LAND AND WATER 
August 14, 1915. 
Hindeubu;-;r. who was still in command of the 
niain German Army, struck, therefore, with forces 
immensely superior, in number to those which he 
first had 'to meet, and the Russian bodies in the 
north of Poland, which had previously pushed 
their advanced cavalrv up to the German frontier 
itself, fell back rapidly before him. Troops and 
munitions were moved up in aid of these 
tlireatened Russian bodies in the north as fast as 
could be accomplished by road, and round-about 
by the imi)erfect and largely-destroyed railway 
system. The Germans continued to have a very 
heaw numerical superiority locally at the point of 
their attack, and on November 23 they succeeded 
in bre-aking the Russian line, when that line was 
covering Warsaw at a distance not greater than 
four or five days" march. 
The moment was exceedingly, critical, and a 
disaster seemed inevitable. 
Nothing lay between the Germans (under 
Mackensen) who had broken through and the 
Polish capital; while the northern Russian armies, 
thus divided into two portions, seemed doomed to 
defeat in detail. 
But in this last week of November there 
followed a most extraordinary develojwient of the 
situation, a parallel to which it would be hard to 
find, at any rate upon such a scale, in all the 
history of the war. 
Though complete victory was apparently 
within their grasp, and the Gfermans had accom- 
plished their main object in dividing the Russian 
forces, the arrival of Russian reinforcements 
turned what had been a wide breach of some six- 
teen miles through the Russian positions into 
something more resembling a purse or pocket, 
within w'hich the hitherto successful enemy found 
themselves enclosed. It even looked for a moment 
as though the arrival of yet more reinforcements 
from the North would close the month of this 
pocket and would compel the surrender of per- 
haps half the German host. But these Northern 
Russian reinforcements could not arrive in time, 
and the nearly surrounded Germans fought their 
way out, though not without losses amounting to 
something like half their number. 
The Russian armies in this region, now more 
nearly equal to the temporarily exhausted enemy, 
but still inferior in number to his total, took up 
positions along the Bzura and Rawka Rivers, 
covering Warsaw at a distance of about thirty 
miles, and awaited the next onslaught of the in- 
creasing numbers which the enemy could still 
direct towards the centre of Poland.' 
- * All this work in the North had at least this 
much of the effect that the enemy desired, that it 
prevented further progress by the main Russian 
armies in-the South. They had even to retire 
somewhat from in front of Cracow to straighten 
their lin«,«^d make it correspond with its exten- 
sion through Poland to the North, and after the 
middle of December the Russians stood from the 
Carpathians to the frontiers of East Prussia nnon 
a line determined by the Dunajec and Bi'ala 
Rivers at the southern end and continued directly 
northward from the Upper to the Lower Vistula, 
across the great eastward bend of that river, thus 
covering W\nrsaw% and thence turning round Neo 
Georgievsk, and reaching the Prussian frontiers 
a httle to the" east of north of that fortress 
Thence to the Baltic the line roughly followed the 
frontier. 
In the Carpathian region itself the Russians 
were halted to the east of the mountains and were 
detained from advancing by the resistance of the 
fortress of Przemysl, which they had invested. 
The next six' weeks were occupied with the 
attempt of the German armies under Hinden- 
burg in the centre of Poland to hammer their way, 
through to Warsaw by a direct frontal attack. 
The manoeuvre was of that perfectly simple 
type to which experience in the West had already 
accustomed the observers of this war. 
The enemy massed heavy guns for bombard- 
ment along the fifty-m.ile semi-circle of the Bzura 
and the Rawka, concentrating now upon one point, 
now upon another. After each such bombardment 
he launched his infantry in dense masses against 
the trenches of the sector that had just been 
shelled. There were, perhaps, in the six weeks 
of his main effort (the latter half of December 
and the whole of January) perhaps ten such 
major efforts to break through to Warsaw and any 
number of lesser supporting attacks. They were 
everyone of them foiled. 
With the end of January the enemy con- 
ceived another stratagem, but before explaining 
it we must digress for a moment upon the nature 
of the enemy's recruitment, which, in contrast to 
that of the Allies, has largely affected the nature 
of the war. 
IX. 
The German Empire can train at any one 
time approximately 800,000 men. Austria- 
Hungary (Avhich may, once war is launched, be 
regarded as a power eighty per cent, that of the 
German Empire) is in a position to train at any 
one time, a similar maximum of over 600,000, but 
less than six and a half hundred thousand. The 
enemy, as a whole can, therefore, provide batches 
of, at a maximum, 1,400,000 odd men. As each 
batoh is trained another can take its place. It 
must not be imagined that the process is the simple 
and mechanical one of calling up a maximum 
number, training them for a given time, sending 
them all out from the depots, and replacing them 
by another batch of raw recruits to be trained for 
a similar period, sent out in bulk, replaced by a 
third batch — and so forth. On the contrary, it is 
an elastic process, some units receiving longer 
training than others, and the whole machine being 
fed gradually from one end and discharging the 
finished product from the other. - 
Nevertheless, this arrangement has the effect 
of producing great waves in the curve of recruit- 
ment, vvhich passes through periods of maximum 
intensity at fairly regular intervals. 
Roughly speaking, the average period which, 
during winter and spring at least, the enemy 
thought sufficient for training w-as about three 
months. Many of his units were trained for far 
less, when there was urgent need of filling gaps, 
many were probably kept back. But great masses 
of new material appeared at the end of the first 
three months (November) for the great assault 
upon the Western line; and another great mass 
appeared for the manoeuvre of Fehrnary, which 
we are about to follow; w^hile a third, more im- 
portant than either of the earlier two, came into 
the field at the end of April, and produced itn 
prodigious effect in the great Polish advance of 
the enemy, which is not yet completed, and which 
we are at the moment of writing still observing. 
These three batches of 800,000 men in 
Supplement to Land i.VD 
Watsr, Aueust 14, I9IS. 
14* 
