LAND AND WATER 
January 30, 1915. 
one can estimate the comparative unimportance 
in mere numbers of what is going on on the Rouma- 
nian frontier. 
The second point to note is that the fighting, 
such as it is, has not given the Russians permanent 
possession yet of the crest, that is, of the passes 
over into Hungary. 
The main lines of the geography of this region 
may be appreciated in the sketch on page 4, 
where it will be seen that the front spoken of in 
the communiques lies upon what is for the Russians 
the wrong side of the range. The last accounts 
speak of places ten miles east upon the aver- 
age of those points upon and just beyond the 
crest which v.-ere mentioned ten days ago, and this 
almost certainly means that the first points upon 
the summits seized by the Russians were held by 
no more than outposts, which fell back before a 
new Austro-Hungarian concentration from the 
three railheads at A, B, and C. 
These two matters, the supposed new move 
against Servia, the Bukovina movements, are not 
very important points, but they are all there is to 
note for the moment in this south-eastern field. 
The third district in which there has bcen-some 
movement is, as we have seen, that between the 
Lower Vistula and the East Prussian frontier. 
The accounts have been meagre from both sides, 
and western judgment has been a good deal puzzled 
by the rapid mention one after another of a series 
of places which seem to mark a curiously rapid 
advance of the Russian forces upon the flank of 
the main German line of communications between 
Thorn and other German depots, and the German 
Army on the Bzura and the Rawka threatening 
Warsaw. The matter is strategically of the 
utmost simplicity. 
For provisioning in a ruined land the German 
front along the Bzura and the Rawka, where the 
bid is being made for Warsaw, there are only two 
divergent lines of railway, the one leading to 
Thorn, and the other, widely divergent, leading 
to Silesia and ultimately to Posen. Further, so 
long as it is really open, the Vistula is an avenue 
of supply in itself. Now, it is clear that anyone 
operating in the region. A- A, with a large force is 
in a position to threaten the Vistula line, and if he 
can cross the river to threaten the railway; while 
at one point, B (which is Vloclav/ek), the line could 
actually be destroyed by heavy artillery operating 
from the further bank of the stream. But there 
are certainly as yet no large forces in this northern 
wedge of Russian Poland, and we may be confident 
that the movements of which we hear are, as has 
been said before in these comments, no more than 
the movements of cavalry. For this conclusion v,e 
have evidence which has already been given, but 
which it may be vrell to recapitulate. 
We have in the first place the rapidity of the 
movements, in the second place the equally rapid 
fluctuations of the front (if it can be called a front), 
and in the third place the obvious indifference of 
the great German forces in front of Warsaw to 
what is going on upon their flank. To such 
arguments may be added the fact that, since there 
is no railway to support a Russian move of this 
kind (the whole district has only one north and 
south line through Mlawa to Warsaw), large in- 
fantry movements vrould have to be accomplished 
even more slowly than elsewhere. 
Glance, for instance, at the names of the 
places where contact has been established. We 
hear of such contact at Konopka south of Mlawa ; 
again at Sierpe, and across the Skrawa; then for 
one brief moment we hear (a week ago) of contact 
at Skempe. That is, we have isolated skirmishes 
over a field forty or fifty miles broad, and in places 
separated by distances which bodies of infantry 
could never deal with in the time. 
The most advanced post of which there is men- 
tion scores a local German success at Lipno; later 
the telegrams speaks of another brush at least a 
day's march further East again, and all of this 
means without doubt that only comparatively small 
bodies of cavalry are " feeling " for each other 
along that dreary land of stunted trees, small 
swells of heaths, and bottoms of marsh and mere, 
not that any considerable movement is or can be yet 
afoot there. When such a movement really does 
develop, or if it can develop in spite of the German 
forces upon its flank in East Prussia, we should 
at once be aware of it by the retirement from the 
line of the Bzura, which would be imposed in that 
case upon the German forces. 
COPPER AND COTTON. 
THE discussion of a military problem differs 
from the discussion of a political pro- 
blem in the same way that the discus- 
sion of means differs from the discussion 
of an end. 
Every war is fought with a political object, but 
the conduct of a war once it is engaged is not a 
political, but a military affair. In other words, one 
may say " This action tends to make you win the 
war, that action tends to make you lose it," and the 
political comment to be offered against such purely 
military grounds of action must have a very great 
weight indeed if it is to expect attention. For to 
lose a great war is, next to losing its soul and 
liberty, the worst thing that can happen to a 
nation. This is particularly the case in a war 
such as is this war, deliberately forced by a power 
whose avowed object, proclaimed through years of 
public action and speech and print, is mastery over 
its neighbours, and the enforced change of their 
lives to its own model. 
If you are about to fight another man for your 
life — and for his ; if at the outset of such a struggle 
you see a third party handing him a lethal weapon ; 
if, seeing this, you neither protest nor attempt to 
prevent it, then it means either that you are v.ili- 
mg to sacrifice your life rather than break some 
principle which forbids you to interfere, or it 
means tiiat you believe interference would inv'olve 
even greater dangers than the possession by your 
enemy of the lethal weapon in question. 
These elementary principles are surely quite 
clear. 
Now, proceeding from them, the first thing we 
have to establish in a purely military criticism 
upon a policy of contraband is that the blockade of 
an enemy should be as complete as possible : but 
that general point has already been dealt vrith in 
these columns. It is too early to return to it, and, 
moreover, the perfect blockade of the Germanics 
is not possible in the sense in which it is possible to 
block the entry of croods into a fully besicsed town. 
