T

HE Germanic offensive against the Dunajec line must rank as an operation surpassing in magnitude almost anything which had hitherto been experienced in the war.

The Germans once more showed their incomparable powers of organization. In matters which can be foreseen, calculated and prepared, hardly anyone can equal, and no one can surpass, the Germans. The human machine which they have created is as mighty in its strength as it is ghastly in its spirit. It marks the highest triumph of the reasoning mind and the closest welding of the modern mass-individuality. When watching the Germans at their destructive work, one's thoughts wander back to the tales of the eccentric, coldly calculating imagination of Jules Verne, especially to the story about the "Millions of the Begum." A German and a Frenchman inherit between them an immense fortune. The German uses his share for the construction of an enormous shall we say-howitzer ? The Frenchman builds a garden city. One shell fired from the giant gun is to wipe out the throbbing life of the Latin city. But the usual happy unravelling of the plot saves

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its existence. The deadly shell rises too high, it leaves the spheres of life, and joins the dead stars in their regular, fantastic courses.

Against the German hurricane of steel and fire stood the patiently enduring nature of the Russian peasant. The artillery which was to equalize the conditions of battle, though splendidly staffed and managed, was unable to cope with the superiority in number, weight, and ammunition possessed by its Germanic opponents. The Russian peasant-soldier had to meet the storm in his own way. He stood at his post and perished. It is the resistance offered by the Russian infantry which imparts the heroic, tragic touch to the fighting on the Dunajec line. Some German military writers cannot abstain from expressing their admiration for that silent, unassuming heroism; they recall the words spoken by Frederick II. after the battle of Zorndorf in 1758, that if a Russian soldier is hit by three bullets one has still to push him before he falls. Other German writers simply foam with fury and annoyance ; according to the ordinary calculations a wild panic ought to have gripped the Russians. Nothing but stupidity and total absence of nerves can, according to them, explain such 55-3

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that against stupidity, gods and howitzers thunder in vain." Was it stupidity? Let those Germans answer the question who shrink with fear before the mighty, suffering spirit of a Dostojewski. The Russian Slav faith and the Russian religious feeling have arisen from the depths of the peasant heart and have grown up amidst the misery and endless pain of peasant life. It was not primarily against the upper classes of Petrograd, then St. Petersburg, but against the spirit of the Russian peasant nation that the Germanic States opened this war. With the peasant nation they had also to fight it out. The fight on the Dunajec was only the opening of a gigantic struggle between the souls of two nations.

In previous chapters we have referred to the western front in Galicia as the Dunajec-BialaRopa line. Up to the beginning of May 1915 it was, on the whole, of only secondary importance, and we therefore abstained from entering into detailed descriptions of that line, along which the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian armies had been facing one another since about the middle of December. The description of the front by the names of those three rivers was naturally never meant to imply that their course marked the actual dividing line between the

two armies. In a war for positions and the fighting in West Galicia had assumed that character-rivers even bigger than the Dunajec hardly ever remain a barrier between the contending forces.

Several times previous to May 1915 offensive movements had been undertaken by one side or the other. Practically each movement left its mark on the configuration of the line. On some occasions the defending side was unable to recover all the ground from which it had been compelled to recede before the first impact of the attack; at other times and places the attempts ended in failures so serious that the aggressors were finally unable to stop their retreat along the previous lines. Thus almost each offensive movement left its salients. It would be both tiresome and futile to attempt a detailed description of the history and the gradual evolution of the West Galician front. We shall limit ourselves to a brief consideration of the main geographical features of the theatre of war in which the Germanic offensive started in the first days of May 1915, and of the relative positions which the two armies were then holding in that district.

In its upper reaches the Dunajec cuts its way between high, steep rocks. Along a considerable part of its course, from close to Novy Sacz to Zakliczyn, the main roads avoid the neighbourhood of the river. Several miles

above the confluence of the Dunajec and the Biala their valleys widen out considerably, and numerous islands facilitate the crossing or bridging of the rivers. From the village of Biala, which lies near the confluence of the Dunajec and the River Biala, to the confluence of the Dunajec and the Vistula, on a stretch of almost twenty miles, the Dunajec can be forded at only very few places. Its valley is about five miles wide. On both sides of it hills rise to a height of between 200 and 300 feet above the level of the river. Both these ranges

dominate the river valley; during April the Austrian positions followed, in the main, the western range of heights, the lines of our Allies stretched along the eastern hills. Further protection was derived by both sides from the woods which cover the slopes and tops of the hills. On the western side these woods form a belt between two and three miles deep. Little strategic interest attaches to the river valley itself. The dams which on both sides encompass the river are its main feature. At several points our Allies were holding practically the entire valley; at others the river formed the dividing line between the armies. Of all the Russian salients on the western bank of the Dunajec the most marked was that near Radlow. This entire village remained up to the beginning of May in the hands of our Allies.

Between the villages of Biala and Gromnik, for a distance of about fourteen miles, the two armies were facing one another on the western side of the river Biala; this sector of the front lay almost entirely within the triangle, of which the Dunajec and the Biala are the sides, their confluence the apex, and of which the Zakliczyn-Gromnik road is the basis. About two miles to the south of the river junction, between Bogumilovice and Tarnow, the doubletracked railway Cracow-Lwow crosses the Dunajec and the Biala. The big railway bridge across the Dunajec had been blown up by the Austrians during their second retreat in November 1914; the Russians replaced it by a wooden structure, but this in turn was destroyed by our Allies during their retreat from before Cracow about the middle of December. Since then the Dunajec had become at this point the unbridgable borderline between the armies, which slowly settled down to the routine of trench warfare. But as surprise attacks were in most parts impossible on account of the intervening river, sniping became the chief occupation of the troops in that sector. Behind the big eastern pillar of the broken bridge was the post of a Russian sniper, who by his exploits earned for himself among the enemy local fame and the nickname of "Ivan the Terrible"; he finished by becoming in turn the victim of a sniper.

There was only one period of "close season observed by both sides in that sector; during a certain hour either side was allowed to fetch water from the river without being molested by the enemy. The Russian trenches near the bridge had been dug in a field covered by beautiful winter rye. "The Russian moujiks," says the correspondent of a Viennese paper, who visited this locality after the retreat of our Allies, "in their superstitious reverence for crops, characteristic of peasants, have carefully respected the sown field and followed, in walking through it, only a few narrow paths." The civilized German correspondent, however, does not seem to feel the same respect for that reverence and love which, according to his own statement, the so-called barbarians were showing for the labour of another poor peasant and for the bread of his children.

Even here, where the broad river formed a fairly serious obstacle to communication between the two sides, it did not constitute an absolute barrier. At one place, to the north of the railway bridge, near the village of Ostrow, the Russians had gained a foothold on the western bank of the Dunajec, and the Austrians, notwithstanding the most desperate efforts, were unable to dislodge them. During the

night a small ferry used to carry food and munitions to the outpost beyond the river.

The main battle in that region consisted, however, of the artillery duel which Austrian batteries, from west of Bogumilovice, were carrying on with the Russian batteries posted above Tarnow. The first Austrian 42-cm. howitzer had been got into position as early as January 15, and was, from a distance of almost eight miles, directing its fire against the town of Tarnow. The Russians in return were bombarding most effectively the Austrian positions near the left bank of the Dunajec from 28 cm. howitzers.

South of the railway line two first-class high roads cross the Dunajec, one near Vojnicz, the other near Zakliczyn. About a mile to the east of the bridge by which the Vojnicz road crosses the river, lies the village of Zglobice; the bridge and the village are both dominated by Hill 269,* which rises to the south of the road. The other road, having crossed the Dunajec near Zakliczyn, runs in a northerly direction past the western edge of the Mount Val, which is the highest point within the

If a figure stands for the name of a height or mountain, that figure expresses its height in metres. A metre is equal to about 3.28 feet.

triangle (526 metres-i.e., 1,725 ft.); on Height 402 the Zakliczyn road is met by a secondary road descending from that mountain.* The two roads meet opposite Tarnow, close to the western bank of the Biala.

To the north-west of the Val lies the second highest hill of the district, Hill 419; Hill 402 forms a bridge between them. Together these three heights encircle a valley traversed by a small, nameless stream. The heights are covered by fine dense forests of elms and beeches, and offer excellent strategic ground; given an approximately equal strength of artillery they form practically impregnable positions. At the time when the great Germanic offensive opened in West Galicia Hills 269, 419, and 402 were held by the Russians, Mount Val by the Austrians.

On a front of about ten miles, between Gromnik and Bobova, the positions of the two armies extended close to the banks of the Biala. Further south the Austrian line crossed over to the eastern side of the river. The sector between Ciezkowice, Gorlice, and Malastow was the decisive district of the entire West Galician front. There are only two possible lines for an advance through Galicia, and they are marked by the two railway lines running east and west; on the DunajecBiala-Ropa line the gate to the Transversal

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Valley" lies between Ciezkovice and Gorlice. Apart from tactical reasons, which it would take too long to discuss, on purely strategic grounds it paid the Germans better to direct their main attack along the southern line than to press it along the Tarnow-Rzeszow railway. The Transversal Valley" runs along the northern slopes of the Carpathians; just beyond the main crest, on the Hungarian side, stood Russian troops. A successful piercing of the Gorlice front carried the Germans at once on to the basic lines of communication of that army. Further, the Russians had better means for a quick concentration of forces along the northern than along the southern line. The former is a first-class double-tracked railway, the latter a rather poor single-track line. Moreover, the Russians had used the winter and spring for the construction of new lines, linking up from north to south their own railway system with that of Galicia. At the outbreak of the war not a single link existed between the two systems from Granica at the extreme western end of Galicia to Brody in the furthest north-eastern corner of the country. By May 1915 our Allies had constructed two links between the Vistula and the Bug, connecting the Cholm-Lublin-Warsaw railway with the Lwow-Rzeszow-Tarnow-Cracow line. One line had been built from Cholm by Zamosc and Tomaszow to Belzec, where it joins the Lwow-Rawa Ruska-Belzec railway.