Chapter 192: The Enemy Hasn’t Attacked Yet, But We’re Already Encircled
November 11, 1915, late at night.
In the field hospital of the Lusha 7th Army Group in Krivoy Rog City.
Thousands of wounded soldiers, some missing limbs, others with guts spilling out, crammed into filthy, rundown shacks with crude conditions and a severe shortage of medicine.
The cold wind of late autumn poured in through cracks in the walls and broken windows, making countless wounded soldiers shiver while running high fevers; corpses were constantly carried out every moment—the hospital didn’t even have enough hands or stretchers to carry them, so they had to be shouldered out.
Carrying required at least two people for one body, while shouldering needed just one. Moreover, most of these corpses had been ravaged by wounds and illness before death, reduced to skin and bones or missing large sections of limbs and torso, so they weren’t heavy at all—one person could easily carry them.
Vasily Blyukher, the former Second Lieutenant Platoon Leader of the 6th Army Group who had been wounded multiple times before and miraculously survived, was now shockingly in this field hospital.
Yes, he was wounded again, but survived once more—his life was truly tenacious. This time, it was that slightly lame leg of his, and this butterfly effect led to direct amputation; from now on, he would have only one leg forever.
Although through repeated injuries and his superiors dying in battle multiple times, he had indeed earned some promotions and was now a bona fide Captain Company Commander. But promotions could no longer console his heart.
“How many times have we already risked our lives for the Tsar? To be treated like this is truly disheartening…” Blyukher couldn’t help but harbor endless doubts about life.
On the adjacent bed was another patient named Yefremovich Voroshilov. He had minor wounds, with shrapnel severing several fingers, so his left hand could no longer grip a rifle or pull the trigger. From now on, he could only support the rifle with his left hand and shoot with his right.
Voroshilov’s unit had just been transferred from the Reserve Army Group in Tsaritsyn on the eastern front to the Kyiv theater.
Their battalion had originally been molders from the Tsaritsyn cannon factory. Yet the war had reached such a point that even the low-skilled laborers from the cannon factory were being drafted as soldiers.
At that moment, a military doctor entered the ward and gave some medicine to a few severely wounded soldiers receiving special treatment; after they took it, the medical orderly directly discarded the waste newspaper that had been used to wrap the medicine.
Blyukher had attended church school, and Voroshilov could also read. So, bored, Blyukher picked up the waste newspaper and glanced at it.
The report on it immediately enraged these wounded soldiers.
“Damn it! How are those noble lords up top whitewashing and deceiving the Tsar!”
“The war has turned out like this, with such horrific casualties on the front line, ammunition and supply transports unable to get through, relying purely on filling the line with lives to retake a few mines. And the newspapers are still boasting of great victories and massive triumphs—this is just self-deception!”
Blyukher grew angrier the more he read, viciously throwing the waste newspaper to the ground.
Only they knew that the frontline field hospital of the 7th Army Group saw at least several thousand deaths every day! Those who died directly on the battlefield without time to be carried back— who knew how many there were! Could such a counterattack be called a great victory?
But he was ultimately simple-minded, so he just bitterly hated the noble lords and the clerics deceiving the Tsar; up to this moment, he still subconsciously felt the Tsar himself wasn’t greatly at fault—it was those treacherous ministers covering up and misleading from below.
A large group of wounded soldiers began cursing those villains who took credit, shifted blame, and whitewashed the battle situation.
But the next moment, the knowledgeable Comrade Voroshilov picked up the newspaper he had thrown away, read it for a while, and then offered a clearly higher-level insight:
“Pah! I say it’s not necessarily the clerics and noble lords deceiving the Tsar! It’s that dog of a incompetent tyrant Tsar himself indulging in militarism, not treating the people as humans. Didn’t he just execute General Evert by firing squad to intimidate those generals, making the generals force us to our deaths!”
His words suddenly awakened some officers and soldiers, and many began chiming in with their grievances:
“Exactly! Over a year of war, so many defeats, probably millions of troops dead by now, right? Could that be some general’s problem? If any general would lose, then it’s definitely that dog tyrant Tsar’s problem!”
Seeing the mood was ripe, Voroshilov continued spreading some rumors he had just heard in the past few days: “I heard that some commanders of the Baltic Fleet and Black Sea Fleet were wrongly executed before! No one sold the mine deployment map to the Germanians! The Germanians invented a new mine sweeping weapon themselves that could sweep into Riga Bay and the Sea of Azov undetected.
That tyrant also randomly executes upright officers and soldiers, from naval wrongful executions to army! If the Germanians counterattack again, why not… stop fighting for that dog Tsar!”
The situations of Voroshilov and Blyukher were merely a tiny snapshot of the mindset among grassroots officers and soldiers in the Lusha Army on the Kyiv theater frontline at that moment.
Yet, seeing one spot reveals the whole leopard—such scenes were repeatedly playing out in countless corners of the front line. The grassroots officers and soldiers of the Lusha Army had recently been pushed to the brink by various dissatisfactions and plummeting morale. Like a dry powder keg, any spark could ignite it.
Meanwhile, in the rear at Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and other places, public opinion was still buoyed by repeated great victories in the newspapers, temporarily maintaining a moment of calm.
Many sober individuals who had suspected the frontline situation seemed unwilling to seek out pain in vain, burying their heads in the sand like ostriches—out of sight, out of mind; if the newspapers said great victory, then great victory it was.
And to speak from the bottom of my heart.
In this recent period, the Germania propaganda apparatus opposite, especially Chief of Staff Lelouch of the 6th Army Group, had not used the transmigrator’s foresight of history to contact certain people and organizations in Lusha who had long wanted to rebel and overthrow the Tsar.
Lelouch merely directed the propaganda forces he controlled, spreading rumors through various channels about the Tsar’s incompetence, indiscriminate killing of his own people, and promotion of villains.
But these rumors were truly effective, hitting right at the hearts of the Lusha officers and soldiers.
Many people and organizations in Lusha wanting to rebel against the Tsar unwittingly adopted Lelouch’s rumor propaganda as arguments. Naturally, they became free helpers providing their own rations for the propaganda.
Krivoy Rog City, where the frontline battle was fiercest, naturally became the center of this rumor storm.
And Kharkiv to the east, Volynsky and Zhytomyr to the west, were also severely plagued by these rumors.
The garrison troops in Volynsky, Zhytomyr, and other areas were mainly the 13th Army Group transferred from the Western Front Army.
Many soldiers there had also faced off for a long time in the Poland and Belarus theaters against Germania Army commanders like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, extremely fatigued with war-weary morale.
After all, in the past six months or so, the Polish Theater hadn’t been idle, with both sides engaged in constant low-intensity war of attrition and trench warfare. But Hindenburg hadn’t obtained enough resources from the Emperor and Chief of Staff Fakinhhan to support a decisive offensive.
In Kharkiv and other areas to the east, the garrison consisted mainly of reserve troops moving south from Kursk and the remaining Cossack Cavalry Divisions.
The new recruits moving south from Kursk were still alright, with morale not too low.
But those remnant Cossack Cavalry had been fueled by rage and resentment to the point of refusing to fight for the Tsar anymore, liable to cause trouble at any moment.
A cavalry Captain Company Commander named Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny was also in Kharkiv at that moment.
A few days earlier, while following his cavalry division harassing the German-controlled railway line at Mariupol, his division commander fell into Rommel’s ambush, and the entire cavalry division was pursued and cut apart by armored car forces.
They had barely chosen to break out southward via coastal tidal flats, hoping to exploit the terrain limitations of armored cars to escape. But they encountered the Germania Fleet on the Mariupol beach, and in the end, the entire cavalry division was nearly annihilated, with only a very few surviving and returning, most wounded.
Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny was one of the lucky survivors who escaped with his life in that battle, also wounded. He too had been promoted on the spot to Captain Company Commander after his previous platoon leader and company commander died in battle.
And the surviving cavalry officers represented by Budyonny naturally brought the unfavorable-to-the-Tsar sayings they had seen and heard on the front line to the garrison in the Kharkiv defense zone.
Especially the claims that the Tsar “couldn’t distinguish loyal from traitorous, harmed the loyal, wrongly killed and forced naval officers to rebel, when in fact no naval general sold the mine deployment map to the Germanians”—these were spread far and wide by the Cossack officers who had miraculously survived armored car and naval gun pincer attacks, with tearful and emotional fervor.
The Kharkiv garrison was mostly green recruits transferred south from Kursk for defense; not yet seeing battle, they were hit with this reverse propaganda—who would still be willing to fight to the death for the Tsar?
Moreover, on their way south, they had more or less suffered Germania airship bombing. A few military trains were even directly destroyed by airships while moving, or derailed and overturned because they didn’t notice the tracks ahead were broken.
It was already not easy for these people to arrive alive in Kharkiv, and all they heard was how some friendly unit got bombed to death on the train. A whole train carrying an infantry regiment, with only one battalion surviving; most died directly from the train explosion, overturning, and crashing.
When these soldiers then saw the rear newspapers whitewashing great victories and praising the Tsar, contrasted with the miserable reality they had witnessed on the front line, their mood was imaginable.
Under the multi-pronged assault of factors, the morale of the Kharkiv defenders had also plummeted to rock bottom, second only to Krivoy Rog in the center line, making it the second-weakest morale point along the entire front.
……
The wheel of history rolled into the early morning of November 12, 1915, amid such widespread panic.
At 4 a.m., near Krivoy Rog City in the central section of the entire southern front line, continuous artillery fire shook countless Lusha soldiers awake from sleep.
These Lusha troops were originally still in offensive deployment, with many units pulled up to the frontline positions.
Because in the past five or six days, the Lusha Army in this area had been playing the attacking role; they had never considered switching to defense.
This offensive posture had also cost them an extremely heavy price, with thousands upon thousands of frontline soldiers directly blasted to death in positions or temporary barracks. They never anticipated that the Germania Army, which had been sequentially retreating before, would suddenly switch to counterattack.
“Run fast! Brother Voroshilov, bring your company and hide in the mine tunnels with me! Only in the mine tunnels left by the Germanians is there a chance of survival!”
The division stationed on the iron ore mine northwest of Krivoy Rog City was also blanketed by countless Germania long-range cannon shells. Likely, the division commander and entire division headquarters command post were wiped out in the first salvo; the entire division lost unified command and could only rely on mid- and grassroots officers to adapt as needed.
Captain Vasily Blyukher happened to be in this unit; the extremely tenacious survivor of multiple near-deaths realized at the first sound of the guns that the only chance of survival now was to hide in the mine tunnels—a few days earlier, during the Lusha Army’s counterattack, the Germanians had methodically held firm relying on the mine tunnels, even ambushing artillery observation posts inside, causing major trouble for the Lushans.
Now, experienced Lusha officers naturally had to learn from it and use the enemy’s advanced tactics for themselves.
Voroshilov and a few other officers had grown close in the past few days and, seeing this, all trusted Blyukher’s survival experience, doing their best to lead their men into the mine tunnels.
The bombardment outside the mine tunnels lasted who knows how long—perhaps one hour, perhaps two.
When the artillery fire finally ceased, the group of Lusha officers and soldiers huddled deep in the mine tunnels, too afraid to move, knew only to shiver in fear, completely at a loss.
In the end, it was the militarily experienced Blyukher who suggested: “Brother Voroshilov, send your men out to check; if the enemy attacks, let’s see if we can use the mine tunnels to hold them off…”
Voroshilov hesitated, then gritted his teeth and led men out of the tunnel to scout.
However, after observing for a long time, he didn’t return. Blyukher and the others in the tunnel grew anxious, thinking Voroshilov had been killed by a stray shell.
Another half hour passed, and unable to wait any longer, Blyukher, leaning on his cane and his newly fitted pirate-style wooden prosthetic leg with a wooden stump extension, hobbled to the tunnel mouth.
When he saw Voroshilov and the others still alive and well, he couldn’t help but complain why they hadn’t returned to report:
“What’s going on? The enemy’s fire preparation ended but no attack? Then why didn’t you come back to report?”
Voroshilov painfully swallowed a mouthful of saliva, licked his dry, sticky lips, and said: “The enemy seems to have already finished their counterattack—they appear to have bypassed the mine area, going around us from east and west directions, directly infiltrating behind us.”
As he spoke, he pointed from above at the enemy’s movements in the distance. Because the mine was fairly high, visibility was excellent, clearly showing the enemy forces had split and bypassed the mountains.
Moreover, they could clearly see two unexpected situations:
First, it wasn’t just Krivoy Rog’s mine area that the enemy had bypassed in just a few short hours. The entire Krivoy Rog City had been bypassed by the enemy.
The enemy had no intention of refighting urban warfare; they directly infiltrated and encircled both the mine area and urban area like dumplings.
Second, Voroshilov and Blyukher clearly saw that in this counterattacking force, there were only a very few Germanians, with the main force surprisingly composed of Austrian Army!
Weren’t the ones fighting them tenaciously before just a small number of Germania troops? How had even Austrians joined in? Weren’t Austrians only for filling the line?
But they no longer had a chance to resolve these doubts; soon after, the enemy fully closed the encirclement, then sent a few Austrian Army officers under a flag of negotiation to parley, stating that this Lusha force guarding the mine was surrounded; even if the mine tunnels were sturdy against bombardment, they were doomed to be encircled and annihilated, so they hoped they would see the times and surrender early.
Originally, Lusha officers and soldiers were very resistant to surrendering to weaklings like the Austrian Army, feeling it damaged their sense of honor.
But with the situation developing like this, where was there time to worry about face.
After some calculation, Blyukher and Voroshilov led the survivors of several battalions guarding the mine down the mountain to surrender their weapons to the enemy.
Voroshilov was somewhat unwilling and wanted to use the surrender to get an answer, so he pressed the Austrian regimental commander who captured them:
“Are you troops from the Austrian 3rd Army Group? Weren’t the ones fighting us before the Germania 6th Army Group? Where did they go? Do they look down on us so much that they sent you to fight?”
“Behave yourselves!” That Austrian regimental commander detected the disdain in the enemy’s words and flew into a rage, first giving them a few elbow strikes to make them behave.
Then, considering everything had already happened and there was nothing left to keep secret, that Austrian regimental commander proudly said: “Do we even need the Germania 6th Army Group to deal with you?
The main force of the 6th Army Group has gone east, already counterattacking your eastern defense line! The main force of the Germania 10th Army Group has also gone west, counterattacking your western defense line!
We Austrian 3rd Army Group are handling the central frontal battlefield, pushing straight against you line by line! The main elite forces on the east and west flanks are said to have mysterious weapons as vanguard—you’re done for this time!”
Blyukher and Voroshilov listened in bewilderment, unable to understand what the enemy boasted mysterious weapon was—could it be the armored cars seen recently?
If it was just armored cars, they were still formidable but hardly mysterious.
But these questions were no longer any of their concern.
These troops had laid down their weapons, becoming the first intact units to surrender in this German-Austrian counterattack campaign.
The initial collapse of the Lusha Army surprisingly didn’t come from the pincers on the east and west lines, but from the absolute center of the entire front line—where the Lushans had counterattacked most fiercely—directly crumbling under the sudden reversal.
Krivoy Rog urban area and the entire mine area were recaptured by the German-Austrian Allied Forces within half a day of the battle starting, annihilating the 3 Lusha divisions there, 2 of which were first crippled by cannon fire, then infiltrated and encircled by the enemy, and finally just surrendered.
No struggle at all—the troops’ morale had completely collapsed.
And at the same time, Lelouch himself, with Rommel and his tank division, was on the extreme eastern line of the entire battlefield, furiously advancing northward.
