One more battle on a big scale remains to be chronicled from the far eastern sector; it may also serve to illustrate the wide divergence that not infrequently exists between official communiqués recording the same event. Early in April, 1915, a Russian force threw a bridge across the Dniester near the village of Filipkowu and moved along the road running from Uscie Biskupie via Okna and Kuczurmik on to Czernowitz, the intention being to turn the Austrian positions south of Zaleszczyki from the rear. We will let the rival communiqués relate what happened:
Annihilated two battalions of Russian infantry belonging to the Alexander Regiment; took 1,400 prisoners, and drove Russians back beyond the Dniester.
Annihilated two battalions of the Honveds; captured 21 officers, over 1,000 rank and file, and 8 machine guns.
The curtain was about to rise for the next act, wherein will be played one of the most terrific reversals of fortune ever produced in military history.
For quite a month it had been an open secret that considerable masses of German troops were being transported to the Carpathian front. What was not known, however, was the magnitude or the plan of these preparations. Never was a greater concentration of men and machinery more silently and more speedily accomplished. All along the south of the range, on the great Hungarian plains, there assembled a gigantic host of numerous nationalities. But it was away to the west, in that narrow bottle neck where the Dunajec flows from the Polish frontier down to the Tarnow Pass, that the mighty thunderbolt had been forged. Thousands of heavy guns were here planted in position, and millions of shells conveyed thither under cover of night. Countless trains carried war materials, tents, pontoons, cattle, provisions, etc. Finally the troops arrived--from the different fronts where they could be spared, and new levies from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Smoothly and silently men and machines dropped into their respective places: All was ready; not a detail had been overlooked; German organization had done its part. The commander was Von Mackensen, nominally Commander of the Eleventh German Army, but in reality supreme director of the whole campaign.