End of the Battle of Mărășești

On 3 September 1917 (21 August by the Julian calendar then in force in Romania), the commander of the German 9th Army, General of Infantry Johannes von Eben, ordered both his corps to halt their attacks and fortify the lines they had won on a permanent basis. On the same day the commander of the Romanian 1st Army, General Eremia Grigorescu, issued an identical order. After almost a month of fighting between the Siret and the Vrancea mountains the front fell still. The last days of the battle were fought not at Mărășești itself but a dozen or so kilometres further west, on the hills around the villages of Muncelu, Varnița and Irești, and it was there that the last shots of this campaign were fired.

The last attack

On 22 August the German Supreme Command ordered Field Marshal August von Mackensen to give up on Mărășești and take only the hills at Muncelu, which commanded the road to Răcoasa. After a week of regrouping, on 28 August, the German 216th Division and the Alpine Corps struck the Russian VIII Corps and took the village of Muncelu and several of the surrounding hills. The breach was closed by two regiments of the Romanian 2nd Army of General Alexandru Averescu, the 18th Infantry Regiment and the 2nd Rifle (vânători) Regiment, which stopped the Germans in front of Hill 441.

The next day the 216th Division attacked the Romanian 3rd Division at Varnița, in the Șușița valley. The historian Constantin Kirițescu writes that the Germans renewed the assault five times and each ended in fighting with bayonets and grenades, while the Romanians, in shallow trenches dug during the night, threw them back with counter-attacks. By evening Varnița was in Romanian hands again. On 1 September, a day both sides regarded as decisive, the Germans vainly stormed the positions of the 30th “Muscel” Infantry Regiment, while the Romanian 9th and 13th Divisions of General Ioan Popescu attacked the Muncelu plateau from the north. Losses were so heavy that on 2 September the Romanians halted the attack to bring up fresh units. According to Kirițescu the Romanian 3rd Division lost 596 killed, 823 wounded and 253 missing in two days of this fighting.

The last day

At six in the morning on 3 September the Romanian artillery began a two-hour bombardment. Then the 26th Brigade of the 13th Division, followed by the 57th Infantry Regiment, advanced on the village of Muncelu. The uphill ground was churned up by shells, and after the heavy rain of the previous days the holes had filled with water and mud. The German artillery barred the way with a barrage, and machine guns fired from the houses at the edge of the village. “Wave after wave the Romanians fall, mown down,” wrote Kirițescu. The village was not retaken.

Eben, however, concluded that his own offensive was also exhausted. In a report to Mackensen he wrote that a further attack “in this extraordinarily difficult terrain, favourable to the defence and fiercely defended by strong enemy forces” held out no prospect of success for the time being. The Germans were to dig in on a line from Varnița through the eastern edge of Muncelu, Panciu, Tișița and Doaga, and then along the Siret to its mouth on the Danube. Grigorescu’s Operational Order No. 43 instructed all units of the attack sector to stay in the positions they had won, dig in thoroughly and prepare them for defence. Some of the German and Austro-Hungarian forces were already leaving anyway: from 30 August trains were taking half of the Austrian 13th Rifle Division to the Isonzo.

The death of Ecaterina Teodoroiu

That evening, on the hill of Dealul Secului west of the village of Fitionești (PL), Ecaterina Teodoroiu, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Gorj, was killed. In the autumn of 1916, after the death of her brother, she had volunteered for the 18th Infantry Regiment and fought on the Jiu, where she was badly wounded. In March 1917 she received the “Virtutea Militară” medal and the honorary rank of second lieutenant in the 43rd/59th Infantry Regiment, with her pay provided by the royal court. Romanians called her “the heroine of the Jiu”. Her regiment, part of General Ernest Broșteanu’s 11th Division, relieved the 35th Regiment in the Zăbrăuți valley in pouring rain on 2 September.

According to the accounts of her superiors quoted in Romanian studies, the platoon Teodoroiu commanded was sent to the front line on the evening of 3 September to close a gap between two companies. At about 9.15 p.m. the Germans opened fire and attacked. The attack was repulsed and the Romanians went over to the counter-attack. Her platoon got ahead of the neighbouring company and exposed its flank, on which the Germans turned their fire. Teodoroiu was hit by a machine-gun burst while urging her soldiers on. Tradition attributes to her the last words: “Forward, lads, don’t give up, you are with me!” The next day the soldiers of her platoon buried her in a clearing beside Captain Dumitru Morojan, who had been killed the day before. Romanian monuments and some sources, including the Polish Wikipedia, give the date of her death by the Julian calendar: 22 August 1917. In 1921 her remains were moved to a mausoleum in Târgu Jiu.

Outcome

The end of the fighting at Muncelu closed the last great offensive of the Central Powers against Romania. Mackensen, who according to Kirițescu had taken his leave in Bucharest at the beginning of August with the words “See you in two weeks in Jassy”, had pushed the front forward a few kilometres, but had not taken Moldavia. The Austrian official history admitted that the plan to break across the Siret into Moldavia “was wrecked by the resistance of the Romanians”, who “with the defensive battle of Mărășești” had barred the Central Powers’ way to the complete conquest of the country. On this line the front north of Focșani lasted until the end of the fighting on the Romanian front.