End of the Battle of Kostiuchnówka

On 6 July 1916, the third day of the fighting at Kostiuchnówka, the Russian attack broke through the front on the sector of the Austro-Hungarian units next to the Legions. In the afternoon the Legions Command ordered a withdrawal from the Styr behind the Stokhid. The legionaries left among the last, beating off the charges of Russian cavalry. The three-day battle cost them about 2,000 killed, wounded and missing.

Second day: the fight for Polish Hill

On the evening of 4 July the Russians took Polish Hill on the right wing of the Legions and forced the First Brigade to abandon Piłsudski’s Redoubt. At dawn on 5 July four companies counter-attacked up the hill. Wacław Lipiński recalled how the companies reached the Russian trenches and were surrounded and wiped out almost to a man. All day the Russian artillery pounded the Polish Grove, where the legionaries held out in shallow trenches dug in the sand. The 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Second Brigade, brought up from reserve, retook Polish Hill. Regaining the height delayed the withdrawal by a whole day and, as Józef Piłsudski later wrote, saved the units standing south of the Legions. In the evening, however, the Russians drove the bled-white regiment off the hill, and the right wing of the defence fell back several kilometres to the third line, Optowa–Wołczeck.

Third day: charges and retreat

On 6 July the Russians attacked the Austro-Hungarian units sent to help the Legions and broke their defence. At Wołczeck the Russian 16th Cavalry Division entered the fight. Its squadrons charged the positions of the First Brigade “when everything around us was falling back”, as Piłsudski wrote. The charges were repulsed by the V and VI Battalions of Major Fleszar, while Major Brzoza’s battery fired almost from the infantry line. According to Piłsudski this allowed the whole brigade to withdraw calmly, an hour and a half after other units had begun to retreat, and the enemy long did not dare to pursue it.

The retreat led west through forests and along sandy roads towards the Stokhid. The 1st Regiment of Edward Rydz-Śmigły formed the rearguard. The wounded commander of the Second Brigade’s 3rd Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Henryk Minkiewicz (PL), was taken prisoner with part of his men. On the night of 6–7 July, in the forest near Manevychi (PL), the head of the 5th Regiment’s column ran into a volley from a Russian patrol. The regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Leon Berbecki, was badly wounded, and Major Tadeusz Furgalski “Wyrwa” (PL) was killed. Piłsudski later called him the brigade’s most painful loss.

The toll

In three days the Legions lost about 2,000 men, roughly a third of those who fought. The 3rd and 5th Infantry Regiments each lost about half their strength. Berbecki’s regiment lost its commander, both battalion commanders and more than half its officers. Russian losses have not been established. For the Russians the fighting on the Styr was a success: according to Russian accounts the corps of the Third Army routed the Austro-Hungarian group of General Leopold von Hauer here, and a few days later Brusilov’s troops stood on the Stokhid. There the advance on Kovel stalled.

In the bled-white brigades revolt against the Austrian command was growing. As early as 11 July the Council of Colonels (PL), an informal body of Legion commanders, decided to send the Supreme Army Command a memorandum demanding that the Legions be turned into a Polish corps under Polish officers. That same day Piłsudski wrote in an order to the First Brigade that these had been its hardest battles so far and that the legionaries had always been the last to leave the field. Soon afterwards, in protest against the treatment of the Legions as auxiliary troops, he asked to be relieved of his command.