July 10, 1915. 
LAND AND SKATER. 
THE WAR BY LAND. 
By HILAIRE BELLOG. 
^OTE.-Thls article has been sobmitted to the Press Bureau, whlck doo nat object to the pubUcatioa ai cenwred, and takes no 
responsibility for the correctneaa ol the statemeots. 
la Accordance with the reqairements of the Press Bureau, the positions of troops on Plans illustrating this Article must only b« 
regarded as approximate, and no deBnite strength at any point U indicated. 
THE one great interest of the war as a whole 
at this moment continues to be the 
Austro-Gerraan advance against, and the 
corresponding Russian s<Teening of, the 
Eowno-Ivangorod line of railway. 
Upon that main matter all the rest of the 
campaign is turning. 
It is the retreat of the Russians and the tm- 
certainty as to whether that retreat will lead to a 
prolonged postponement of their counter-offensive 
that has postponed the corresponding offensive 
which all the Allies and every student of the war 
was expecting in the West. It is the same action 
in this Eastern theatre of the war which is bring- 
ing increasingly into play the factor of enemy 
wastage upon our side of the balance-sheet of war 
and exposing the factor of tardy equipment and 
munitioning against our side in the same balance- 
sheet. The operations against the Dardanelles find 
more than half their meaning in this same opera- 
tion, for if Ru.ssia were munitioned and equipped 
in useful time through the opening of her chief 
avenue of supply, the whole wnr would im- 
mediately change. 
Finally, it is the Eastern operations which 
have among other causes produced that political 
uncertainty, especially in this count.-.y ; a political 
uncertainty upon which the enemy most iaiibiuliy 
trades. 
The Rowno-Ivangorod line, then, is the great 
interest of the moment. 
Readers of these columns are familiar with 
the very simple elements of the strategic problem 
here, but I will repeat them so that this article 
may be followed as a whole. 
The River Vistula is much the most serious 
military obstacle in Europe; broad, deep, rapid, 
with usually a highly defensible steep bank to be 
held against a force attempting to cross it. 
The River Vistula is only crossed by railway 
communication on a large scale at Warsaw. 
Therefore, whoever has the railway bridges 
of Warsaw possesses the crossing of the Vistula, 
for a modern army cannot live long without rail- 
ways. 
Therefore, if the enemy could seize the rail- 
way bridges of the Vistula, he could, for some 
long time to come, render a new Russian offensive 
across the Vistula impossible. He would have 
put the Russians behind a hedge where he could 
keep them with comparatively small forces. 
All this has been repeated twenty times. 
It is because Warsaw means this that Russia 
is holding that big and expensive salient expressed 
by the dotted line in the accompanying diagram. 
So long as the railways I., II., and III. are 
intact Warsaw holds. Pressure along the arrow A 
from the north is not great, nor is there as yet 
ajpparently very serious pressure directly on 
Warsaw at B , but the great mass of the enemy, 
and a still larger proportion of their heavy artil- 
lery, is bringing the most violent pressure to bear 
on the third side, along the arrows C — C, to try 
and get astride of the line Rowno-Ivangorod ; and 
there lies for the moment the crux of the war. 
What we have to follow in the news of this 
week, and that in some detail, is the enemy's 
approach to this line and his chances of cutting it. 
If he reaches it and cuts it, Warsaw can hardly 
be held. If Warsaw be evacuated, and the 
Russian line straightened, the enemy has the 
whole Vistula obstacle for his own, and, though 
he shall not have defeated or inflicted disaster 
upon the Russian armies, he will be comparatively 
free to use considerable portions of his forces else- 
where. 
We have seen, in a somewhat detailed analysis 
last week, the nature of this Rowno-Ivangordd 
line. I therefore on the next page repeat the dia- 
gram used on that occasion. 
The line as a whole may be regarded as 
consisting in three sections of about equal length, 
each of some sixty miles. There is the double 
section as far as Kowel; the section to Lublin, 
including Cholm, where there is a single and a 
double line coming from the north; and finally, 
the last section from Lublin to the fortress of 
Ivangorod. 
Now, the enemy's attempt, which is even now 
in progress, is being made against the second of 
these two sections, and a double blow is being 
struck — one, apparently, mainly by Austrians 
against Lublin; the other, apparemtiy, mainly 
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