March 27, 1915. 
LAND AND 5^! A T E R. 
THE WAR BY LAND. 
By HILAIRE BELLOG. 
NOTE.— This Article has been submitted to the Press Bureau, which does not object to the publication u censored, and fakei M 
responsibility for the correctness o! the statements. 
la accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, the positions of troops oa Plans Illustrating this Article must only b« 
regarded as approximate, and no defiaite strength at any point is Indicated. 
THE POSITION ON THE EAST PRUSSIAN 
FRONTIER. . 
I. 
THE capture of Warsaw, with its railway 
bridges, is, as has been the theme of these 
articles for many weeks past, the capital 
operation of the enemy in the present 
phase of the War. 
If he can obtain possession of that point, he 
guarantees himself in the East against a Russian 
advance for some time to come, and is free to mass 
in the West before the munitioning and new 
equipped armies of the Allies in the West imperil 
his line through Northern France. 
The fortunes, therefore, of the campaign for 
W^arsaw must be grasped as a whole if we are to 
understand the present phase of the War, and I 
propose to take the opportunity of the present lull 
and indecision in this quarter to recapitulate the 
operations there and to lead them up to as precise 
a description as our scanty views permit of the 
situation at the moment of writing. 
It will be remembered that the Germans, 
after having failed to take Warsaw by direct 
attack from in front along the Bzura and the 
Rawka (which attempt had lasted nearly two 
months, and had cost them in total casualties per- 
haps two hundred thousand men) determined with 
the beginning of February to attempt the capture 
of the city from behind. Their plan was to come 
down from the North to cut the fortified line of 
the Niemen and the Narew and so to get a-straddle 
of the sheaf of railways that converge upon the 
bridges of Warsaw across the Vistula. 
This is the fundamental point of the Eastern 
Campaign in its present phase. I have described 
it more than once in these pages during the last 
six weeks. I take the liberty of repeating it again 
this week because a clear comprehension of it is 
essential to the comprehension of the present 
position. 
The position, then, at the opening of February 
was that on the accompanying sketch map. The 
enemy having failed, after prolonged efforts, to 
capture Warsaw at W by a direct attack along the 
line B R (which is the line of the Bzura and the 
Rawka) from the direction A, gathered certainly 
more than ten, and possibly fourteen. Army Corps 
in East Prussia — that is, anything from 400,000 
to nearly 600,000 men — and designed to come 
down in the directions BB B and get a-straddle of 
the railways 1, 2, and 3 which converge upon the 
bridges of Warsaw and by which alone a Russian 
Army, working westward of the River Vistula, 
can live. In front of those railways stretch like 
a screen the fortified lines of the Narew River, 
prolonged by the fortified lines of the Niemen 
River. The enemy's design was to push out from 
East Prussia and break that line. 
During the first week of February he delivered 
a very violent attack upon the Bzura Rawka line 
which lasted from February 2 to February 8, We 
can now see that his probable main object in doing 
this was to distract attention from the concentra- 
tion of his troops in East Prussia, though, at the 
same time, we must remark that his effort was 
sufficiently violent to warrant some hope of his 
breaking through in this last attempt. At any^ 
rate, with February 8 and 9 his advance with 
the large forces concentrated in East Prussia 
began. 
He had immediately opposed to him nothing 
but the Tenth Russian Army, a force of no more 
than four Army Corps, amounting, after scA'^eral 
months of fighting, to perhaps not more than from 
120,000 to 140,000 men, even allowing for the 
drafts by which they had been replenished. 
Suc'B a force is, for a campaign of the present 
dimensions, a weak one. It does not represent 
more than a fifteenth perhaps of the total Russian 
forces operating between the Baltic and the 
Roumanian frontier. 
This tenth Russian Army was either taken 
by surprise or at any rate compelled to a very, 
rapid retreat before this greatly superior concen- 
tration of the enemy, and its retirement took up 
the whole of the second week and extended into the. 
third week of February. 
When the German forces struck it, in an 
immediate superiority of at least five to two, and, 
counting the German forces behind the first line 
in a superiority of quite three to one, the situation 
of this tenth Russian Army was that set out in thQ 
next map. 
It had slowly fought its way over the EasE 
Prussian Frontier, going partly north of the lak«i 
