of East Prussia is of a character peculiar in the German
Empire and in Europe.

That character must be grasped if the reader is to understand what
fortunes attended the war in this region; for it is a district which
in its history, in its political value, and in its geographical
arrangements has very powerfully affected the whole of the campaign.

Historically this district is the cradle of that mixed race whose
strict, narrow, highly defined, but quite uncreative policy has now
piqued, now alarmed, civilized Europe for almost two hundred years.

[Illustration: Sketch 72.]

The Prussian, or rather the Prussian aristocracy, which, by achieving
the leadership of Germany, has flung so heavy a mass at Europe,
originated in the rough admixture of certain West German and Christian
knights with the vague pagan population of the Eastern Baltic plain,
which, until almost the close of the Middle Ages, was still a field
for missionary effort and for crusade. It was the business of the
Teutonic knights to tame this march of Christendom. They accomplished
their work almost out of sight of the governing empire, the Papacy,
and Christendom in general, with what infamies history records. The
district thus occupied was not within the belt of that high Polish
culture which is one of the glories of Europe. Nations may not
inexactly be divided into those who seek and those who avoid the sea.
The Poles are of the latter type. This belt, therefore, of _Borussia_
(whence our word Prussia is derived)--roughly from the Vistula up on
to the Bight of Libau--was held by the Teutonic knights in a sort of
savage independence. The Christian faith, which it had been their
pretext and at first their motive to spread, took little root; but
they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany
itself had absorbed from the south and west could filter in; and the
northern part of the district, that along the sea (which is the least
marshy, and, as that poor country goes, the least barren), was from
the close of the Middle Ages German-owned, though for some generations
nominally adherent to the Polish crown. The Polish race extended no
farther northward in the present province than the lake country of its
southern half, and even there suffered an admixture of Lithuanian and
German blood.

That lake country well merits a particular description, for its
topography has powerfully affected the war in the East; but for the
moment we must chie