a complete stoppage of operations. For there the
weather becomes very severe. The ground freezes sometimes to a depth
of three and more feet, which, of course, makes it impossible to dig
trenches quickly. But just as soon as trench digging at short notice
became impossible operations had to cease. For whenever armies advance
over closely contested ground--as was the case all along the eastern
line--the advance by necessity is slow, possibly over only a few miles
every day. And every time the line is pushed forward, and trenches
previously occupied are left behind, it becomes necessary with each
step of the advance to dig new trenches unless the advanced line was
fortunate enough to be able to stop the day's work in the trenches of
the enemy, a possibility which, of course, did not offer itself any
too frequently. And even then a lot of digging was necessary, because
what was previously, during the enemy's occupation, the back of a
trench line now had to be turned into its front. All of this digging,
or at least most of it, had to be done quickly, in order to avoid the
loss of the newly gained positions by the success of hostile
counterattacks. But both sides alike found it impossible to dig
quickly, or, for that matter, in most cases to dig at all when the
ground was frozen solid. So both sides found themselves condemned to a
more or less continuous state of inactivity as far as all war
operations were concerned, excepting only artillery duels, mining,
aeroplane attacks, sniping from each other's trenches, and all those
other more or less insignificant operations that are usually called by
the generic term "trench warfare."

Although the Russians were acknowledged masters of trench digging and
of throwing up well-planned and efficiently defended field
fortifications of every kind, and also the great mass of their
soldiers were much more accustomed to severe winters than the German
forces, because a very much larger part of the Russian than of the
German Empire is subject to very low winter temperatures, still the
Germans, all in all, had the advantage over their adversaries under
these conditions. In the first place the percentage of mechanically
and scientifically trained men in the German army is far greater than
that in the Russian army, because the latter is recruited primarily
from an agricultural population, whereas the former draws its largest
numbers from an intensively industrial body. Furthermore, organization