his field (the very names of which have such
great moral effects upon the French and the German minds) was, by the
2nd of September, as follows:--

The French had suffered in the first considerable action of the war a
disaster. They had lost their foothold in the annexed provinces. They
had put the capital of French Lorraine, Nancy, in instant peril. They
had fallen back from the Vosges. They were beginning, with grave
doubts of its success, a counter-offensive, to keep the enemy, if
possible, from entering Nancy. They had lost thousands of men, many
colours, and scores of guns, and all Germany was full of the news.

LEMBERG.

The foundation of the Germanic plan upon the Eastern front at the
origin of the war was, as we have said, the holding up of Russia
during her necessarily slow mobilization, while the decisive stroke
was delivered in the West.

That is the largest view of the matter.

In more detail, we know that the main part of this task was entrusted
to the Austro-Hungarian forces. The German forces had indeed entered
and occupied the west fringe of Russian Poland, seizing the small
industrial belt which lies immediately east of Silesia, and the two
towns of Czestochowa and Kalish--the latter, in the very centre of the
bend of the frontier, because it was a big railway depot, and, as it
were, a gage of invasion; the former, both because the holding of one
line demanded it (if Kalish and the industrial portion were held), and
because Czestochowa being the principal shrine of the Poles, some
strange notion may have passed through the German mind that the
presence therein of Prussian officers would cajole the Poles into an
action against Russia. If this were part of the motive (and probably
it was), it would be a parallel to many another irony in the present
campaign and its preliminaries, proceeding from the incapacity of the
enemy to gauge the subtler and more profound forces of a civilization
to which it is a stranger.

[Illustration: Sketch 67.]

This local German move was almost entirely political. The main task,
as I have said, was left to the Austrians farther south; and,
proceeding to further detail, we must see the Austrians stretched in a
line from near the middle Carpathians past the neighbourhood of
Tomasow towards Tarnow, and this line distinctly divided into two
armies, a northern and a southern. The two met in an angle in front of
the great fortress of Przemysl. The northern, or first, arm