On the Eastern Front, on August 17, 1915, following a bombing involving 1,360 pieces of artillery, which included the use of 406 millimeter naval cannons, and after firing 853,000 projectiles, German forces captured the fortified city of Kaunas.
The Russian commander of the fortress, General Grigoriev (who had not managed to fly the only railway tunnel between Ostende and Petrograde, had left intact the bridge over the Niemen River, which was said to have never abandoned his underground shelter, except at night, and abandoned the fortress before its fall, without telling its Chief of Staff) was subjected to a war council and sentenced to eight years of forced labor.
At Kaunas military depots, the Germans captured several million cans of corned beef, the main Russian supply on the front line, with which they could feed their own troops. Further south, Austrian Brotherhood forces approached the Brest-Litovsk fortress, forcing Russian forces to retreat to the Bug River.
The news of the suffering of the Russians as they retreated to the Bug came to the ears of General Vasili Gurko, who was then in Galitzia: "Men who have fought in several wars and in many bloody battles have told me that no horror of the battlefield is comparable to the horrific spectacle of the incessant exodus of the population, which knows neither the purpose of the movement nor the place where it can find rest, food and shelter.
Finding themselves in a dire situation, they have increased the difficulties of troops, especially transport, who had to move along roads full of that unorganized human wave. On more than one occasion, our forces had to stop and intervene in retardation so that that crowd could pass to the troops. [... ] Only God knows the sufferings they have endured, the tears they have shed and the number of human lives that have been surrendered as victims to the inexorable Molok of the war. ”
The plight of Russian soldiers extended a serious discontent among all their armies, apart from filling the POW camps in all the lands conquered by Germany. On August 17, the day of the fall of Kaunas, the number of Russian prisoners of war amounted to 726 694 in German prison camps, while 699 254 more were held by Austrians: a total of 1,425 848 in captivity. Captivity conditions could be harsh. In the spring and summer of 1915, there had been an epidemic of typhus among Russians who were in a prison camp in Gardelegen and three hundred of the eleven thousand who had died.
In August 1915, typhus proliferated so much in the Wittenberg camp that the German administration of the camp abandoned the fifteen thousand Russian, British and French prisoners living there and surrounded the perimeter fence of machine guns and dogs.
Only the invectives of neutral criticism made the German staff return to the pitch and improve their conditions.

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