August 21, 1915. 
LAND AND .WATER 
THE RUSSIAN RETIREMENT. 
By HILAIRE BELLOC. 
Ii'OTE This article has been submitted to the Press Bureau, nhich does not object to the publication as censored, and takes 09 
responsibility tor the correctness of the statements. 
In accordance with the requirements of the Press Bureau, the positions of troops on Plans illustrating this Article must only be 
regarded as approximate, and no definite strength at any point is indicated. 
[Note. — Owing to important, engagements I have Lad to 
Write these nofcss on Monday, August 16, and thus they con- 
cern events only up to that dats, instead of to the Tuesday 
afternoon as usual.] 
WHEN these lines appear it will be 
exactly five weeks since the Russian 
autliorities determined to retire from 
the Warsaw salient and to take up a 
sliorter, straighter, and more defensive line 
stretching from the Gulf of Riga, past Kovno and 
Grodno, and the industrial town of Bielostock, 
the grci^t fortress of Brest, and so on to the lines 
of tne I'pper Bug and the Dnieper. The whole 
interest of this vast operation lay, to the student 
of strategy in this war, in the failure or success 
of the Russians to withdraw without confusion 
and without disaster the advanced bodies occupy- 
ing the salient of Warsaw back eastward to the 
new lines. We are not even yet in a position to 
affirm that this enormous task has been accom- 
plislied witli complete success, but it is very near 
accomplishment. 
If our Ally brings the great attempt off and 
fulfils his plan, it will be one of the finest things 
over done in the history of war. The student 
concerns himself little when such an c-peration is 
in hand with the facts that a retirement is a 
retirement, and to that extent of a confession of 
temporary inferiority; or that the advance upon 
the other side is an advance, and to that extent a 
proof of temporr."ily superior power. The 
enemy does not advance in order to compel 
liis opponent to retire; lie advances in the 
hope of cutting off at least portions of the retiring 
armies during the process; if possible of envelop- 
ing the whole. If that be not possible, of at least 
inHicting such severe losses that his foe shall be 
crip[)Ied. 
The student of strategy is interested, then, 
once the abandonment of such a great salient is 
found necessary, almost entirely in the success or 
failure of the perilous manoeuvre. 
For if it succeeds, the e.xpenses in men and 
material to which the advancing force has been 
put are, strategically speaking, thrown away. 
That the advance will obtain political results more 
or less weighty, according to the nature of the 
ground occupied, goes without saying, and 
iWarsaw was in this case a political prize of very 
high value. 
That the retirement may depress the moral of 
the army condemned to it and must effect neutral 
civilian opinion is equally obvious, but strategic- 
ally the whole point is whether the retreat has 
been accomplished according to the plan of its 
higher command or no, and whether it has been 
carried out without suffering the loss of any grave 
portion of its total force by cutting off. 
If this is done, especially if it is done in an 
operation of such enormous scale as that of the 
recent Russian abandonment of the Warsaw 
salient, it is a triumph, not for the offensive, buF 
for the defensive, which that offensive has 
attempted, and failed, to destroy. 
The line once straightened may still further 
retire, and the offensive he none the stronger, 
wherever ample space lies behind for retreat. It 
is not reaching or staying on the Brest line that is 
essential : it is saving the imperilled salient, a 
BA LTIC 
SEA 
double attack on which, from north and from 
south, was the whole of the enemy's strategy. 
In the light of these surely obvious first prin- 
ciples, let us examine what this Russian retire- 
ment has been. 
Upon the accompanying Sketch I. we have, 
in the line of crosses from the Gulf of Riga, past 
Novo Georgievsk, in front of Warsaw, in front of 
Ivangorod. in front of Lublin and Cholm and so on 
to the lines of the Upper Dniester and Bug Rivers, 
the positions occupied by the Russian armies 
[Copyright in America by "The Sew York American."} 
