of action against Russia.

The Russian army has been compared to cotton wool. The farther you
went into Russia, the more cotton wool there was. The Russian army
would yield, but there never seemed any end of it. Gaining a passive
victory over the Russian army has also been compared to brushing the
snow off the front doorstep. The more you brushed, the more snow
banked up. Russia could afford to lose territory equivalent to the
area of all France without having received a vital blow. Russia has
plenty of room in which to retreat, as Napoleon learned. She is
confident in the safety of her distances. When the enemy falls back
she follows on his heels.

At the end of the winter, 1914-15, she was still in the possession
of a large portion of Galicia. But the Germans were preparing a
battering ram which their generals thought irresistible. Their plan
now was to deliver so hard a blow at the Russian that he would be
forced to yield a separate peace. Von Mackensen formed his
unprecedented phalanx of soldiery and of artillery in Galicia and
destroying all the fortifications and covering the trenches with
torrents of shell fire he skillfully worked his legions forward,
first breaking the Przemysl line, which compelled a general retreat,
and then breaking the Lemberg line. Thus, having beaten back the
Russian left wing, the Austro-Germans turned their attention to the
Warsaw front and there repeated the same organized machine method of
warfare. There were no brilliant strokes of genius, but merely the
use of superior systems of railroads in making the concentration; of
trained engineers and workmen in advancing the railroad lines; of
systematic overwhelming attacks at critical points, directed by the
unsurpassed German staff organization.

With the fall of Warsaw the Russian army was inevitably badly
broken. They had lost multitudes of prisoners, and staggering
quantities of material. But still it remained an intact army. It was
not decisively beaten. The prisoners were taken by brigades,
regiments, and divisions--thousands of them in reserve, without a
rifle in their hands, as they waited their turn to pick up the rifle
of a dead man. For six months, March to August, the greatest of all
campaigns in numbers of troops and length of line continued in the
east, Von Mackensen and the Austrians striking in the south and Von
Hindenburg in the north. Its details will be read in the history
which follows. Characteristic of either adv