At the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, though it was already high summer, it still felt like the depths of winter, without a trace of warmth. Nicholas II's gloomy face had dragged the temperature straight down!
Ever since summer began, Nicholas II had not had a single good day. There was no helping it—the bad news from the front never stopped, and especially over the past half month, the situation on the battlefield had taken a sharp turn for the worse.
Having just received another battle report, Nicholas II let out another thunderous roar. "Trash! Every last one of you is trash!
"Even if they were seven hundred thousand pigs, the Germans couldn't have caught them all in such a short time! Yet seven hundred thousand Russian soldiers actually became German prisoners in just three days!
"Now the entire world is laughing at us! An entire army group surrendering in formation?
"God! The largest surrender in history was actually created by us! Has the great Russian Empire truly fallen into decline? This is simply..."
No wonder Nicholas II was so furious. In just half a month, the Russian army had lost a total of 1.8 million men. The Northern Front was already finished, the Western Front was on the verge of collapse, and the Southwestern Front had suffered grievous losses in the winter offensive. It had yet to recover before being dealt another crushing blow.
On July 3, 1916, the German army punched through the Russian Northern Front's defenses.
On July 6, the Northern Front, with a total force of more than two million men, was split in two. The Russian northern defensive line collapsed!
On July 9, the German Sixth Army completed its deep thrust through the Northern Front, trapping nearly one million Russian soldiers within the German encirclement.