LAND AND WATER 
December 12, 1914. 
excluding the garrison of Cracow : and tJiese great 
forces hold a line not eighty miles in extent as the 
crow flies. It is very nearly as strong a body in 
proportion to the line it holds as was till recently 
the German force inFlanders. Further, the country 
in which it runs is hill country, country getting 
more hilly and perhaps more defensible as one goas 
southward. The line is v/ell served (as these Ger- 
man defensive lines invariably are) by a parallel 
line of railway. It must be pierced in its centre 
if a direct advance upon the industrial region, M, 
is to be made. Of the actual conditions, the en- 
trenchment, the opportunities of forcing it, the 
Russian bodies available upon the noith and 
centre of the line, we know nothing. But the cir- 
cumstances suggest that the Russian attempt will 
almost certainly be made round by the Cracow 
end, and not through the centre, and we must par- 
ticularly examine what the conditions of the for- 
tress of Cracow are. For if the Russians should 
succeed in investing and masking Cracow, though 
their road into Upper Silesia is not so direct as 
through the centre, yet they are, once past Cracow, 
only fifty miles from the industrial district in ques- 
tion. What, then, are the opportunities of resist- 
ance of Cracow, and how far does that fortress 
block the Southern advance into Silesia ? 
northward, from the acropolis, as did the original 
town. 
The conditions under which Cracow could be 
fortified on the ring system, during the imme- 
diately past generation when that system was still 
thought valid (its authority was not destroyed until 
this war), were such that forts might well have 
been erected at a considerable distance from the 
town. For Cracow lies in a tumbled country of 
hills some two to three hundred feet above the 
valley level, rising gradually in the south towards 
the Carpathians, which are close at hand, and in 
the north continuing the broken country up to and 
beyond the Russian frontier (which is but eight 
miles away from the heart of the city), but, 
whether for reasons of economy and the greater 
cheapness of a narrow ring, or, more probably, for 
another reason which I will state in a moment, 
the ring of great forts round Cracow was traeed 
quite close to the town; much closer, for instance, 
than the corresponding ring at Lifege. The most 
distant is only 6,000 yards from the castle hill, the 
nearest is only just over 2,000, and the fortified 
area as a whole is, at its greatest diameter, only 
just five miles across, and at its least not much 
more than three. The other reason besides the 
saving of estimates which may have led to this 
CRACOW. 
ONLY the future will show whetiher the 
Russians are either able to, or even in- 
tend to, reduce the fortress of Cracow, 
or whether their plan is to mask it. But 
it is in either case of interest to grasp 
the elements of that fortress. The old ecclesiasti- 
cal capital of Poland stands in hilly country on 
the upper reaches of the Vistula, where the river 
is no longer a mountain torrent, but is hardly yet a 
serious military obstacle. The old town grew up to 
the north of a sort of rock or acropolis on which still 
stand the magnificent castle andcathedralwhere lie 
many great Polish kings and patriots. The castle 
hill rises just above the stream; the town of the 
Middle Ages is gathered under the shadow of it 
northward away from the stream. The whole 
group, especially as one sees it from the south 
across the river, is typical of Poland : a rare out- 
post of European civilisation beyond the wilds of 
those Eastern Germanics into which letters and 
the arts never really struck root. 
Round this old mediaeval town, as has been 
the case from so many other similar centres, there 
has arisen a ring of modern building, and Cracow 
as a whole is now a district of over two miles every 
way with more or less continuous houses spreading 
over fairly flat country and still stretching to the 
curiously restricted scheme of fortification, is to 
be found in the peculiar conditions of fortification 
of many sites lying in the valleys of mountainoos 
countries. 
It often happens in these that you get hills 
fairly close to the place you desire to fortify, v/hich 
hills, though low, are quite dominated within effec- 
tive range, for the most part by the higher masses 
of land around. Whereas, if you go further afield, 
and make a wider range of forts, you come upon 
the foothills of tlie main summits, which foothills 
are dominated from those summits. 
Take this section, for instance ; you want to 
fortify the point F. You would like to make a 
wide outer range of forts as far apart as A and 
B, but if you did A would be dominated from C, 
and you would have to have a double scheme, C 
from D, D from E, and so forth, and there would 
be just the same series against B on the other side. 
You would be led into an impossible expense and 
to an impossible extent of fortified territory. Or 
instead of that you take to the nearer hills, M 
and N, which are rather too close to F, but which 
give you your only opportunity. 
This, I take it, is the real reason that the forti- 
fications of Craco-w- have not been extended, at any 
rate upon the Carpathian side. Although, as I 
shall show in a moment, they are dominated from, 
the north. 
