LAND & WATER 
June 29, 1916 
Austrian. But, at any rate, no one can say that the 
Germans would disapprove of the Trentino plan because 
it had too pohtical a character and not a purely military 
one. 
Lastly, it is not credible that if the Germans had really 
found their Allies independent for once, and if these 
Allies had reallj' acted against German advice, the Ger- 
mans would not have immediately taken counter-measures 
and drawn in their horns to protect their alliance as a 
whole from suffering a disaster. 
To believe the Germans capable of foreseeing that the 
Trentino would be checked, and that the Eastern frontier 
would break is to endow them with a prescience and 
rapidity of intelligence which the whole of this war 
belies, and which is only sincerely belie\ed in by theif 
own middle classes and a few panicky people in this 
country. 
But even if. one does allow them these exceedingly un- 
Prussian (|ualities, one must admit that they would have 
guarded against the disaster which, according to such a 
theory, they saw approaching. They would have 
checked the effort at Verdun with its drain on the depots, 
and would have begun to send men in considerable 
numbers to Galicia. They did nothing of the sort ; the 
whole thing took them by surprise just as much as it 
took the Higher Command of the Austro-Hungarians. 
The Germans must not only share the responsibility of 
the Trentino adventure, they must be regarded as the 
actual authors of the folly, and only those who have 
made a religion of Prussian methods, I think, can doubt 
such a conclusion. 
The Trentino business was a thoroughly Prussian idea 
from beginning to end, and I fancy it will have the fate 
happily attending Prussian ideas in modem warfare. 
The only un-Prussian thing about it has been the absence 
(so far as we know) of massacre, arson, torture and rape 
in the first days of the advance when it was believed to 
be successful. , 
Events on the Eastern Front 
Upon the Eastern front it is clear tliat the right wing, 
which is roughly the advance on Kovel and upon the flank 
north of Lcmberg created by the Lutsk salient, is the 
theatre upon which the Germans are concentrating all 
their available power in aid of their defeated Ally. They 
are, and have for a week past, been holding the Russian 
advance everVwhere, and at the moment of writing (the 
evening of Jlonday the 26th) there is no appreciable 
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further movement of the line either north-westward 
towards Kovel, or south-westward upon the Lemberg 
flank. There is a very ftnious struggle going on along 
the whole quadrant from Gorokhov on the south-west to 
Kolki upon the east, but it is a struggle in which neither 
side has yet arrived at a pronounced result. 
The centre, of course, the great Austro-German sahent, 
between Radzi\iloff and Kolomea, still stands. The 
point where there is movement and where there is there- 
fore a threat to that centre is in the south, the Bukovina. 
The advance of the Russians over the lower ground of 
the Bukovina continued throughout the week. The test, 
as I have said, of its final strategic effect will be the occupa- 
tion of the town of Kolomea. 
If the Russians reach and hold that point the Austro- 
German centre is no longer in potential peril, as it has 
been now for over a fortnight, but in actual peril. It 
will have to retire and the whole line will have to be 
modified, and whether that modification would be 
possible in the face of the extreme pressure it would be 
subjected to by the corresponding Russian advance is 
the whole problem of the immediate future in this region. 
Meanwhile, it is important to understand what the 
condition of communications in the Bukovina is. These 
communications enable a commander possessing Czer- 
nowitz — which is the communication centre of the Buko- 
vina — to chose between, or to combine, two quite distinct 
movements. He can threaten the plains of Hungary 
and compel an enemy concentration in an advance 
upon or at the foot of certain passes in the Carpathians, 
Motai£aiiwus , 
Cous:£Ty///////, 
To Ovij^arian F^ams^^/// 
