January G, H)i6. 
A i\ i ) A .\ I ) 
W A 1 1-: R . * 
dissolution, that the proportion of ineflficients is so 
large as to have already greatly affected the enemy's 
men, or that the ineihcients "in question are deaf, 
dumb or bhnd. 
The phrase means no more than it says. But 
what it says is exceedingly significant. The drafts 
for filling wastage have now largelv to be drawn 
from the first— that is, the least inefficient — cate- 
gories of inefficients. The process can go on for a 
long time, but its effect increases in more than 
arithmetical progression, for you are compelled to 
go on from one category of inefficients to another 
worse one, until you seriously affect the stuff of 
your whole army. 
It should be remarked that the prisoners to 
whose dilution with inefficients Mr. Warner Allen 
bears witness, were (i) troops used in positions 
where it is necessary to have your best and not 
your worst material. Though the numbers with 
which you hold the first trenches are thin, yet you 
have to put into them the men whom you think 
can best stand the terrible effect of an intensive 
bombardment, and will be best able after it, when 
the enemy assault begins, to meet that assault with 
steady nerves and accurate fire. (2) Troops be- 
longing to formations of a specially selected and 
supposedly superior type. They " were Jaeger 
troops. Perhaps one ought not to make much of 
this last point after seventeen months of war, and 
after a wastage which has largely obhterated such 
distinctions from the German service, still it must 
be noted for what it is worth. , 
BATTLES IN BESSARABIA. 
The contemporary enemy preparation for 
threatening Egypt and the canal I will postpone 
till next week, as also the very interesting point of 
the consideration of Salonika as a base for any 
offensive movement, remarking only, before under- 
taking that analysis, that the main effort, the only 
chance for a true decision, must necessarily remain 
in the West, and whether the enemy will or no 
he must concentrate there and even attempt to 
attack there, before he either admits defeat or 
claims victory. 
For the moment the threat to Egypt is still, 
and will long be, a matter of preparation only, 
and the position of Salonika as a base for an 
offensive movement is in the same position.' 
There is only one considerable movement of 
troops and change of ground upon which our atten- 
tion can be fixed, and that is the Austro-German 
offensive against the southern portion of the 
Russian line and the Russian counter-offensive 
which is at present proceeding. 
Our accounts of this whole business are con- 
fused and somewhat contradictory. The affair 
is still in progress, and nothing approaching even 
a local result is determined. But if we put together 
the various brief messages received we arrive at 
some such conclusion as the foUorwing :— 
The enemy attacked in force (along the arrow 
I in Sketch I) along the railway Jeading eastward 
from Kovel towards the lateral Hue which runs 
down south through Rovno and Dubno to Lem- 
berg. It was pointed out during tie great Austro- 
German advance last summer that the capture of 
this lateral line running from Galicda up through 
the Pinsk marshes to Baranovichi and Vilna, and 
so to Dvinsk and Riga was the objective (after 
the attempts to enclose one or other of the Russ an 
armies in the great salients had f^aUed;^ of all the 
end of the enemy's eastward thntst, Jt will also 
.I II ifci,' ' I ' > I I m I 
ITchartDi'iisk 
I. 
10 to 
f^?^/A 
be remembered that when the Austro-Germa.n 
armies had, in Lord Kitchener's words " shot their 
bolt " last autumn, they remained possessed of no 
more than a portion of this lateral railway. They 
prevented, indeed, its complete possession by the 
Russians (which would have been enormously 
useful to the latter) but they also failed to obtain 
possession of it for themselves. 
It was widely held in this country, and in 
France, when the news of this new attack from 
Kovel along the arrow i, Sketch I, was first heard 
of, that a new attempt was being made to get 
hold of the southern portion of this eastern lateral 
railway. 
The conclusion seems to me unsound. It 
would not be in the depth of winter and just after 
a bad thaw in the Pinsk marshes into the bargain, 
that the enemy would make a stroke of this kind. 
It is much more probable that his violent local 
offensive upon the region of Tchai-tariisk (which 
is the point upon the Kovel railway where the two 
fronts cross it) was made from information received 
that the Russians were going to make a diversion 
further south, near the Roumanian harder. 
At any rate, what happened was this. The 
moment the Austro-German attack jusi: south of 
the Pinsk marshes in the region of Tchartoriisk 
developed, the Russians countered hea'vily by a 
thrust just north of the Roumanian harder from 
Bessarabia. They began a violent offens ive along 
the arrow 2 in Sketch I, for the possession of the 
heights immediately above Czernowitz, tl le capital 
of the Bukowina, defended by very strong and 
continuous Austrian entrenchments wh? ch reach 
up northward to the neighbourhood of Buczacz 
and follow a line nearly north or south. At the 
