December 26, 1914, 
LAND AND WATEK 
THE WAR BY LAND. 
By HI L AIRE BELLOC. 
NOTE.— TU* Artlcl* hti b««D iobmltttd to th« Preii Borean, which doei not object to tho pobllcttlon ai c*Bior*d and takoi no 
re>ponilbilIty for the corraetntit of th* itatemcnti. 
!■ accordaneo with tho reqnlrementi of tho Preii Bnrean, tho podtioni of troopi on Plani lllnitratln; thli Artlclo moit only bo 
rtfarded ai approximato, and no dtfinlto itrenfth at any point ii indicated. 
, HE news this week both from east and 
from west is scanty, and the results in, 
both fields of war singularly imperfect. 
There is, therefore, very little to 
illustrate or to comment upon by way of 
active operations, on which account I shall devote 
ths greater part of my space this week at the con- 
clusion of these notes to an examination of the 
evidence before us as to the moral of the enemy : a 
matter upon which we have had a great deal of 
writing in the papers, but very little weighing of 
the scanty testimony before us. Meanwhile, I will 
first recapitulate the events in the field, such as 
they are. 
I.— THE POLISH THEATRE OF WAR. 
The past few days have been marked, in the 
Polish theatre of war by a general retirement of 
the Russian line. From the point where the 
Bzura falls into the Vistula below Warsaw to the 
Carpathians, 200 miles away, the line has fallen 
back across a belt varying from five or six to fifteen 
or twenty miles in breadth ; and it has presumably 
fallen back thus through difficulties of supply. 
It is not easy to see why an operation of this 
kind was described by the German Government in 
its messages to the German Press as a decisive 
action, or why the German newspapers were ad- 
vised to compare the Austro-German advance' to 
the Battle of Salamis and to the Battle of Leipsic. 
It was about as much like Salamis or 
Leipsic as a check in fox-hunting is like a kill. 
The falsehood is the more puzzling because the 
rest of the German official news this week has 
been, as usual, terse and accurate. The only ex- 
planation we can afford for this folly is that which 
I shall deal with further when I come to talk of 
the moral of the enemy, to wit, a political object 
peculiar to the domestic conditions of Germany. 
The German Government, which is, after all, not 
childish, must have thought it worth while to 
spread enormities of this sort at home even at the 
expense of looking foolish abroad. 
The Russian retirement as a whole has 
brought the line back thus. It ran some ten days 
ago from Ilovo through Lowicz, in front of Petro- 
kow, and so down some fourteen miles north-east 
of Cracow on to the Raba River, and passed in 
front of New Sandec in the Carpathians, as upon 
the dotted line in the accompanying sketch. It 
now starts at the point where the Bzura falls into 
the Vistula, runs thence to Sochazow, abandoning 
Lowicz. Thence it goes behind Petrokow (aban- 
doning that town also) and so runs south on to the 
Lower Donajec, behind New Sandec, and thence 
along the Carpathians, bent back to the north- 
ward by the Austrian advance over the passes of 
those mountains. It now runs, therefore, as on 
the solid line in the accompanying sketch. 
It is apparent from this sketch that the whole 
of these operations, which have between them 
^Days 
6 T 
One weeks average 
4Ai»JK«w ScttuiUc 
Crest' cf'ita^ 
covered quite a fortnight, have been successful in 
the main immediate object of the Germans and 
Austrians, the relieving of the pressure upon 
Cracow and of the threat to the industrial region 
of Silesia. One has but to look at the thick Hue 
on the sketch to see that the place where the Rus- 
sians have yielded most is where the dotted line 
approached Cracow, and also where in the Car- 
pathians, by the possession of the passes over those 
mountains, it threatened the Hungarian plain. 
But all this gives the enemy nothing, remotely ap- 
proaching a decision. There is no sort of guaran- 
tee in manoeuvres of this kind that the Russians 
will not readvance with new equipment, bring- 
ing to the front further levies, and with reorgani- 
sation of supply. 
It should in this connection be noted that two 
critical events may be taken by the student of the 
war as tests of German or of Russian success upon 
the eastern front. One of these is the possession 
of the main Galician railway; the other is the 
possession of Warsaw. 
The possession of the main Galician railway 
is the test of Russian maintenance in the southern 
part of the Polish field of war. The elements of 
the situation are perfectly simple, and may be ap- 
preciated at once in the following diagram. 
Galicia is the country lying between the Vis- 
tula (and the Russian border east thereof) and the 
Carpathian Mountains. Across the Carpathian 
Mountains on to the plains of Galicia there are 
certain passes, P-P-P-P. The Russian line, be- 
