March 30, 19 16 
L A N D 3c W A T E R 
for operations earlier than the r.ortlieni althouRli, the 
climate beiiiR more wliat is called " Continental," the 
depth of winter is sometimes more severe in the south 
than in the north. 
All this reasoning upon existing raihvays and the 
nature of the soil and the roads (it is the absence of stone 
which makes the country what it is) is modihcd in some 
degree by the power of the modern industrial civilisations, 
of which the Austro-Germans form a part, to supplement 
their commimications with rapidly built railways and to 
trace new roads which they can, within the delay of so 
many months, harden. They are in a better posture to 
improve their front in this fashion than are the Russians 
with their much smaller industrial opportunities and their 
absence of material behind the lines. But wc must not 
exaggerate this advantage, ajiprcciable though it is. 
The Field Raihvays which the Germans have laid down 
are not permanent ways. .\nd the providing of metal- 
ling and ballast road-bed for any large system of new 
roads and railways would be quite beyond the capacity 
of the enemy, especially during the winter season 
which is all he has had at his disposal. He will here 
and there have hardened a few new tracks and no 
doubt improved the main causeways. But he is still 
in the main dependent upon the system which he found 
when he entered the country, and this is the more ob- 
viously true from the fact that the whole district is a 
tangle of marsh, lake and forest. A generation of ex- 
tensive exploitation with a commercial civilisation behind 
it under the best conditions of peace would make a great 
change in the physical conditions of Eastern Poland and 
Courland, and the marshes between Poland and Russia. 
It would especially improve communications. But a few 
months, and those months winter months under con- 
ditions of war, will have done very little. We are right, 
therefore, in thinking of the whole problem in terms of 
main comnumications existing when the war began, and 
of conditions of ground and facilities of communication 
not very different from these which existed in the summer 
of 1015. ■ 
Judged then by general considerations, let us see 
how matters lie in the Northern sector which lias been the 
seat of the late movements east of Vilna and south of 
Dvinsk. 
The reader is familiar with the line upon which the 
enemj''s effort of last year was exhausted and balance at 
last restored between the invader and the invaded. It 
ran along and just missed the river Dvina, leaving a rather 
large bridgehead in Russian hands in front of Riga, 
easily tenable on account of the marshes there. The line 
of the river itself is everywhere in Russian hands. It 
covers Dvinsk or Dimaberg, after which the upper parts 
of the stream come from the east and no longer concern 
the trench line. 
It then, in the midst of a perfect maze of lakes, small 
and great, threads its way down to the Vilna-Dvinsk 
Tyfi^S' i^ 
