LAND AND WATER 
Dpcemlier 19, 191f. 
West 
Frontier 
.^«aOi 
'pea 
The German 
Allies 
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Ease Ttontiex 
J OpenCRownanian . 
Frontier) 
East.Fnmtier 
&ItaUan 
is closed. They have two sections of neutral 
frontier — the Roumanian and the Swiss-Italian— 
on all the rest they are held. 
Upon the united western front the task of 
the Allies is to contain the enemy — at any rate, 
during this present phase of the war. Upon the 
eastern front the task of the Allies is— while re- 
tiring before a special concentration, or holding 
a particular offensive— to challenge the Enemy 
everywhere, to keep him moving, and so to bring 
pressure upon the Enemy in order that he shall 
be more and more constrained to withdraw men 
from the West. The Allies now possessing the 
Initiative in this process, only two alternatives 
are open to the present situation. 
(1) Either the Enemy will succeed in revers- 
ing the Initiative which thus constrains him upon 
either side, and, recovering the Initiative for him- 
self by pushing through one of the two fronts 
(preferably for him the eastern front, for that is 
where he is most anxiously engaged), will create 
to his own will a new phase of the campaign ; or 
(2) He will fail to recover the Initiative and 
will remain butting ; in which case he must soon 
be in a position of being imable to withdraw 
further men from the West, and compelled to 
stand upon the strict defensive upon both fronts. 
Once this latter condition is imposed upon 
him by the Allies (that is, supposing they succeed 
by their tenacity in imposing it ultimately) the 
war will enter its third phase ; and the rest of it 
will consist in the successful restriction of the 
Enemy to a narrower and narrower and still nar- 
rower area of desperate resistance. 
It will, in a metaphor which I shall develop 
further at the end of these notes, and which I have 
taken from the remarkable work of Colonel Maude 
during the present war, be a strict " siege." 
Now these things being so the Allies in the 
Wes^t have for their immediate task no more than 
the containment of the Enemy there ; that is, the 
compelling him to use as many men as possible 
there, just short of letting him break through. The 
Allies on the eastern front have for their task to 
wigage the enemy thoroughly, to " keep the move 
on " in their field, and to make him draw off as 
many men as he dare from West to East. That 
eastern front is therefore obviously the area in 
■which, for the moment, the strategical situation 
should produce changing and locally decisive re- 
sults; and this is, in point of fact, what we dis- 
ceyer. Ever since the Enemy was pinned in the 
West to his defensive line along the Aisne, and 
later to his trenches directly north-and-south, from 
■wliere the Aisne joins the Oise to Nieuport and 
the sea, there has been no appreciable change in 
the mere positions of the western field. There has 
only been a series of vigorous and futile attempts 
— on the Yser, before Ypres, by Arras, etc.— upon 
the part of the Germans to break the containment 
to which they are subjected, and latterly a slow 
biit perceptible addition of weight and movement 
upon the side of the French and English and 
against the Germans here "wrestling ": to which 
turn of the tide I shall allude later. 
But in the East the engagement of the Enemy 
by the Allies has been more vigorous ; has led to 
perpetual changes of position; and in this last 
week to three most notable actions, two of them 
in the Polish field, one in the Servian. It is these 
eastern actions which we must specially watch , not 
only because they are the most intellectually in- 
teresting (and the only mobile) actions of the 
moment, but also because upon them must depend 
the rate at which we can approach the third and 
perhaps final phase of the campaign. 
This eastern field falls under three sections. 
There are the comparatively small forces watching" 
each other upon the frontier of Eastern Prussia 
at A. 
WARSAW 
II 
There are the large bodies operating in connection 
with the two great towns of Warsaw and of 
Cracow in the heart of Poland at B (B^ and B^). 
And finally, there is the Austrian and Servian 
struggle at C. 
The first of these. A, does not concern us this 
week. Nothing has been doing. Both parties 
have withdrawn men for service further south; 
each is comparatively small compared with the 
large forces engaged elsewhere ; and each is suffi- 
cient to hold up the other. The commanders of 
neither think it worth while to reinforce their side 
liere and to advance in or from East Prussia at 
the expense of strength in other parts of the field. 
All movement of interest this week, then, in 
