rpose has again failed of accomplishment, and at several points
the Russian line has advanced.

We have no key to the German mentality which inspires these attacks so
wasteful in lives of soldiers, so ineffectual in their general result.
In the records of this struggle along the courses of the two little
rivers I have notes of upward of 100 attacks in considerable force,
of which not a single one resulted in shifting the imperturbable Russian
infantry from a trench, but each of which has been accompanied by
ghastly loss to the Germans.

A fight characteristic of the operations on this front took place west
of Gradow, where the German attack was exceptionally heavy throughout
New Year's Day, culminating in an assault by infantry on the same night.
Throughout the day they shelled the Russian trenches, spending
ammunition with their customary lavishness. The day's shelling justified
the Russian opinion that of the German forces their artillery and
cavalry are the weakest arm and their infantry is the best. The
positions are not greatly disturbed by the day-long aspersion with
shrapnel, and the Russians are more than ready for the attack. On this
front the infantry attacks usually in line, but this night they came up
in dense columns. The Russian guns were at work promptly with the fuses
of the shells reduced, so that they burst almost at the gun's mouth, and
from the trenches a steady, schooled infantry fire tore gaps in the
masses of the enemy.

At Gradow the Russians were utterly outnumbered. To this extent the
German concentration of forces was successful, but no further. They
succeeded in reducing the Russians' tactics from a mere defense of the
trenches to delivering a counter-attack; but this was the limit of their
success.

I have talked with three Russian officers here who were wounded during
the counter-attack. Five machine guns were at work on them as they left
their trenches in a charge. One of the officers was shot through the
chest as he climbed the bank of the trench; the second got perhaps
twenty yards before being hit in the head; the third, however, led his
men home into the German trench. Of the Russians who set out only eighty
were alive and unhurt when they reached the German trench, but this
eighty took it with the bayonet, killing about five times their own
number of Germans.

At Gradow, on the morning of Jan. 2, the ground resembled the strewn
battlefield of Brzezny or the body-littered valleys