Angus! 14, ISlSi 
LAND AND WATER 
which was also perhaps Ihe most determined and 
the weightiest, may be called the battle for Ypres. 
Jt began upon October 20, and was not finally con- 
cluded until the middle of November, passing 
through a very critical moment in the last three 
'days of October, when the resisting line but barely 
held, and through another spectacular but per- 
haps less perilous moment upon November 11, 
when a considerable, fraction of the Prussian 
Guards corps was launched directly westward 
towards Ypres and thrown back by the British 
troops. 
Space forbids us to consider at greater length 
this famous achievement of the British Army, 
which, with its Allies in that sector, never num- 
bered as much as one-third of the numbers of men 
brought against it, certainly not anything like 
one-quarter of the hea^y artillery under the bom- 
bardment of which it suffered. 
By the middle of November, then, the enemy's 
higher command had finally discovered the impos- 
sibility of breaking through in the West. His 
main effort for the winter and on into the en- 
suing spring he determined to direct towards the 
East, and it is time to consider what fortunes he 
had already had in that theatre of the war when, 
with the end of November, he proceeded to make 
it his chief scene of operations. 
VIl. 
The opening of the War in its Eastern 
theatre discovered a heavy miscalculation upon 
the part of the enemy. About a million Aus- 
trians had been detached to stop an advance upon 
the part of the Russians in the South of Poland 
while the decisive victory' w?,s being gained at 
once by the Germans in tne West. On the fron- 
tiers of East Prussia, to watch any moveinent the 
Russians might make in Northern Poland, was 
one army corps or two of Germans, and no more. 
The enemy had calculated that the Russian 
mobilisation would be so slow that these forces 
would be sufficient to deal with any Russian 
effort until the French armies were destroyed. 
The Russian mobilisation had, as a fact, pro- 
ceeded smoothly and more rapidly than the enemy 
thought possible. Our Ally, therefore, appeared 
in far greater strength in Southern Poland than 
was expected, pushed back the Austrian army 
which had been advancing there, defeated it in 
front of Lemberg, captured numerous prisoners 
— more than a tenth of the whole force — and pro- 
ceeded to advance through Galicia. 
This series of successful Russian actions in 
front of Lemberg and beyond were contemporary 
with the furthest extent of the German advance 
in France, Von Kluck's blunder in front of Paris, 
and the Battle of the Marne. 
Meanwhile, in East Prussia, forces which 
would have seemed enormous in the wars of the 
past, but which were small indeed on the scale of 
the present great war, had met with results disas- 
trous to the Russians. These had invaded the pro- 
vince of East Prussia in greater force than the 
German General Staff had thought possible; their 
miscalculation as to Russian mobilisation doing 
them here an ill service for the moment, as it 
had done for the Au.strians in the South. 
About 200,000 men of our Ally advanced 
rapidly through the province. They were care- 
ful to spare property and to observe the conven- 
tions of civilised war; for the abominations of 
Wttlintcnt to lUKD tf>I> Water, Ausust 14, IS15. 
which Prussia was already guilty in Belgium 
and France were not yet generally known 
throughout Europe. 
To meet this unexpected invasion a force 
about equal to it in numbers was rapidly 
gathered under the retired Prussian General 
Hindenburg, who had expert knowledge of the 
region invaded. This region is known as that of 
the Masurian Lakes. It is a tangle of meres and 
marshes, with narrow passages between. The 
main part of the Russian Army was caught in 
this tangle near the country town of Tannenberg. 
Nearly half of it was put out of action; the whole 
was severely defeated, and the invasion conse- 
quently repelled. 
This victory of Tannenberg, taking place in 
the last days of August, produced an impression 
upon the popular mind in Germany which has 
not yet faded, for it was not only a complete 
success, but also one waged upon German soil and 
having for its result the liberation of the national 
territory. 
Neither the striking enemy success of Tannen- 
berg in the north of the Eastern theatre of war 
nor the defeat of much larger bodies of the enemy 
in the southern' part of that theatre in Galicia as 
yet disturbed the persistent plan of the Prussian 
General Staff to succeed, if it were possible, in the 
West before developing any considerable effort 
towards the East. As we hav-e seen, most of 
October and nearly all November were occupied 
by violent and repeated attacks against the 
Franco-British line, delivered with vastly superior 
forces on the enemys side and intended to break 
through and secure the ports of the Channel. 
Though it was evident that something must 
be done to relieve the pressure upon the defeated 
Austrians in Galicia, the forces gathered for that 
purpose were not equal to the task. Hindenburg, 
pressing forward from East Prussia towards the 
Niemen, between Kovno and Grodno, had been 
beaten back in the last week of September. From 
the first week of October up to the 16th of that 
month (just as the great German offensive was 
beginning in Flanders in the West, after the fall 
of Antwerp), Von Hindenburg was trying again, 
with larger masses, to create a diversion in favour 
of the Austrians by a direct advance upon 
Warsaw. 
He reached, and even passed, the line of the 
Vistula, p.nd was fighting, upon October 16, quite 
close to Warsaw itself. Three days later a 
Russian attack from the North upon its com- 
munications, issuing from the fortress of Novo 
Georgeivsk and its neighbourhood, compelled his 
retirement. His most advanced bodies upon the 
Vistula River suffered a severe defeat, and the end 
of October was occupied with the rapid retirement 
of the German forces to their own frontier, pur- 
sued by the Russian armies. 
This fii'st invasion of Russian Poland, brief 
and a failure as it was, discovered two important 
consequences, the one political, the other strategic. 
The first was the alieJiation of the Polish 
people, whose allegiance might have been thought 
in the balance between the various alien Powers 
fighting upon Poli.sh soil. The abominable and 
useless cruelties which the Prussian armies com- 
mitted threw Polish feeling back upon Russia. 
For the first time in the Eastern theatre of war 
the general imagination was seized with what 
hitherto the French only had appreciated from 
11* 
