LAND A N D WATER 
August 21, 1915. 
five weeks a-o. when tlie deterniinatiou to e^^Y^^f]!^ 
f!. tS hat command had determined o w.th- 
.i;^" The Lilient at its brcmdeat pomt ^^■as a 
fitter of somewhat over 120 miles. 
''t^ refwen^nt f.om this sal>e.it would l^ke 
place along the line of the arrows upon ^^'^ Uh J^ 
Smrrd and from the f rcmt C-.D. where close 
uJIJm" million Austro-Germans were pressing 
""""'S'total onemy forces indudod nmch mo,^ 
than these two main Indies A— B and t— J*. 
'X m-luded forces E-E-E along the nortl, 
perhaps half a million in number, the importance 
&''Sse action was exaggerated by -me c"txe 
in this cx)untry because they seemed to threaten 
one of the great railway lines. They included 
the curve of forces F-F-F, which were pressing 
down on the Warsaw front from ^ovo Georgievsk 
to Ivangorod. They included lurther torces 
G_G— G which faced the main Russian line ot 
positions on the Upper B^g and Dniester to the 
very frontiers of Rouniania. 
But the operative part of the enemy s 
strategic soheme clearly lay in the two great 
bodies, luv. 'jering between them from 1=300 OOO 
t® 1 500 000 men, which I -have marked black 
upon' Sketch 1., and which were the jaws of the 
pincers destined to cut off the troops within the 
salient. 
That was the position five weeks ago. 
To cut off tlie Russian troops in the salient 
it was neoessarv to break well into it from the 
north and from the south before the extreme 
western bodies could march back 120 miles — a 
business of twelve days before the Russians could 
evacuate material and guns from all the positions 
they proposed to abandon— ai.J to round up 
within a period of certainly le" than three weeks, 
but better of less than a fort-ight, the retiring 
columns and the evacuated n.;. erial. 
To all appearances the enemy has quite 
failed in this, his main object. 
The southern force C — D has advanced so 
slowly that its progress can be measured at the 
rate of less than a mile a day. The northern 
force A — B has been so well held upon the line 
of the Narev and beyond that its progress has 
been at little less than half that rate, and it is 
only now, after four weeks and with its task 
accomplished, going back in force. The main 
Russian bodies to-day have reached a line indi- 
cated by the dots upon Sketch I., while the forces 
from the north and the south which were to have 
cut them off are no further advanced than the 
positions indicated upon Sketch I. by the shaded 
oblongs vjs. y-s. 
That is, in its general terms, the story of the 
retirement of the Russian forces upon their new 
lines carried up to the present date; and it is, so 
far, a story of complete success in one of the most 
difficult of all operations of war. 
Tlie really successful work of the Russians 
has been done upon the Xa'-ev. It was the check- 
ing of the northern force A — B which did the 
trick, and the nature of that check I shall describe 
in a moment. Meanwhile the «nemy advance 
now pushed back somewhat from the Riga front 
in the north, touching Kovno iurther south, still 
far off from Grodno and Bielostock in the centre, 
is advancing upon Brest and resolving itselt into 
vet another line parallel to the Russian line and 
kchievii^ nothing in the way of envelopment. 
Of all the jwsitions to the west the Russians 
haveonlv maintained— now isolated— the tortress 
of Novo"Georgievsk, for reasons that will be dis- 
cussed later. 
If the Russian retirement should (as every 
in-dication points to its actually havmg done) 
have finally established itself upon a fairly 
straight line, a vast expense in men— which, 
again, will be discussed in a moment— has be^en 
paid out bv the enemy without achieving his 
strategic object, and it will be the statenient ot 
no Biore than a simple truth to say 1*at he will 
have suffered a strategic defeat. 
There are, then, in this great operation, three 
points u])on which we must concentrate our atten- 
tion at the present moment : 
First, tlie failure of the great enemy forces 
upon the Narev front to break through and so 
press upon and confuse the Russian retirement as 
to c^.use disaster while that retirement was still 
in progress. 
Secondlv, the isolated position ot Novo 
Georgievsk aaid the task which that fortress is 
ext^ected to perform in the next development ot 
the war. . 
Thirdlv, and most important, the price which 
the enemy"^ has paid in that vast scheme which 
has, at the moment of writing, quite failed to 
achieve its object. I will now deal with these in 
their order : 
GERMAN 
FAILURE UPON 
NAREV. 
THE 
The enemv has issued this evening (Monday, 
August 16) a' bulletin to the effect that he has 
'• broken the Narev Yront." It goes on to say thnt 
the Russian losses are perhaps 5 per cent. One 
would imagine that the German Higher Command 
wrote for the disloyal section of the London 
Press! What has "happened is quite another 
thing. 
The essential to envelopment is rapidity. 
Envelopment usually connotes not only rapidity 
but surprise. But even if your element of sur- 
prise is necessarily lacking on account of the scale 
of the operations, yet without rapidity envelop- 
ment, even with vastly superior forces, is impos- 
sible. The classical example of envelopment, the 
battle of Sedan, gives admirable proof of either 
quality. Both in surprising the French and the 
rapidity with which their movements effected that 
surprise, the Prussian Higher Command in 1870 
achieved a memerable triumph. Von Hindenburg 
himself during the present war, in the battle of 
Tannenberg, achieved a triumph hardly less 
remarkable. i ^ i 
But if you attempt an envelopment and find 
j^ourself held up. lose days or weeks, and give the 
enemy time to withdraw, you have simply wasted 
men for nothing. The more you get your teeth 
into your business, the more determined you are 
to pull it off in spite of failure, the more you are 
throwing good money after bad; and if y-ou do 
not lo<jk out you may find yourself at last weak- 
