cted points and undertaken with a
violence and an apparently unlimited supply of guns and ammunition
such as had not been displayed by the Russian forces on any previous
occasion, and when, after these preliminaries the actual offensive was
launched, the number of men employed was proportionally immense.

Before we follow in detail developments along the eastern front, it
will be well for a fuller understanding of these, to visualize again
its location and to determine once more the distribution of the forces
maintaining it on both sides. In its location the eastern front had
experienced very little change since the winter of 1915 had set in and
ended active campaigning. Its northern end now rested on the southwest
shore of the Gulf of Riga at a point about ten miles northwest of the
Baltic town of Pukkum on the Riga-Windau railroad and about thirty
miles northwest of Riga itself. From these it ran in a southeasterly
direction through Schlock, crossed the river Aa where it touches Lake
Babit, passed to the north of the village of Oley and only about five
miles south of Riga, and reached the Dvina about halfway between
Uxkull and Riga. From there it followed more or less closely the left
bank of the Dvina, passed Friedrichstadt and Jacobstadt to a point
just west of Kalkuhnen, a little town on the bend of the Dvina,
opposite Dvinsk. There it continued, generally speaking, in a
southerly direction, at some points with a slight twist to the east,
at others with a similarly slight turn to the west. It thus passed
just east of Lake Drisviaty, crossed the Disna River at Koziany, then
ran through Postavy and just east of Lake Narotch, crossed the Viliya
River and the Vilna-Minsk railroad at Smorgon, and reached the Niemen
at Lubcha. From thence it passed by the towns of Korelitchy, Zirin,
Luchowtchy and entered the Pripet Marshes at Lipsk. About ten miles
south of the latter town the line crossed the Oginsky Canal and
followed along its west bank through the town of Teletshany to about
the point where the canal joins the Jasiolda River. From that point
the Germans still maintained their salient that swings about five
miles to the east of the city of Pinsk.

Up to just south of the Pinsk salient, where the line crossed the
Pripet River, it was held, for the Central Powers, almost exclusively
by German troops. Below that point its defense was almost entirely in
the hands of Austro-Hungarian regiments. Soon after crossing the
P