans, and on the 17th
they succeeded even in crossing the Vistula over a pontoon bridge
slightly south of Warsaw. However, even then the arrival of Russian
reenforcements made itself felt, for after a short stay on the right
bank of the Vistula the Germans were thrown back by superior Russian
forces. All that day the fighting went on most furiously and lasted deep
into the night. The next day at last the Russian armies had all been
assembled.

CHAPTER LXXVIII

GERMAN RETREAT FROM RUSSIAN POLAND

On October 19, 1914, the Germans, who apparently had accurate
information concerning the immense numbers which they now faced, gave up
the attack and began their retreat. The retreat was carried out with as
much speed and success as the advance. By October 20 the Germans had
gone back so far that the Russian advance formations could not keep up
with them and lost track of them. Without losing a gun, the First German
Army managed to escape the pursuing Russians as well as to evade two
attempts--one from the south and one from the north--to outflank them
and cut off their retreat.

During the fighting before Warsaw the total front on which the Russian
armies were battling against the German and Austrian invaders of Poland
was about 160 miles long, stretching from Novo Georgievsk in the north,
along the Vistula, through Warsaw and Ivangorod to Sandomir at the
Galician border in the south. All along this line continuous fighting
went on, and the heaviest of it, besides that directly before Warsaw,
took place around the fortress of Ivangorod. Two attempts of the
Russians to get back to the left side of the Vistula on October 12 and
14, 1914, were frustrated under heavy losses on both sides. A German
soldier states in a letter written home during the actual fighting
before Ivangorod that at the end of one day, out