Three days earlier, at the battle of Szack, Orlik-Rückemann had punched through Soviet positions and forced his exhausted column across the Bug River. The Border Defence Corps, known by its Polish initials KOP, had been built to guard Poland's eastern frontier from Soviet incursions. When the Red Army poured across that frontier on September 17, the KOP became the only organized Polish force still trying to fight in the east. By the time they reached the Włodawa-Trawniki road, they numbered about 3,000 men. They had no air cover, almost no artillery, and only what ammunition they could carry. Behind them, two weeks of forced marches; ahead, a Soviet rifle division with tanks. Most armies in their condition would have surrendered. Orlik-Rückemann's men kept walking.

Just after one in the morning on October 1, Soviet tanks of the 45th Rifle Division ran into the Polish vanguard. The Poles had four Bofors 37mm anti-tank guns and the wits to use them. They opened fire at point-blank range, knocked out four T-26 tanks, and the Soviet armor pulled back into the dark. After daybreak the Soviets came again, this time in strength, expecting to scatter what they assumed was a routed column of officers. They found instead that the Polish supply train had crossed into the woods behind Wytyczno and emplaced its few remaining artillery pieces there. The Bofors crews held their positions. The fighting for the village turned ugly and slow, with both sides taking heavy losses.

By nine in the morning the Polish 75mm guns had sixty shells left between them. The howitzers had ten rounds per barrel. Orlik-Rückemann ordered the Polesie Battalion to swing left and hit the Soviet flank, the kind of maneuver that might have broken the encirclement. The men of the Polesie Battalion looked at the order, looked at each other, and refused. They were too tired to attack. They had been too tired for days. Colonel Nikodem Sulik of the Sarny Regiment reported what was already obvious: the defenses were weakening hour by hour. By dawn the next day there would be nothing left. At ten-thirty, a war council in the woods made the only choice still available. The army would dissolve.

At noon the Polish units broke contact and slipped into the forests behind Wytyczno. They split into smaller detachments and tried to reach Independent Operational Group Polesie, the last large Polish force still fighting nearby. Most of them made it. Orlik-Rückemann himself escaped through Lithuania and Sweden, eventually reaching Britain to continue the war from exile. The men who could not escape became prisoners of the Soviets, and many of them would never come home. Wytyczno was the last sustained battle the Polish Army fought against the Red Army in 1939. The country that had been Poland on September 1 no longer existed in any recognized form. The men who had walked five hundred kilometers to fight here had earned no victory, only the dignity of having tried.