LAND AND WATER, 
July 10, 191S. 
^WARSAW 
^^ 
wvmo 
loKieV; Odessa 
andllussiait 
bases 
LEMBERG 
with German forces against Cholm. And we 
must never forget that the Austrian heavy^ artil- 
lery is as good as anything of its kind in the 
.world, both as to its type and as to its handling. 
The general reader will at once be struck by 
the apparent paradox of the enemy's marching 
through the worst bit of country in the belt before 
the railway and in that over which he has the 
greatest distance to go from his railhead and 
consequent facility of supply. 
,Why is he acting tnus? It seems at first 
difficult to understand when we consider that the 
whole of his power consists in superior munition- 
ment in heavy shell, and that munitionment is 
with very great diflBculty supplied along any road 
in the quantities required by modern warfare. It 
is an arm now dependent upon railways for its 
efficiency. 
In order to see why it is that the enemy is 
thus striking for Lublin and Cholm, instead of 
striking for Kowel, which is nearer to his fine 
.Galician system of railways, and to Lemberg, we 
must appreciate the importance in this district 
of the Bug. 
About a day's march east of Cholm the River 
Bug runs from south to north. Near its source, 
where it is an insignificant obstacle, at the town 
of Kamionka (K), the enemy are in possession 
of it, and can therefore turn its line. But shortly 
after its first reaches the Bug becomes a consider- 
able stream running through a marshy valley and 
possessed of few crossing-places at which an army 
can pass. Nowhere at all in Russian territory (in 
this district, at least) is there a spot where dry 
land on either side of the Bug comes quite close 
to the stream itself; there is a belt of marsh on 
cither side all along. 
If, therefore, the enemy had undertaken to 
deliver his main blow cast of the Bug and towards 
Kowel, in the region A — A on the following 
diagram, he would have been operating in this 
peculiar fashion : 
Warsaw 
1 1 » ' » I 
fCbwel 
Kra$no.<taw)5> 
rmosk }« ^ 
3 
V 
His big force, which he would have had to 
maintain in munition and food, would have been 
fed by communications corresponding, roughly, 
to the arrow in the diagram, very lengthy, and 
not perpendicular to his new front, but curling 
round. He could not have defended those com- 
munications well because, leaving only small 
forces to the west, in the region of the Bug at 
B — B, the Bug would have separated theui, and 
kept them out of touch, from the main army at 
A — A. And if the Russians had attacked hard 
in the region B — B (as they certainly would have 
done), he could not have reinforced his imperilled 
troops there from the legion A — A, for the Bug 
