MACKENSEN PRESSED BACK
On November 6, 1916, came the news from Bucharest that the Rumanian and Russian forces in northern Dobrudja had again assumed the offensive and that Mackensen's line was giving way; and that in retiring his troops had burned the villages of Daeni, Gariot, Rosman, and Gaidar. Full details of these operations were never issued, but as day after day passed it became obvious that the Russo-Rumanian armies were indeed making a determined effort to regain the ground lost in Dobrudja.
On November 9, 1916, it was announced through London that the Russian General Sakharov had been transferred from Galicia and was now in command of the allied forces in Dobrudja; that he had succeeded in pushing Mackensen's lines back from Hirsova on the Danube, where a gunboat flotilla was cooperating with him, and that Mackensen was now retreating through Topal, twelve miles farther south, and was only thirteen miles north of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad. On November 10, 1916, an official announcement from Petrograd stated that "on the Danube front our cavalry and infantry detachments occupied the station of Dunareav, three versts from Cernavoda. We are fighting for possession of the Cernavoda Bridge. More than two hundred corpses have been counted on the captured ground. A number of prisoners and machine guns have also been captured. We have occupied the town of Hirsova and the village of Musluj and the heights three versts south of Delgeruiv and five versts southwest of Fasmidja." On the following day the Russian ships began bombarding Constanza and set fire to the town which, according to the Petrograd reports, was burned to the ground. At the same time a Russian force advancing southward along the right bank of the Danube occupied the villages of Ghisdarechti and Topal. On that same date Sofia also reported heavy fighting and an enemy advance near the Cernavoda Bridge. Two days later, on the 13th, an indirect report through London stated that the Russians had crossed the Danube south of the bridge, behind Mackensen's front. This was not officially confirmed, but apparently another attempt was made to strike Mackensen's rear from across the river.
Meanwhile the Russo-Rumanian line was pressing Mackensen's front back, hammering especially on his left wing up against the river, until he was a bare few miles north of the railroad and thirty miles south of the point farthest north he had been able to reach. Here he seems to have held fast, for further reports of fighting on the Danube front become vague and contradictory. At any rate, the Russo-Rumanian advance stopped short of victory, as the recapture of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad would have been. That Mackensen's retreat may have been voluntary, to encourage the enemy to advance and thereby weaken his front on the Transylvanian front, seems possible in the light of later events. Also, it was possible that his forces had been weakened by Bulgarian regiments being withdrawn and sent down to the Macedonian front, where Monastir was in grave danger and was presently to fall to the French-Russian-Serbian forces. From this moment a silence settles over this front; when Mackensen again emerges into the light shed by official dispatches, it is to execute some of the most brilliant moves that have yet been made during the entire war.[Back to Contents]
