LAND 'AND WATER' 
November 21, 191€« 
Awiwctmatc present position mm ■» ■■ 
Avm-oximati position a -fortnight aSi 
THa LAST OFFICIAL NKW3 OF ST. ELOI LEFT II IN THK KNKUrS HAND3, BUT IT MAlf BB ONB OF IHK SEVERAL P0IM3 KETAKEN 
WITHOm; MENTION IN TUB FKENCH DESPATCH. 
Kalisz to the same junction; (3) the main line 
from Czestochowa to Warsaw. All those three 
lines are divergent. Between each pair of them 
upon the front now occupied by the opposing 
armiesthere is a wide gap ; behind that f rontRussia 
has nothing corresponding to the railway which so 
strictly follows the German frontier behind the 
line which the Germans have chosen. 
It is to be a railway battle, if ever there has been 
one in the historyof the modern world. Which of the 
two elements will prevail, the Russian superiority 
in numbers, the German superiority in mobility 
(which is equivalent to an addition to their num- 
bers) only the immediate future will show. But 
after the profoimd elTcct produced upon the whole 
European campaign by the failure of the Austro- 
German forces to hold the line of the Vistula and 
the San, the next most important development 
must arise from the results of this battle in 
V/estern Poland, and according to who has the 
better of that struggle from before Plock to before 
Cracow the next consequences of the whole cam- 
paign, East and West, will still depend. _ Now, as 
well as during so many weeks past, it is Poland 
that is the decisive area of the whole European 
war. 
11. 
THE WESTERN FIELD OF WAR. 
The week's news from the Western field of 
war, enormous as it is in the sense of trial and 
endurance, is strategically slight. It means little 
more than that the positions round Ypres have 
been kept, that the German capture of the ruins 
of Dixmude (with the French wounded therein, and 
the French wounded in front of the town) have led 
to no corresponding advance such as was hoped 
by the enemy over the line of the river. Upon the 
contrary, further inundation has made most of the 
country immediately to the south and west of Dix- 
mude untenable, and in the country south and east 
of Bixschoote the French have gained a, littlo 
ground. In the story of the wa,r apart from mcrq 
6* 
