July 31, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER, 
thousand men fighting on a front, and behind 
them, say, twenty thousand men — and after that 
no more. These twenty thousand men consist, let 
us say, in four units of five thousand each. He 
makes his plan for reinforcing his perpetual 
wastage among the one hundred thousand on his 
front, and says to himself, " I will first draw from 
Block 1 of my reserve, then from Block 2, and so 
on." He gives orders, distributes equipment and 
munitions accordingly, and thus perpetually keeps 
his fighting front at full strength. 
In the midst of such a campaign, in full 
action, there comes an attack in a totally different 
place from his old front, which he cannot meet 
with less than, let us say, one block of his reserve. 
He sends off Block 4, as least interfering with his 
original plan, but he cannot say to himself, " Now 
I have sent Block 4 I have done with the whole 
business." He may need, sooner than he expects, 
to send off Block 3 to the reinforcement of Block 4 ; 
just as he is preparing to set his machinery in 
motion for reinforcing his old front from Block 2, 
he may get news from the new front that even 
more men than Blocks 3 and 4 will be required, 
and he will have to draw upon Block 2. 
In other words, the introduction of the 
Italian front into the campaign has, by direct 
numerical effect, by confusion of plan, and by, 
possibly already, the starving of units upwn the 
other fronts, begun to produce its effect. 
But what we cannot do more than conjecture 
— and that only on very insecure elements of 
judgment — is the actual rate of the drainage 
effected by the Italian pressure upon the Austrian 
forces. 
We must remember that this purely defensive 
attitude whidi the Austrians have adopted from 
the beginning (obviously under a joint plan with 
the Prussians) was based upon the extreme diffi- 
culty of all the country until one gets to the last 
few miles between Gorizia and the sea. Nomin- 
ally they had to defend 300 miles: in reality, they 
only had to defend about a dozen points where 
troops could cross in large numbers tne barrier of 
the mountains. And all they had to do at these 
points was to prevent them crossing. Their role 
was purely passive, and depended very mndi 
more upon artillery than upon rifles. 
It wiU perhaps be discovered, when the 
history of the war is written in detail, that the 
enemy was not constrained to put upon the whole 
frontier between the Krn (or Montenero) and the 
Swiss boundary more, including local reserves, 
than fifty thousand men. 
But when we come to the more or less open 
country, south of Gorizia, where the main action 
is now developing, it is quite another matter. 
It is obvious that at first the Austrians 
attempted to hold this front with too few troops. 
They allowed the Italians to get across the Isonzo 
and to get a footing upon the Carso plateau. In 
order to repair this error, and to throw the 
Italians back across the Isonzo, they have massed, 
especially in the last two or three weeks, and more 
particularly in the last ten days, what are 
evidently very important forces. 
The front in the immediate vicinity of 
Gorizia is hardly held with less than two di>'isions 
— probably more like three; while upon the Carso 
plateau itself there was an attack in force last 
week, of the numbers of which we have no in- 
formation, but v.hich we are surely under the 
mark in estiniiiting at four or five divisiona. 
It is pure guesswork, and must be taken at 
no more value than that, but I would suggest that 
at the beginning of the war Austria had not 
between the Adriatic and the Swiss frontier an 
eighth of a million, or 125,000 men. I will suggest 
that at the present moment the forces upon this 
front have passed, or are approaching, double this 
number, and are reaching a quarter of a million. 
How many more men the enemy may have had to 
concentrate here we cannot tell, but I do not see 
how it can have been less even to-day in view of 
the known weight and numerical strength of the 
growing Italian offensive. 
Now these enemy reinforcements must, as a 
matter of sheer necessity, increase. 
Not only must men come down to replace 
wastage — which has certainly been high in the 
heavy fighting for the hill called the Sei Busi 
and in the big struggle for the Podgora spur — but 
now that it is apparent that the numbers present 
are insufficient to prevent the slow Italian advanc* 
from proceeding, those numbers must be increased. 
If we will keep steadily in view this factor of 
numbers on the Italian front, we shall be less im- 
patient and less liable to false judgment in 
estimating the effects of the new theatre of opera- 
tions in the South. 
THE SITUATION I.N POLAND. 
In order to understand both the peril and the 
chances of the Russian forces upon the Eastern 
front we must distinguish clearly between two 
strategic theses upon which our judgment will 
depend. The two theses in question do not over- 
lap. They involve two distinct theories of defence. 
The first of these theses is that with which 
readers of these pa^es are already thoroughly 
familiar : Warsaw being the desired object of the 
enemy (because its bridges are the termini of all 
railway communications and the possession or 
destruction of them would give the enemy the line 
of the Vistula), Warsaw becomes grievously cut 
off from supply and is at too perilous an angle 
of a great salient if either the northern or the 
southern of the three chief railway lines c&ncerg- 
ing upon it are seized and held hy the enemy. 
That is the thesis which has been maintained 
consistently in these pages for many months. It 
is, further, an obvious thesis which anyone 
acquainted with the dependence of modem armies 
upon railways and the condition of the Eastern 
front would at once act upon. We have seen as 
a fact that the enemy has acted upon it from the 
b^inning. He has tried (last February) to cat the 
northern railway. He has tried (first week in 
July) to cut the southern railway. He is at this 
moment trying to cut both the northern and the 
southern together. 
We have further seen that the screen nmteot- 
ing the northern railway and running paniliel to 
it everywhere was the fortified line of the River 
Narewl 
So far as this element in our judgment of the 
Russian chances of saving Warsaw is concerned, 
the [x>stulates.are, I repeat, well known and evoi 
obvious. 
Further, we know in what peril the two rail- 
ways now stand. We know that the Xarew in 
the' north has already been forced, and that on the 
south, though the enemy has halted for st "= 
(presumably in order to reaceuraulate a 
tion), his advanced trenches are already as close 
