Battle of Kostiuchnówka begins

On 4 July 1916 (21 June by the Russian Julian calendar) the Russian artillery opened fire on the positions of the Polish Legions on the Styr, near the village of Kostiuchnówka in Volhynia (PL). The largest battle of the Legions had begun. All day the First and Third Brigades beat off the assaults of the Russian XLVI Corps, but in the evening the Russians broke the defence of their weaker neighbours on the right wing and took Polish Hill, a height the legionaries had captured the previous autumn.

Brusilov’s new blow

Since the beginning of June the armies of General Alexei Brusilov had been pushing west after breaking through the front at Lutsk. Their goal was Kovel, the railway junction linking the South-Western Front with the neighbouring Western Front. Two days earlier the latter had at last moved forward at Baranovichi. On Brusilov’s northern wing the attack was now made by the Third Army of General Leonid Lesh, which had just been handed over to him. Its XLVI Corps under General Nikolai Istomin, two infantry divisions and a Cossack division, was to break the front on the Styr, on the sector held by the Legions, and advance on Hołuzja and Manevychi.

The Legions had been here since the autumn of 1915. The front line was held by the First Brigade of Józef Piłsudski and the Third Brigade of General Wiktor Grzesicki, together fewer than 5,000 bayonets. The Second Brigade was in reserve. To the north stood Hungarian Honvéd cavalry, and to the south, on Polish Hill, the weak Austro-Hungarian 128th Infantry Brigade, made up of Landsturm battalions. Polish accounts put the Russian strength at about 13,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry, with more than a hundred guns.

Fire and assault

The bombardment began at about six in the morning. Russian observers directed it from balloons, and by Polish estimates about 20,000 shells fell on the Legion positions that day. The heaviest fire fell on Piłsudski’s Redoubt, a forward sand dune above the marshes, and on the Polish Grove behind it. The shelling buried trenches, cut telephone lines and tore open graves in the Legion cemetery. At about noon, during a lull, Piłsudski went up to the Redoubt and, as the First Brigade’s doctor Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski recalled, spent an hour and a half talking to the soldiers.

Towards evening, after renewed fire, the infantry came on, line after line. It was stopped in front of the Polish trenches by uncut wire and rifle fire. On the right wing, however, the Russians broke the defence of the 128th Brigade and forced their way onto Polish Hill. Threatened with encirclement, the I Battalion of the 5th Infantry Regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Leon Berbecki fought its way back to the second line along a narrow footbridge across the marshes. According to accounts, 160 of about 500 men survived. Captain Stanisław Sław-Zwierzyński (PL) was killed in a bayonet counter-attack.

Counter-attack towards Polish Hill

In the evening the 8th Company of Berbecki’s regiment, led by Second Lieutenant Aleksander Myszkowski (PL), struck towards the captured height. In the order he issued after the battle, Piłsudski counted this counter-attack among the brigade’s most glorious deeds and said it had saved the regiment from destruction. The night attacks did not restore the old line, however. Piłsudski’s Redoubt, exposed on its right, had to be abandoned, and the defenders moved back to the Polish Grove, where far weaker trenches awaited them. Polish accounts put the losses of some units after the first day alone at more than half their strength. The hardest fighting was still to come.