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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



point of view was new; but gradually 

 the truth of it all began to dawn upon me. 



After that some German officials asked 

 if I would not go to Poland, because 

 there the situation had gotten the best of 

 them. There some three millions of peo- 

 ple would die of starvation and exposure 

 if not fed between then, a year ago, and 

 the next crop, last October. They said, 

 "If that thing goes on and on, it will 

 demoralize our troops." Again that prac- 

 tical reasoning. 



I hurried into Poland under the guid- 

 ance and always in the company of Ger- 

 man officers, many of them very high 

 officers, men on the general staff. 



I want briefly to give you a word pic- 

 ture of what I saw there, and again drive 

 home the point of what that system 

 stands for. Picture Poland, that country 

 beween Russia and East Prussia, looking 

 like a man's foot, with the foot pointed 

 toward East Prussia. 



In the fall of 19 14 the Russian offen- 

 sive had successfully driven the Germans 

 back almost to East Prussia. There they 

 dug themselves in for the winter, two and 

 one-half millions of Russians and two 

 and one-half millions of Germans, in a 

 north and south line nearly 300 miles 

 long, from East Prussia to the north and 

 down to Galicia. 



when Russia's yerdux fell 



It took ten months for the Germans 

 to prepare the greatest offensive that has 

 ever been known in military times, under 

 General von Hindenburg. They antici- 

 pated that in the retreat that might fol- 

 low every railroad bridge would be de- 

 stroyed, the railroads would be torn up. 

 the highways and culverts and everything 

 would be gone, and they must make a 

 supreme effort to be ready for all these 

 contingencies. That started in August. 



I9I5- 



By the collapse of their great fortifica- 

 tion at Lodz, the "Verdun" of the Rus- 

 sian line, about 50 miles west of Warsaw, 

 which stood there as a bulwark support- 

 ing Russia and Poland against any in- 

 roads by the Prussians, the situation was 

 changed. 



That fortification had been built eight 

 or ten years back by money which the 

 Russians had borrowed from the French 



Government. I spent the entire day out 

 there. It took only five shots from the 

 huge howitzer. "Fat Bertha," named for 

 Miss Bertha Krupp, that throws a shell 

 weighing 1,900 pounds, with an effective 

 range of 22 miles, to completely demolish 

 that magnificent fortification. 



The gun was located on a concrete 

 foundation 13 miles away from one of 

 the principal forts — the one that contained 

 the most munitions. They knew twenty 

 millions of marks' worth of provisions 

 were in that warehouse. They knew ex- 

 actly how much ammunition was in each 

 one of the twenty-six forts in a semi- 

 circle facing Prussia, and they picked out 

 the one that contained the greatest quan- 

 tity. Then they fired four shots, each one 

 of which went astray. 



Each one made a crater in that field, a 

 place 150 feet in diameter and 30 or 35 

 feet deep. 



THE UNPRECEDENTED POWER OF THE BUSY 

 BERTHAS 



The fifth, getting the range by aero- 

 plane, struck the center of that fortifica- 

 tion, and the combined explosion of that 

 shell with the explosion of the ammuni- 

 tion in the firing pits, detonated by the 

 explosion of the shell, threw chunks of 

 concrete one-fourth the size of a big room 

 out into the field as if they were paper, 

 turned over those six- and eight-inch 

 guns, mounted on their heavy carriages, 

 with 15-inch steel turrets over them, and 

 dumped them out in the field as if they 

 were nothing. 



I went around through some of the 

 firing pits that were more or less intact, 

 and there the German officer pointed out 

 to me the forms of men against the con- 

 crete. 



He said 450 men were killed instantly ; 

 that in some of the firing pits they were 

 plastered up against the wall and flat- 

 tened as flies would be against a window- 

 pane, so that thev had to spade the bodies 

 off. 



The whole Russian line collapsed with 

 the surrender of that fortification. The 

 commandant of the Russians telephoned 

 to the German commander and said, "We 

 will surrender the fortification if you will 

 stop firing." 



"No," he said, "not until you have sur- 



