The Russian 61st Infantry Division had mobilized on 6 August with cadres supplied by 10th Infantry Division and reservists from the Nizhny Novgorod area east of Moscow. It had just arrived at the front and been assigned to the left wing of XVII Corps. Its commander, Gen. Panteleimon Nikolaevich Simansky, described his officers as “tactically illiterate . . . not having any tenacity in battle, prone to panic, constantly looking back at abandoned families.” And now they would face Austria-Hungary’s best division.

In its first action of the war, the Edelweiss Division’s 5th Infantry Brigade devastated the 61st Infantry Division, taking 40 guns and thousands of prisoners while the remainder of Simansky’s hapless division fell back in disarray. Prisoners named the Kaiserjäger “flowery devils” for their edelweiss insignia. Col. Alexander Brosch von Aarenau of 2nd Kaiserjäger told his wife that he led recklessly from the front “to give the men an example of cold-bloodedness and courage on our first day of battle.” The victory cost one-quarter of his men dead and wounded.