February 13, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER 
so nearly certain as to warrant a locaWand brief 
• — continued waste of men. But though the figure 
30,000 may be too high, the losses must certainly 
have been, from the nature of the fighting, severe. 
It must never be forgotten that a great assault 
which fails is tactically, and for the front which it 
covers, a defeat. You come out of it not as you 
were, but weaker than you were, both morally and 
materially; and that in proportion to the effort 
you made to succeed. So true is this that in the 
case of the action before Bolimow the Russians, 
when they had repelled the enemy, were able to 
make certain advances; notably just below the 
junction of the Rawka with the Bzura, at the point 
marked D, and at the point marked K (which is the 
village of Kamion). In both these points the Rus- 
sians crossed the river and established themselves 
upon the further side. 
The details of the action are fairly simple. 
From in front of Skiernievicz (S), past Boli- 
mow (B), runs the little river Rawa, which falls 
into the Bzura at yl . It has in front of Skiernie- 
vicz a belt of woods on either bank (marked with 
shading on the plan) which stretch all along the 
railway to Warsaw, past the roadside station of 
Bednary (at Ba) to Zyradov, at Z. 
On either side the ground falls gently down 
to the Rawa ; but on the eastern side there is a roll 
down again to the little parallel stream of the 
Sucha, and on the crest of this roll, or rather just 
in front of it, covering Borjumov (Bo), Gumine (G), 
and the Chateau and Works of Volia Shidlovska 
(V), run the Russian trenches. The German 
trenches face them, between the crest and the 
River R^wa. From Z to Warsaw is about twenty- 
six miles. 
The Germans massed their guns on the night 
of Tuesday last, February 2, on the ridge west of 
the Rawa, along the crest I have marked with a 
line of crosses. It was a snowy night. Air work 
was impossible, and they took advantage of the 
■weather to concentrate on that narrow front, from 
S to not quite A, nearly four corps. That same 
night they attacked the positions Bo-G-V-Ba, 
grouping their densest force just north of the 
woods against V on a section Y-Y, about 3,000 
yards in length, or less than a third of their total 
local front. All Wednesday the advance made 
ground. The Chateau at V was occupied, so was 
Gumine, G; while behind the v/oods and up the 
railway the Germans carried the station of Bed- 
nary (Ba) in a corps-a-corps. Upon Thursday, 
February 4, the issue was still doubtful ; the Rus- 
sian line still pushed back to the crest or beyond it. 
and the weather still a scurry of snow. But on 
Friday the tide turned ; by the Friday night the 
Avhole crest was recovered, and by Saturday morn- 
ing the German line (whose most advanced points 
had reached to the dots on the sketch) was back 
west of the line of dots and dashes which roughly 
represents the present Russian positions. 
The massed attack smouldered out on the 
Sunday and ceased altogether on Monday, the 8th. 
It had, after six days of effort, quite failed. 
But the local result along that front (which 
might give to the action the name of Bolimow, for 
that is the name of the village just beyond the 
stream on the slopes in the neighbourhood of which 
the artillery was posted) is not perhaps of such 
importance as is the indication it affords of the 
enemy's general attitude towards his chances upon 
the eastern front. This last violent bid for War- 
saw means that the pressure in East Prussia is 
being felt. It means also, perhaps, that the pres- 
sure upon the central Carpathians, to which I will 
turn in a moment, is giving anxiety. It is true 
that in East Prussia considerable enemy reinforce- 
ments have arrived, so that the forward movement 
of our ally there would seem for the moment to be 
held ; and it is further true that in the Carpathians 
the Russians' advance in the centre has gone with 
a retirement upon the southern extremity of their 
line. But these heavy blows delivered by von Hin- 
denburg upon the centre in Western Poland have 
hifherto been directly connected with the desire to 
draw pressure off some other part of the line, and 
it is probable that this last action in front of Boli- 
mow was no exception to the rule. 
THE SITUATION IN THE 
CARPATHIANS. 
I said last week that the Russian effort was in 
the main intended, when the advance was resumed 
upon the Carpathians, to press over near the 
Roumanian frontier and from the Bukovina; 
while the enemy's object was rather to bring pres- 
sure to bear in the central portion, westward of 
and south-westward of Przemysl. In the fighting 
that has followed, each party has failed exactly 
where he chiefly attempted to succeed — and that is 
always what happens when you meet a blow by 
countering elsewhere, in the set German fashion. 
The enemy have been compelled to fall back, 
perhaps, over the Dukla, certainly over the rail- 
way pass immediately to the east of the Dukla, 
because the Russian communiques speak now of 
the front passing in this region through Meso- 
Laborcz ; and as Meso-Laborcz is beyond the ridge 
this should mean that the Russian advanced bodies 
are here over the main crest of the range. This 
advantage is not absolutely certain; it is only to 
be presumed from the wording of the communiques 
issued by one side, but it is a probable inference. 
In the Bukovina, on the other hand, there has 
been a retirement of the Russian forces before an 
advance in considerable strength of the enemy. 
The enemy have not only re-occupied the heights, 
as the summit of the Kirlibaba Pass, but have 
passed over the Borgo and have entered Kimpo- 
lung. 
The double situation, and the change from the 
corresponding situation some ten days ago, may 
best be seen by comparing the following sketch, 
where the Russian line is marked in what is its 
5* 
