and to let it fall to his opponent.

But, on the other hand, such a position is as bad in strategical value
as it is good in material and political value.

If you suffer defeat in front of a great modern town, and have to
retreat through it under the blows of the victorious enemy, you are in
the worst possible position for conducting that retreat. The streets
of the town (but few of which will run parallel to your course and
can, therefore, serve as avenues of escape for your army) are so many
defiles in which your columns will get hopelessly congested. The
operation may be compared to the pouring of too much liquid into a
funnel which has too small an orifice. Masses of your transport will
remain clogged outside the place; you run the risk of a partial and
perhaps of a complete disaster as the enemy presses on.

There is very much more than this. A great town cannot but contain, if
you have long occupied it, the material of your organization; you will
probably abandon documents which the enemy should not see. You will
certainly, in the pressure of such a flight, lose accumulated stores.
Again, the transverse streets are so many points of "leakage," into
which your congested columns will bulge out and get confused. Again,
you will be almost necessarily dealing with the complication of a mass
of civilian conditions which should never be allowed to interrupt a
military operation.

In general, to fight in front of a great town, when the chances are
against you, is as great an error as to fight in front of a marsh with
few causeways; so far as mere topography is concerned, it is a greater
error still.

Lemberg did not, indeed, fulfil all these conditions. It is very large
(not far from a quarter of a million people), with all its suburbs it
is nearly two miles in extreme extent, and its older or central part
is a confusion of narrow streets; but it is not highly industrialized,
and the position of the Austrian armies was such that the retreat
could be effected mainly from either side of the built area,
particularly as the main enemy pressure had not come in front of the
city along the Busk Road, but far to the east and south in the open
field. But Lemberg was an exceedingly important railway centre (seven
lines converge there), and it contained an immense amount of war
munitions. When, therefore, the retreat was tardily undertaken, the
fact that the more precipitate retirement had begun in front of the
city and not be