rmer and facing the
Niemen River and the fortress of Kovno; the two other armies under Von
Scholtz and Von Gallwitz--the latter the farthest south--were to
attack the Nareff-Bobr line between Novo Georgievsk and Lomza.

The central group was under the command of Field Marshal Prince
Leopold of Bavaria and was reenforced by another army under General
von Woyrsch, which previous to the fall of Warsaw had been fighting
more independently somewhat to the south and, a day before the fall of
Warsaw, had forced the strong fortress of Ivangorod on August 4, 1915.

The southern group was originally exclusively Austro-Hungarian. But
during the early summer of 1915 a German army under General von
Mackensen had been sent into Galicia to cooperate with the Austrian
forces in freeing Przemysl and Lemberg after they had assisted in
throwing back the left wing of the Russian forces then fighting in
Galicia and in forcing them to relinquish their hold on the mountain
passes of the Carpathians. This problem having been solved, these
mixed Austro-Hungarian-German forces were rearranged and reenforced,
and, under the command of Von Mackensen, were to attack the retreating
Russians around Brest-Litovsk. The left wing of this group was under
the command of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand. To the southeast of this
entire group was another army under the Austrian General
Pflanzer-Baltin, which in the early summer (1915) had driven the
Russians out of the Bukowina.

On August 8, 1915, the attack on Kovno was begun. At the same time the
German forces advanced against Lomza and still farther south advanced
nearer and nearer to the Warsaw-Bialystok-Vilna-Petrograd railroad,
their main objective for the present. All these advances found serious
opposition at the hands of the Russians, who successfully attempted to
hold up the enemy everywhere in order to insure the safety of their
retreating armies. On August 10, 1915, the Russians attempted an
unsuccessful sortie from Kovno. Farther south, as far as Lomza, the
Russian forces continued their retreat, fighting continuous rear-guard
actions for the purpose of delaying the hard-pressing enemy, who,
however, gradually came closer and closer to the Nareff-Bobr line. Of
course the losses on both sides throughout this continuous fighting
were severe. The Russians lost thousands of men by capture, for
although they succeeded in withdrawing, practically intact, the
principal parts of their armies before the Ge