This battle was a German victory and a Russian disaster. More than 92,000 people were taken prisoner. An estimated 30,000 people were killed and missing. About five hundred guns of the Second Army were destroyed or captured. Gilinsky was concerned about Samsonov's fate and ordered Nian Kampf to find the location of the now-defunct Second Army. But for many years Kampf turned around and fled, because the victorious Eighth Army concentrated fire on his troops.

Two weeks later, at the Battle of Lake Masuri, the Germans wiped out all Russian forces in East Prussia. Compared with the German casualties of 10,000, the casualties of Kampf's troops in successive years amounted to 145,000. Hysterical about this disproportionate loss, Kampf abandoned his army and fled back to Russia. Furious at his cowardice, Gilinsky sent a telegram to the Grand Duke, demanding that he be removed from office immediately. According to the commander of the Petrograd garrison, Noskov: "Kampf for many years...... His march was interrupted in order to avoid aiding Samsonov. He was even accused of collaborating with the enemy: \'He's a German, what else can you expect him to do?' The commander-in-chief not only deposed Kampf for many years, but also removed Gilinsky "because he lost his mind and could not master the battle."

Compared with the German army, which created glory by fighting less, the Austro-Hungarian army was not worthy of their name of "empire" at all, and the commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian army, General Conrad, was not as good as General Hindenburg, or even as good as any German general. Conrad is better at waging a war than winning it.

His pre-war plan was to subdue Serbia and at the same time send a large number of troops to Galicia to launch an offensive against Russia. But when Conrad divided his six army groups into two fronts, he effectively eliminated the chance of victory - neither Serbian nor Russian, Conrad's forces were superior.

He sent Potiorek to the Serbian front, further reducing the chances of victory. As governor of Bosnia, Portiorek has not recovered since failing to protect Francis Ferdinand from assassination. Now that he is worried and cowardly, fearing that he too may be assassinated, refusing to show his face in front of his troops, and making his "decisions" far from the battlefield, how can such a general lead his troops to victory?

Because Serbia's eastern neighbor, Bulgaria, had joined the Allies and declared war on Serbia, and a Bulgarian army group joined the attack in order to regain the land that had been stolen by Serbia. The two countries will flank Serbian forces from both north and south.

This gave the Austro-Hungarian army a big advantage, and they could only attack on the northern and western borders of Serbia. Access to this area is blocked by natural obstacles such as the Danube, Sava and Drina, which can only be crossed by boats or rafts, and on both sides of the rivers are mountainous.

The Serbian army, which was greatly outnumbered, had no choice but to engage in a delayed battle until the Entente could come to their aid. The Serbian commander, General Radomir Putnik, lacked artillery, automatic weapons and transport, and had to rely on veterans of the recent Balkan wars who had trained to make up for them. Most importantly, Putnik was adept at maneuvering the enemy to fight in the terrain that was most advantageous to him.

On 12 March, three Austrian armies and one Bulgarian armies, including nineteen divisions, invaded Serbia. The Serbian commander Putnik stationed some troops along the northern river border, while the main body of his army was concentrated in an arc formed by the confluence of the Drina and Sava rivers. The Serbian army continued to retreat under the Austrian attack until it reached a defensive zone suitable for Putnik's tactical needs.

In the southeastern border with Bulgaria, Putnik sent troops of a corps to set up a defensive line along the border, and due to the lack of troops, the Serbian army was quickly broken through by the Bulgarian army.

On the northern front, however, the Serbian army achieved good results, and on 16 March, Putnik attacked along a thirty-mile front on the Yadar River. Before sunset, the surviving Austrians fled desperately back to the Drina River. Putnik then attacked the Austrian left flank, which quickly broke up and retreated, suffering heavy casualties. The Austrian rout was even more striking, for the sixty-seven-year-old Putnik, a bedridden patient with occasional ills, commanded the campaign from his bedroom.

Serbia, which has experienced many wars such as the Balkan War, has a considerable number of veterans, who are the backing of a force to support, and in the face of the Austro-Hungarian army, which has an advantage in equipment and mobile tools, the Serbian army did not show weakness and took the initiative to attack, completely defeating the invincible Austro-Hungarian army.

Conrad, not knowing that a serious blow had been inflicted on his troops, took a train that night to the fortified city of Przemyšl in Galicia. When he heard the news the next day, he ordered Potiorek to transfer a corps of the Second Army from his Danube defense zone to reinforce the Austrian forces facing the Serbian army. Potiorek needed the entire Second Army, but Conrad decided to draw the rest of this army to Galicia. Reinforcements arrived on the battlefield in two days, too late to do anything to Potiorek. The next day the battle continued in Yadar, which lasted for a week in the scorching heat. Fierce fighting was fought around Shabac until March 30.

Only a desperate rearguard fight was able to get the Austrians out of it. The Austrians returned to their homeland on 1 April, suffering 40,000 casualties, while the Serbian army suffered relatively little damage. After defeating the Austro-Hungarian army, Serbia concentrated its forces in the southeast, defeating the Bulgarian Army Group, which was rampaging through Serbian territory, which retreated one after another until it returned to the vicinity of the border to stabilize the front. Serbia played well without relying on the support of the Entente, and became one of the bright spots of the Entente in the early stage of the war.

Another bright spot is also related to Austria-Hungary, this "soft persimmon of the Allies" once again made a fool of itself, in the battle with the Russian army on the Eastern Front, Austria-Hungary lost more than 100,000 under the leadership of Conrad, and if it were not for the support of the German army, Austria-Hungary might have perished under the attack of the Russian army.

Judging from the situation at the beginning of the period, all the initial favorable conditions were on the side of Austria-Hungary. Starting from the Danube, about fifty kilometers east of Vienna, the Carpathians form an eight-hundred-mile arc that reaches southeast of Romania. Its width varies from seven to two hundred and thirty kilometers, and the central part is around seventy kilometers. Neither a natural road nor a large river basin separates this obstacle, but the seven Austrian railway lines leading through the mountains to Galicia can be effortlessly defended or blocked if necessary. To the north of the Carpathians are the fortified cities of Krakow, Przemyšl and Yarosław, defended by the Vistula and San rivers.

If Conrad had asked his troops to dig trenches and hold on, the Russian onslaught would not have been able to overcome these obstacles. The Chinese military attaché in Austria-Hungary also suggested to Conrad to hold on, but the Chinese did not have the same influence in Germany here, and Conrad regarded the Chinese advice as a contempt for himself and a haughty rejection.

He believed that the Russians had not yet fully mobilized their manpower and were vulnerable to attack, so he planned a swift offensive from Galicia to capture the railway line between Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk, but apparently did not think about what the Russians would do if they had actually been mobilized and what their troops would do when they came into contact with them. In the decade before the war, Russia learned of Austria's valuable military secrets from its senior spy, Colonel Alfred Raeder, who systematically betrayed his country even before he was appointed head of the Austro-Hungarian Army Intelligence Service.

Conrad demanded that the German Eighth Army launch an offensive from East Prussia. He was rejected by Schlieffen. The commander-in-chief of Habsburg needed the Germans to sweep east of the Neman River and then strike at the Russian right flank. He was eager to attribute Austria's victory in the first battle to his emperor, so he continued to be convinced that the Germans would take action when his army reached the Bug River.

Conrad rashly sent thirty divisions, forming three army groups, to march on Lublin on 22 March. At the head of the procession were hussars in colorful uniforms, eager to kill the Cossacks, a colorful relic of the nineteenth century.

But the Austro-Hungarian medieval cavalry could not see the Cossacks in front of them, and the Russian general Nikolai Ivanov placed his cavalry in the rearguard, ostensibly isolated, but in fact they were all arranged in several wide corridors separating the four Russian armies, in order to lure the Austrian troops into positions where the Russian flanks would be completely exposed.

This strategy of defense in depth was well suited to Russia's vast territory, and Ivanov's strategy was only slightly different from the measures used against Napoleon. When the Cossacks were seen by the invaders, they turned to the east and galloped so fast that they could not be overtaken by the Austrians, so that the Austrians were lured into a dangerously exposed position. Ivanov and his fellow commanders, Alexey Brusilov and Nikolai Rusky, and the Bulgarian-born Radko Dmitriev, were not able tacticians, unlike the Russian commanders in Tannenberg. (To be continued.) )