Bialystok, command of the East Prussian Corps.

Chentian paced back and forth, and the staff officers were busy sorting out the information of all parties and marking the latest situation on the operational map in a timely manner.

"Colonel Hoffman, hasn't the Russian army moved in the east?" Chentian stopped suddenly, and the icon on the map representing the Russian army east of Bialystok had been moved for 4 hours.

"Yes, Your Highness! 30,000 Russian troops have been building fortifications in situ, more than 200 artillery pieces have all entered their respective artillery positions, and the trains have all left! Hoffman replied without hesitation, and Chentian had to ask the question almost every half hour.

"It seems that they are waiting for the train to bring up the troops behind, ordering the reconnaissance aircraft to keep a close watch! And what about the Russian army moving towards Kimon? "The Russian army in the west is still honestly in their pockets, but their own troops are not sure to digest them, and Chen Tian is already a little irritable.

"That unit has lost its tracks, and the Walbeck Division of Kimon's 4th Army has reported that no anomalies have been found near Kimon, and the Russian troops on the west bank of the Leif River have long since moved to the area of the Leif River Bridge!"

Chen Tian looked at his watch, and then asked Hoffman to inform the air force far away in Königsberg to carry out a bombing of the besieged Russian army before dark.

"Your Royal Highness, let's attack!" General François entered the house while he was still outside the door.

"It's General François, how did you come back from the front!" Chen Tian was a little surprised, but soon realized that it must be this belligerent guy who was starting to itch again.

"I didn't attack the Russians on the ground after launching a small charge on the ground, but dug trench after trench on the spot, and we stared at them across the trenches, occasionally bombarding each other with small artillery, which was really frustrating! Does the Olg side attack or not? His armored car is full of gasoline! François kept complaining as soon as he entered the door, but he also seemed helpless about this.

"The Panzer Corps is replenishing ammunition! The Russians launched two attacks on the area around the bridge they defended. They also divided and eliminated a part of the Russian army three times, but the effect was not very good. There has not yet been large-scale chaos in the Russian army, and their resistance is still tenacious, which is completely different from what we encountered in East Prussia! ”

"Then let's attack! I think Matthew's Fourth Army can also attack together, and our two armies will squash the opponent like bulldozers from the northeast! François said and made a squeezing motion with his hand, it seemed that this guy had already had this idea, and this time he ran back to convince himself.

"The problem is that we don't have enough troops right now. Use 100,000 troops to backlog more than 150,000 Russian troops, in case the Russian army violently counterattacks...... "Chen Tian is not very relieved about this tactic.

"But the Russian army is running out of ammunition now, and we can take advantage of this! What's more, our artillery has not yet been fully utilized! François became more and more excited, and even began to shake his fists.

"Cannon......" Chen Tian remembered that he still had more than 600 cannons in his hand, and he had been trying to turn the East Prussian Army into a new army with powerful machine gun fire and air support, but he somewhat ignored the huge role of artillery in this era.

"Colonel Hoffman. How much ammunition do we have for our artillery? ”

"Report to His Royal Highness, the daily ammunition base of each cannon of our army is 320 rounds. In Bialystok we equipped each cannon with a day and a half of ammunition, and the artillery of the 4th Army carried a day's ammunition! Hoffman replied quickly in a slightly trembling voice, and it seemed that the chief of staff was quite satisfied with François's proposal.

"Okay, let's first carry out an artillery bombardment of the Russian army for 1 hour, and then the first and fourth armies will slowly advance forward, supplemented by artillery fire to open the way, and the armored army will replenish the ammunition as soon as possible and cooperate with other troops to attack at any time!" Chen Tian finally agreed to this attack, trying to settle the battle on this side before the Russian army launched an attack in the east.

As the siege became longer and longer, the mood of the Russian commander, General Ruzsky, became worse and worse, his soldiers only had a little ammunition with them, and one less bullet was fired, and the artillery was already less, and the shells were almost exhausted. But every time he asked the Russian army in the east for help, the other party's answer was always the same sentence: drag the main force of the German army.

Ruzsky complained bitterly, he and his soldiers had breakfast and attacked, it was already past lunchtime, but their food and kitchen utensils were blocked to the west of the Leif River. Fortunately, there were a few villages from which the Poles, although they hated the Russians, did not have any good feelings towards the Germans, and the wheat had only been harvested for a short time, and the Russians had found a lot of food from there, barely enough for their troops to eat, and now they were cooking food in pots and kettles they had stolen from the villages.

"General!" The adjutant did not know where to find a plate with some strangely shaped food cooked in flour and handed it to Ruzsky, who this time found that his stomach had been rumbling for a long time.

Ruzsky had just gobbled up two bites of food, and there was a thunderclap in the distance, and he looked down at his shadow and immediately shouted: "Not good, the Germans have opened fire!" ”

Soon, countless shells whizzed into the Russians' heads, and many Russian soldiers who were cooking outside the trenches were hit by the flying shrapnel before they could even disperse. The entire ground was almost completely enveloped in the flames of the explosion, the splashes of dirt and the smoke of gunpowder, and the Russian soldiers lying on the ground were almost out of breath. Little by little, Ruzgis moved and managed to climb into the trenches not far away, which were already crowded with soldiers covering their heads, and many of them were even directly hit by mortar shells close to the German positions. Every soldier of our country feels that the whole world is shaking on the ground, and those who shake are dizzy, and those who shake are disgusted. In this era, there was no country whose armies did not worship artillery, and this German army only showed itself at this time.

General François, who was in the trenches on the front line, could barely suppress his excitement at this time, the Russian positions had been completely covered by their own artillery fire, and the trenches they had temporarily dug did not seem to work well, because there was no shelling before, many Russian soldiers simply dug a trench where they could hide, and now they began to pay the price for their laziness.

An hour was so long for the Russians facing death, and even longer for the Germans desperately for the charge.

The shelling, which lasted for 1 hour and 2 seconds, finally ended, and François couldn't wait to fight and shouted from the trenches: "German warriors, rush! ”

The grievances of the German soldiers for most of the day were finally vented, and in the earth-shattering shouts, countless pointed helmets and gray cloth uniforms converged into a gray wave, which instantly submerged the bullet-riddled Russian forward positions. Half a minute later, the Russian artillery began to speak sporadically, the few machine guns were simply powerless to stop the fierce German charging team, and the Russian shells and bullets were like a few small grains of sand thrown into the water, barely splashing a few ripples, and then they were swallowed by the raging waves.

The Germans quickly routed the two infantry divisions at the front of the Russian army with a fierce tiger descending from the mountain, and it was not until the Russian cavalry, which had been shattered by the artillery fire, began to recover and launch a counterattack, that General François ordered his troops to stop the charge, form themselves and begin to advance slowly as planned.

Soon, the Russian soldiers, recovering from the sudden shelling, began to organize a defense on the spot under the command of General Ruzgis, and 5 more intact Cossack cavalry regiments then charged the Germans. The three divisions of the German 1st Army were already lined up on the wide flat ground, and the soldiers seemed to have returned to the days of front-loading muskets, one infantry regiment lined up in a neat square line, in front of the line and between the queues was a half-man tall infantry with a heavy machine gun, machine gunners worked in groups of three, one aimed and fired, one was responsible for towing the cartridge belt, and one kept carrying bullets back and forth from the truck or horse farm behind. The soldiers in the infantry phalanx were all equipped with shiny bayonets, the front row of soldiers stood with their guns raised, and the soldiers in the back row stood by. More than 7,000 cavalrymen from five Cossack cavalry regiments formed two rows of cavalry 2 kilometers wide, and they charged the German infantry from the front, a scene that seems to appear in every war story - a group of brave soldiers tastelessly rushed to the enemy several times their size, and then fell one by one.

The sound of machine-gun fire was deafening, and the infantry in the front row were busy repeating the action of pulling the bolt and pulling the trigger, and the machine gunners were quickly piled up with bullet casings under their feet, and before the infantry could press the second row of bullets into the magazine, the Russian cavalry charge line had disappeared in front of them.

The Russian commanders, like their soldiers, no one cared how strong the other side really was, they firmly believed that bayonets were better than bullets, and they seemed to have wave after wave of never-ending waves of men, no matter how big the casualties, they would be indomitable and indomitable.

"Forward!" General François, who was on his horse, seemed to be infected by the spirit of the Russians, drew his sword and directed his infantry to advance slowly but surely with a neat pace. Time seems to have gone back decades, to the time that belonged to Napoleon. Brightly dressed soldiers marched in neat steps across the fields after the harvest, allowing their cannonballs and bullets to sweep their companions down one by one until they themselves fell.

The meagre artillery of the Russians was at its best at this time, and the shells fell on the advancing gray ranks. After the neat square team walked by, the ground was littered with gray corpses. The pointed steel helmets in the eyes of the Russians were getting closer and closer, and the Germans finally entered the range of the Russian infantry, and after the Russian machine guns and rifles rang out, the German neat queues suddenly dispersed, and the soldiers began to charge in a straggler line, and the machine guns on both sides began to fire back and forth. In this field, where there are no trenches or shelters, any bullet can easily end the life of the opponent. Gradually, the German army pressed the Russian soldiers in the trap in terms of momentum, organization and firepower, and General Ruzsky's 2 and a half infantry divisions and 1 cavalry division that had finally been assembled here could not hold on, and the already scattered defense line of the Russian army began to waver, and some soldiers began to retreat, and then evolved into a collective retreat. Ruzsky found that more and more Russian soldiers were retreating along the way due to the pressure of the German 4th Army from the left flank of the Russians, and everyone barely stopped after retreating 10 miles. At this time, only 120,000 of the 180,000 Russian troops remained, and more than 60,000 were either killed in the sudden shelling or taken prisoner by the Germans, and the rest were suppressed into a flat area no more than 10 miles long and 13 miles wide, but under the leadership of Ruzsky they decided to continue to resist.

The size of the pocket has been reduced by half, the density of the encirclement has nearly doubled, and the encirclement of 120,000 Russian troops by 150,000 German troops seems more reasonable, but unfortunately the battlefield can never use data to determine victory or defeat. Ruzsky led 120,000 Russian troops to dig trenches in the remaining 300 square kilometers of territory, and if the world held a trench digging competition, Mr. Ruzsky and his soldiers could win the world championship without any suspense. When François's 1st Army and Matthew's 4th Army arrived. The Russians had dug some of the original trenches deep and wide, and they not only had a complete ring trench at the outermost level, but also many trenches and trenches crisscrossed the inside, and everywhere there was the sound of earth flying and digging sounds, and many German soldiers even thought they had arrived in the land of marmots. At this time, Olg also arrived at the scene of the accident with the Panzer Corps, which was replenished with 10,000 ammunition, and he merged with the command posts of Matthew and François.

"Little rabbit hiding inside the steel plate, you're finally here!" Seeing the belated Olg, Matthew quipped.

"Hmmm! I'm late! I think this is the terrible power that bursts out when people's lives are at stake, and those trenches, although they can't stop the steel plates of armored vehicles, can stop their wheels! Olg looked frustrated.

"Don't think about it, as always, bombard them with cannons!" François looked very disdainful on the side, the charge just now showed the momentum of the German army, and the feeling of fighting with that momentum was really refreshing.

The distance of 10 miles was an easy trot for the cavalry, sweaty for the infantry, but a problem for the carts and mule-drawn cannons, and the artillerymen had to move forward while clearing the corpses of soldiers on both sides of the road. After 1 hour, the cannons drawn by the cars finally arrived, and after another half an hour, the cannons pulled by the mules also fell, and the shelling finally began! But at this moment, a news came like a thunderbolt from the blue:

A large number of Russian cavalry suddenly appeared around Kimon, and the Wallbeck division was surrounded......