The 5th Honvéd Cavalry Division rode out on 15 August, part of the Austro-Hungarian 2nd Army’s screen of three cavalry divisions pushing into Russian territory along the far eastern flank of the Austro-Russian border. Two days later they ran into a division of Russian Cossacks who had dismounted and dug in to await the Hungarians. Maj. Gen. Ernst von Froreich ordered an immediate attack.

Alexei Brusilov, commander of the opposing Russian Eighth Army, would call this action “a brave but foolish event.” Froreich ordered a mass charge against the Cossacks, who held a prepared position including carefully-positioned field guns. Half the division went forward mounted, and the rest on foot. The Austro-Hungarian official history would claim that the Russians also laid barbed wire in front of their position, but this seems unlikely. The charge broke amid massive casualties inflicted by shrapnel and machine-gun fire, shattering both the 5th Honvéd Cavalry Division and the attached brigade from the Common Army’s 8th Cavalry Division. It took hours to restore order among the surviving horsemen, and that evening Froreich became the war’s first general officer fatality for the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, pressing a pistol to his temple to take his own life.