December 5, 1914. 
LAND AND WATER 
t V^ftcult Guntry •< ^ x Western limit of 
I Very difficult amntg, Russianjirvts inGalicia 
Line when hills end and plain v^ins 
CGO Galicta, I J Tie/ronC^ates 
HtiH the Hiuyanan. 7liitn Ethe Bohemian Mountains 
Tioumania. R MtheMoravianCate 
ing the more restricted area of really difficult 
country forming a serious obstacle to the progress 
of armies. Within this difficult country again I 
have emphasised certain particularly difficult por- 
tions by cross-hatching to indicate country over 
which no army could operate at all. 
In this sketch map it is evident that for anyone 
attacking from the East and desiring to defeat to 
the West nations of which Vienna and Budapest 
are the capitals, to harass the great Hungarian 
plain (H — H — H), and to march upon the chief 
cities of the Austrians or the Hungarians, as 
Russia now proposes to do, the Carpathians are 
the great natural obstacle to be overcome. They 
are to Hungary, round the dominions of which thay 
curve in their huge sickle, what the Alps are to 
North Italy; and they are pierced, for an invader 
marching westward, by only two natural flats: the 
trench through which the Danube cuts (called the 
Ii-on Gates) at the south of the system (at I — I), 
and the gap between the Bohemian Mountains (E) 
and the last Carpathian knot of siunmits, called 
the High Tatra (A), which gap may conveniently 
be called in military history the Moravian Gate 
(M). Through the former of these natural open- 
ings no army can safely pass against opposition. 
The defile is too narrow. Moreover, it does not 
immediately concern us, because Roumania is, at 
the moment of writing, a neutral country, and the 
Iron Gates lead, not towards Russia, but into the 
Roumanian plain at R. The importance of the 
Moravian Gate, i\\4 high road for all invasion from 
the north-ea.st towards Vienna, I described a 
couple of weeks ago in these notes, and I showed 
how anyone occupying Upper Silesia (S), as the 
Russians propose immediately to do, threatens at 
once Berlin to the north-west and Vienna to the 
south-west. 
But apart from this great natural opening of 
the Moravian Gate through which both the railway 
and the road run. uniting Galicia or Southern 
Poland and its capital, Cracow (at C) with Vienna, 
there are, over the central and lower portion or 
" waist " of the Carpathian chain certain natural 
passes very much easier for the passage of troops 
than any other issues through the mountains. 
It will be seen upon the sketch that the High 
Tatra at A and the broad part of the chain in the 
south, east of the internal upland plain B, are par- 
ticularly difficult country. The " waist " of the 
chain in between these two difficult bits contains 
the passes of which I speak^five in number — and 
is further open to present operations because the 
Russian armies are immediately upon this part of 
the Carpathians. They are not to be found behind 
the difficult portion to the south, east of B, which 
forms the political boundary between Hungary 
and neutral Roumania. 
These five principal passes are known by the 
names (in order from east to wiest) as the Pass of 
Delatin (Dn-Dn upon the sketch), the Pass of 
Volocz (V-V upon the sketch), Unsoker (U-U 
upon the sketch), Lupkow (L-L upon the sketch), 
last, and most remarkable, Dukla (D-D upon the 
sketch). 
These passes, particularly the latter, are ex- 
ceptionally low, as well as easy in section. Rising 
from flats in the foothills already from 1,000 to 
1,200 feet above the sea, the highest of them, 
Delatin, does not quite reach the 3,000 feet lino. 
The lowest and best of them, Dukla, is only just 
over 1,500 feet above the sea, or only five or six 
hundred feet at its summits above the last flats of 
the foothills. 
■ The great fortress of Premzysl (at P) was de- 
signed, among other things, to protect these low 
passes over the central Carpathians. So easy are 
they that over the four eastern ones the railway 
crosses the crest of the range, though the lowest 
and easiest of the lot, Dukla, has no railway; for, 
in spite of its strategical importance, it leads less 
directly to centres of commercial importance. 
Now, the first thing we must note in connec- 
tion with the whole Carpathian system is that at 
the present moment the Russian forces (though 
their southern bodies are principally occupied in 
the Plain of Galicia (G-G-G) , have invested 
Premzysl (at P), have reached the line of crosses 
in front of Cracow (at C), and propose to invest 
that town), are sufficiently numerous to have de- 
tached sundry bodies that have already captured 
the passes over the central Carpathians, in parti- 
cular the Pass of Dukla. They have even occupied 
the point K, the town of Komonna (or Homonna), 
in the region of which the road over the Dukla 
Pass and the railway over the Lupkow Pass (D-D, 
L-L) meet. In other words, the advanced cavalry 
of the Russians is once more in the foothills that 
border the great Hungarian plain (H-H-E>, and a 
raid upon that ])lain is apparently intended. 
Strategically such a raid is a dispersion of 
force. It is the withdrawal of troops from the de- 
cisive field of action to the north of the mountains 
in Poland. But the Russian armies are very 
numerous. Their irregular cavalry is present in 
numbers quite out of proportion even to their mil- 
lions of infantry. And a side issue of this kind is 
worth pursuing under the political and economic 
circumstances which dictate it. Let us discover 
what these political and economic circumstances 
may be. 
Roughly speaking, the object of a Russian 
raid into the Hungarian plain is the political dis- 
turbance or disruption of a most perilous and 
unstable kingdom without which Austria is power 
less and Grermany greatly weakened. That king- 
0» 
