January 16, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
which to draw, but the railway could not take 
them more than a couple of hundred miles towards 
this front; there would still remain nearly two 
months of marching by mountain tracks before 
Erzerum would be reached, and if, in the interval, 
the Russians account for the remaining 10th and 
11th Corps it is fairly certain that new Turkish 
Armies will not be sent north-eastward at all. 
Were transport by sea secure such reinforcements 
might reach the port of Trebizond and the region 
of Erzerum in a few days, but transport by sea is 
contested and though it has been effected recently 
along that coast quite insecure, as we know by the 
fate of the two transports sunk by Russian fire. 
Upon the whole it would seem as though the effect 
of Sarikamish was decisive, so far as this theatre 
of the war is concerned. 
THE POLISH FIELD. 
In the Polish field there is an absence of any- 
thing decisive during the whole of the week, 
and even of any minor action with any de- 
finable result. In Galicia and in Bukovina 
the Russians are in the mouths of the passes 
and have not yet proceeded to control the summits, 
or even to advance towards such control. The 
reason probably is that the weather has made 
transport for an advancing force impossible. Clear 
weather, however cold, would see the beginning 
of another forward movement. And here it may 
be worth while commenting upon the perfectly 
meaningless phrase which has twice escaped the 
German General Staff, and which has been re- 
peated by their apologists in the United States : I 
mean the phrase that " the Russian offensive is 
broken." That phrase is not meaningless in itself, 
it is only meaningless in the circumstances to which 
it is applied. There is a perfectly simple meaning 
to the expression " the breaking of an offensive " : 
it means that your enemy having attempted an 
offensive movement has failed in it, not only for the 
moment, but so finally and thoroughly that he will 
never be able to begin again. A Russian who felt 
inclined to prophesy might be inclined to say that 
the Austro-German offensive movement against 
the line of the middle Vistula and the San was thus 
" broken." It would be a foolish prophecy, because 
so long as there is a great army capable of 
threatening your own in front of you, and so long 
as it has ample reserves of men, it may always re- 
turn to the attack. But, still, the Austro-German 
effort has been a very clear case of a vigorous offen- 
sive breaking down at the end of its first stage. 
On the Russian side there has been nothing 
of the sort. There has been a deliberate retire- 
ment before the German advance, the taking up 
of a defensive line, and the maintenance thereof. 
The retirement followed no surprise or lost general 
action : it was a calculated retirement based upon 
difficulty of supply under the climatic and topo- 
graphical conditions of Russian Poland. So far 
from being the end of the Russian offensive, it is 
quite manifestly the preparation for the Russian 
offensive, to which only the accumulation of 
supply, a matter of the weather, and the time is 
lacking. Whether such a new offensive will suc- 
ceed or not is quite another matter ; but that it is 
not only possible, but in the very strategical nature 
of things in the Eastern field, is self-evident. 
Meanwhile the last phase of the German at- 
tempt to break through to Warsaw consists in 
something singularly like what happened in 
Northern France from three to two months ago. 
Upon a comparatively narrow, selected front a 
very violent attack is delivered. The terminal 
points of this front, the hamlet of Sukha and the 
farmsteads called Mogele are about a day's 
march apart, and stand upon the Bzura much 
where the first violent attack upon Warsaw was 
made a month ago. Upon that restricted area the 
enemy massed in particularly dense formations, 
and depending exactly as he did in the West upon 
a lavish and concentrated display of heavy artil- 
lery, is directing all the weight of his effort; pre- 
cisely what he did first on the twelve-mile front 
between Dixmude and the sea, later upon succes- 
sive narrow fronts round Ypres. Hitherto the re- 
sult has also been the same. 
THE WESTERN FIELD. 
THE ATTACK ON MULHOUSE. 
The French offensive against Mulhouse was 
much more likely, as was said in these columns 
last week, to bring down German reinforcements 
into Upper Alsace than to achieve its immediate 
object of reaching the Rhine, although that 
frontier of Germany proper, which would thus 
have been uncovered, is only sixteen miles away 
from the advanced French positions. 
But, as was also said in the same place, the 
bringing of German reinforcements down from 
the north to stand against this pressure on Mul- 
house is an end in itself, though less serious than 
the approach to the Rhine. 
We must always remember that the great 
asset the French have is their superiority in 
gunnery; not only in the mechanical superiority 
of their field guns, but in the superiority of their 
training, rapidity, and genius for gunnery. Their 
great weakness on this side at the beginning of the 
war was an insufiiciency of heavy artillery, and 
that weakness has now been made right. 
Consequently, wherever the French are exer- 
cising pressure upon the long line of trenches, their 
gunnery must be met as best can be by German ro" 
inforcements in the same arm. The heavy re- 
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