e beginning of the end for the last great Russian
fortress. On September 2, 1915, Grodno was taken by Von Hindenburg's
army after a crossing over the Niemen had been forced. The Russians,
however, again had managed to escape with their armies. The entire
lack in the official German announcement of any reference to the
Russian garrison of Grodno suggests that there was no garrison left by
the time the Germans took the fortress. In spite of this fact,
however, the Germans of course continued to capture Russians in fairly
large quantities for, naturally, numerous detachments lost contact
with the main body during the retreat.

With the fall of Grodno the next objective of the German troops became
Vilna. Indeed, on the very day of Grodno's occupation, German cavalry
reached the northwest and western region immediately adjoining Vilna,
in spite of the most determined Russian resistance. These, of course,
were troops that had not participated in the drive against Grodno, but
during that time had been fighting the Russians farther to the north,
and now that Grodno was no longer to be feared, started a drive of
their own against Vilna. Vilna is second in importance among Polish
cities only to Warsaw itself. By September 8, 1915, detachments of
General von Eichhorn's army had reached Troki, hardly more than ten
miles west of Vilna.

The Russian front had now been pushed back everywhere over a wide
extent, which varied from about twenty miles in the extreme southeast
and about fifty miles in the regions east of Grodno and Kovno, and to
the north of this territory to almost 200 miles in the center east of
Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk. Of the great Russian fortresses of the first
and second line, built as a protection against German and
Austro-Hungarian advances, none remained in the hands of the Russians.
It was true that the main body of the Russian armies had succeeded in
extricating itself from this disaster and withdrawing to the east to
form there a new line. But it was also true that this retreat of the
Russian army had cost dearly in men, material, and, last but not
least, temporarily, the morale of the troops themselves. For a
considerable period of time during the retreat rumors were heard of
changes in the leadership of the Russian armies. These rumors gained
strength when it was announced that General Soukhomlinoff had resigned
as minister of war and that some of the commanding generals of the
different individual army gr