Chapter 227 - 227: General Zhilinskys Response

The headquarters of the Russian Northwestern Front stood in eastern Poland, in the town of Białystok, housed in a broad government building that had once symbolized provincial order and imperial bureaucracy. Before the war it had been a place of paperwork, tax ledgers, legal petitions, and administrative dignity. Now telegraph wires ran through its corridors like exposed nerves. Maps covered the walls. Muddy boots hammered over polished floors. Clerks hurried from room to room with dispatch satchels clutched to their chests. Outside the tall windows the streets were thick with the traffic of retreat—wagons, wounded men, shattered supply trains, horses without riders, officers without composure, and the broken remains of an army trying to convince itself that it still existed.

At the center of that chaos sat General Yakov Grigoryevich Zhilinsky, commander of the Northwestern Front, and therefore the man responsible for the invasion of East Prussia itself.

Only a short time earlier, the campaign had seemed almost insultingly simple.

...