iraiiiiary 16, 1916. 
E'AND ANJD WATER. 
as the crow flies is about 115 miles, and by the 
road over two high passes something like 140 if I 
am not mistaken. Eoth centres stand very high;^ 
Kars nearly 6,000 feet above the sea, Erzerum 
over 6,000, while the road between them rises at 
the pass to as much as close on 8,000 ; and we must 
conceive of the whole of this theatre of operations 
as a tost sea of huge mountains separated by a 
network of deep ravines, even the' lowest floors of 
which are deep in snow. 
i The sketch at the foot of the preceding page 
may give some idea of the extremely difficult 
country over which some German, working with a 
map, saw fit to design a converging movement 
against the Russian columns v/hich were advancing 
up the Kars-Erzerum road. 
In this sketch I have marked the high- moun- 
tainous land by shading, and the ridges or crests 
along which all that high mountainous land is 
grouped I have marked by a series of dashes. 
Hei'e and there in the mountains are figures 
showing the height of some crest or of a pass, 
while the valley floors are left white. It will, I 
think, be clearly seen from such a sketch how 
impossibly confused the whole district is. 
Observe, for instance, how the 1st Turkish 
Army Corps, coming from the valley of the 
Choruk River and making for Ardahan, had: to 
cross a high ridge, and had for such a passage 
nothing but one bad mountain road, with the 
height of the pass more than 8,000 feet above the 
sea; from which, upon the further side, was a 
sharp fall of nearly 3,000 feet on to Ardahan 
itself. Observe in what a tangle of mountains 
lies the point of Olti and the neighbouring point 
of Id; from one of which, Id, the 10th Army Corps 
started for its ill-fated adventure against the Kars- 
Sarikamish road, and upon the other of which, 
Olti, that same Army Corps has withdrawn by 
something which is no more than a mountain 
track, after its defeat. 
There is, indeed, in all that extraordinary 
confusion of high peaks and gorges, only one 
natural avenue for troops, which is the depression 
leading from Kars up to Sarikamish, a sort of 
broad floor in the midst of the mountains, the road 
up which, after the pass at X, comes down on to 
the valley of the Araxes at Koprikoi, the old " Ad 
Confluentes." It so happens that between the 
upper waters of the Araxes River and the first 
sources of the Euphrates, near Erzerum, there is 
no saddle of high land ; and the road passes easily 
from the Upper Araxes to Erzerum. But, apart 
from that main line between the two military 
towns of Erzerum itself, more than 6,000 feet 
above the sea, and Kars, little more than 400 feet 
lower, there is the only good marching route of 
all that land. And the attempt to converge upon 
Sarikamish from the neighbourhood of Id and Olti, 
as did the 9th and 10th Turkish Army Corps, was 
an attempt necessarily doomed to failure. 
So was the attempt to bring in a wide sv/eep 
an extreme body round by the sea through Arda- 
han, and .so on through to the railway behind 
Kars. For though, once at Ardahan, such a body 
had a clear road through open country before it 
until it reached the railway behind Kars, yet in 
order to reach Ardahan it had to cross the high 
ridge, A, A, A, the summits of which touch 10,000 
feet, and the saddle over which from the valley of 
the Choruk was itself over^,000 feet above the sea. 
The reader who follows these campaigns upon 
the best maps may be curious to note the prolonga- 
tion of the railway from Kars to Sarikamish, and 
may. have wondered why I spoke of the latter place 
as the Russian " railhead." None but the most 
recent maps give this extension. Two years ago 
the railv/ay stopped at Kars. It is only since 
1913 that the extension to Sarikamish at the foot 
of the high mountains has been opened. 
From such a digression upon the details of 
that impossible country I return to the movement 
itself. 
Sundry preliminary actions between the ad- 
vanced forces of the two armies that were concen- 
trating would have interest in a full history, but 
would only confuse the main lines of this sum- 
mary. We therefore proceed at once to the main 
advance, which did not develop until the last ten 
days of November. It was on November 20th that 
the Russians had reached their furthest point in 
their march upon Erzerum, driving the Turks from 
Koprikoi. We shall do well if we conceive of this 
Russian success as being rather due to a deliberate 
retirement upon the part of the Turks than any- 
thing else, because immediately after the action at 
Koprikoi the Turkish counter-advance began. Tt 
was pursued slowly and successfully during the 
month of December, and took the following form : 
The 11th Corps marched towards Khorcsan, 
which is just over the Turkish frontier and about 
thirty miles from the Russian railhead at Sari- 
kamish. There was heavy fighting in Christmas 
week, and two days after Christmas the Turkish 
11th Army Corps had reached the outskirts of 
Kborosan itself, which the Russians were defend- 
ing. I have marked their position at this moment 
with the figures 11, Jl, 11. Meanwhile, concen- 
trated round the frontier post of Id forty miles to 
the nortli was tlie 10th Turkish Army Corps, which 
I have similarly marked with the figure 10, and 
between it and the 11th, that is, between Id and 
Khorosan, was the Uth Turkish Army Corps, which 
I have marked with the figure 9. The Russians 
were well held in front of Khorosan, and their 
main forces stretching back along the valley to- 
wards Sarikamish and so to the rail and road to 
Kars were to be attacked by the 10th and the 9th 
Army Corps sweeping round in the direction of tho 
arrows, X-X. Meanwhile, far to the northward; 
yet another Turkish force having been brought 
round by C, and consisting partly of troops from 
Constantinople, that is from the 1st Army Corps, 
were advancing to take Ardahan, and having 
taken it to go on along the direction of the arrow, 
Y-Y, and to cut the railway behind the Russians 
a little below Kars. I 
Wliile we speak thus upon the sketch-map of 
" advancing in the direction of the arrows," we 
must constantly remember that this meant in prac- 
tice the crossing of high mountain ridges in the 
blizzards of mid-winter, and at the same time keep- 
ing all the movements exactly co-ordinated. The 
first of the failures was that of the body, I, in front 
of Ardahan. The Turks here did manage to take 
the town. They had to fight for more than a fort- 
I'light to get it, but they were in possession upon 
New Year's Day. Hardly had they establislied 
themselves there, however, when a Russian force 
coming up just in time broke them two days later, 
s* 
