LAND & WATER 
August 10, 1916 
drive through Poland which reduced almost to exhaustion 
the originally insufficient equipment and munitionment 
of our Russian Ally. 
That drive was undertaken, not for the occupation of 
territory, but for the destruction of the Russian armies. 
They were saved, as we know, by the skill of the retreat, 
though only at the expense of terrible losses in men and 
in instruments of war and at the expense, as I have said, 
of exhaustion, especially in the munitionment of heavy 
pieces, the hardest of all to replace in a country imper- 
fectly industrialised. 
The Second Year of the War opened with this attempt 
to impose a separate peace upon a defeated Russia in 
full swing. Already the line of the Vistula was reached 
and the capital of Poland occupied. The advance con- 
tinued throughout August. It reached the Hne of the 
Great Marshes in the centre, entered Volhynia in the 
south, and in the north made its last supreme (and much 
its greatest) effort to arrive at a decision before its energy 
should be spent and a change in the season should render 
further operations impossible. 
VILNA SALIENT 
That great attempt may be known to history by the 
name of the Vilna salient. Distant as the operation now 
is in time, and loosely as it was followed in the west, 
we shall do well to note it carefully, for it was a turning 
point in the whole history of the campaign ; and the 
failure of the enemy here was followed by a whole series 
of changes which led up to the latest phase of the war. 
;Throughout the Polish advance the attempt upon the 
part of the enemy to obtain a decision had been the 
simple one of attacking in strength with massed heavy 
artillery at two distant points, compelling a Russian 
retreat at each of these points, and so producing a salient 
between them. The salient once produced the next 
effort was to cut off the neck of the salient, to press in 
upon either side and thus envelop the Russian forces 
within the bulge. Several such salients had been pro- 
duced by the enemy in his advance ; in each case he had 
failed to grasp the Russian forces thus threatened above 
and below. The attempt to capture the Russian forces 
within the great Vilna sahent in the middle of September 
was the most serious of all. The salient began to appear 
upon the map in the first ten days of September. It 
grew pronounced in the following week and round about 
the 17th or i8th of the month, those who were following 
the progress of the German envelopment remarked with 
astonishment to the north of Vilna an extremely rapid 
advance day by day which could only indicate the use of 
cavalry. As a matter of fact, it was later learnt that by 
farjJthe largest body of cavalry in this war had been 
launched by the Germans to the north of Vilna : No 
less than 40,000 sabres accompanied by 140 mounted 
pieces swarmed all up the higher portions of the Vilia 
River and all but enveloped the great Russian forces 
within the curve. It was a curiously daring performance 
and, as the event turned out, a perfectly futile one. 
Something like one-half of this great force was lost in 
the ensuing week. Cavalry is, of all the arms, the most 
delicate to handle ; its rapid action at the beginning 
of any strategic movement where it can be used is modi- 
fied by the enormous supply of the horses needed, and 
already as early as the i6th of September the difficulty 
of that supply had begun to be felt. During the 17th, 
i8th and 19th, the Russian armies within the Vilna 
salient were retiring. They were destroying, with 
greater and greater ease upon their flank, with each 
succeeding day, the now scattered remnants of the 
cavalry to the north. The enemy entered Vilna town 
upon the i8th, but he had lost his objective which was not 
the town but the armies which had been grouped in its 
neighbourhood. A great portion of our Press in Eng- 
land still expressed anxiety for the fate of the retiring 
Russian force. That anxiety was ill-timed. The last 
of the great Austro-German strokes had failed, and 
before the beginning of October the line of the enemy in 
the east was established precisely where it was to be 
found unchanged until the great offensive delivered upon 
its southern part by the Russians in the beginning of 
June in the present year. Lord Kitchener put the 
matter simply and in words the accuracy of which could 
be gauged by the exasperation they caused at Berlin, 
when he said that the enemy had now in the East " shot 
his bolt." It was a phrase exactly true. The expense in 
men, the difficulty of bringing up munitionment ; the 
entry into territories with worse roads and less oppor- 
tunities of supply ; the fact that the line now reached 
and was cut by the great belt of marshes in the centre — 
all these things between them brought the great adven- 
ture to a stand. It had in four months advanced over a 
belt of territory averaging 100 miles in width ; it^^iad 
exhausted Russian munitionment ; cost the Russians 
many hundreds of thousands of men missing as prisoners 
and a corresponding proportion of wounded and of dead. 
It had cost them in mechanical appliances little of their 
field artillery, but a vast proportion of their existing 
rifles and machine guns. It was thought a paradox by 
many when, with the opening of that October last, all 
competent judgment affirmed that the Austro-German 
stroke had failed. Yet, if military terms have any 
meaning, it had failed, and the great advance with all its 
tactical successes was strategically a defeat. For its 
one object had been and could only have been the 
destruction of the Russian armies, or at least of some 
large portion of the Russian armies. For this had it 
formed over and over again its great salients. Each of 
these it had attempted to cut off so as to secure a decision, 
and every one of those attempts had failed until the 
last and crowning failure at Vilna completed the story. 
THE SEPTEMBER OFFENSIVE 
Meanwhile, against the western line where the Ger- 
mans stood upon the defensive, there had been under- 
taken by the French and British combined, a very 
vigorous offensive movement in Champagne and in 
Flanders. Two attacks were undertaken contem- 
poraneously and in co-ordination one with the other, 
and launched in the hope of breaking the German 
defence in France and Belgium. 
This attack in the West had been thus delayed mainly 
on account of the desire to accumulate as large a head 
of shell as possible before it should be delivered. To 
have attacked much later when the weather would have 
changed and when the enemy could have brought back 
his troops from the East, would have been an error, 
although it would have permitted a still larger accumula- 
tion of shell. It was hoped that the existing head of 
shell would be sufficient for the task, and the amount 
was calculated upon what the enemy had delivered in 
his successful attack upon the lines of the Dunajetz 
five months before. 
But there was this great difference between the two 
situations : That in the attack upon the Russians the 
Austro-Germans were delivering their great masses of 
shell against an enemy very ill provided with heavy 
guns and almost at the end of his stock of munitions, while 
the offensive of the Allies in the West was being delivered 
against an enemy whose power of munitionment was 
still superior to our men. 
The plan devised by the French Higher Command had 
in it one element of novelty. The points upon which a 
special effort was to be made had, of course, required 
long preparation, and had probably been noted by the 
enemy already. But the enemy was deceived in some 
degree by many days of heavy bombardment all along the 
hne from the Vosges right up to the sea. And when the 
attack itself was delivered this bombardment had only 
just ceased. 
It was upon the morning of Saturday, September 25th, 
that the two blows were struck. 
The chief effort undertaken by the French in Cham- 
pagne was over a total front of abour 17 miles, from the 
village of Auberive to the market town of Ville sur Tourbe 
just outside the Argonne Forest. The attack was delivered 
in mass, was expensive and, though causing surprisingly 
heavy losses to the enemy (as was ascertained later from 
captured documents and an analysis of his lists) it did 
not attain its main object. It carried the first German line 
in 48 hours, with many thousand unwounded prisoners 
and over thirty guns, but beyond that real progress 
could not be made. 
Almost exactly the same thing on a smaller scale had 
been carried out by the British with certain French 
contingents to the south of them in the region between 
La Bassee and Lens, in which Loos has given its name 
