By PERCY CROSS STANDING HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO MCMXIV The capture of the important town of Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, by the forces of the Tsar during the first week of September may be said to have marked an epoch in the operations of the gigantic armies contending for the mastery in what had come to be popularly known as the Eastern Theatre of operations in the world-war. It was a very solid advantage, and one which gained for the Russian Army a substantial foothold

We shall now proceed to follow the fortunes of the Russo-Austrian campaign immediately after the capture of Lemberg in the early days of September. Such a substantial success naturally put the Russians in good heart. Rewards were judiciously distributed on the recommendation of the Grand-duke Nicholas, Generals Russky and Brussiloff each receiving that most coveted of decorations, the Cross of St. George. It was likewise officially notified that between August 17 and September 3, a period of rat

The armies of the Tsar had by the middle of September established so firm a foothold upon Austrian territory, and so remote were the chances of their being dislodged from it, that little surprise was felt at the issue of a manifesto addressed by the Grand-duke Nicholas to the inhabitants of the invaded country. It was circulated in all the nine languages of that wonderfully polyglot population, and the text of it was as follows: “ Peoples of Austria-Hungary ,—The Government of Vienna declared wa

General Rennenkampf’s brilliant raid into East Prussia—which admirably served its immediate purpose of causing the Germans to transfer great masses of men from the west to the east, thereby relieving the pressure upon the Franco-British allies in Northern France—had closed with the brave Rennenkampf’s heavy defeat of Osterode, or Tannenberg, on the last day of August. Two days later had happened, as a counterstroke, General Russky’s capture of the capital of Galicia with its thousands of prisone

General Rennenkampf received from the Tsar telegrams congratulating him upon his well-ordered retreat and his victorious counter-attack and resumed invasion of East Prussia. In this message the Tsar noted that, during the retreat, the Russian General had not left a single pound’s weight of supplies to the enemy. Before passing on to the story of the larger conflict in Central Poland, we may note some interesting incidents which occurred during this ebb and flow of the war on the East Prussian bo

“When Przemysl falls,” wrote Mr. Granville Fortescue in the Daily Telegraph , “the name of Radko Dimitrieff will ring around the world.” It was not, however, the immediate object of General Dimitrieff and his coadjutors to bring about a hurried capitulation of this commanding fortress and its 30,000 defenders. The Russian headquarters in Galicia could well afford to play a waiting game and let the grim business of starvation do its work. In our second chapter we brought down the record of events

The Austrian Army in these Polish campaigns suffered under the serious disadvantage that, amongst the various nationalities serving in it, there were many men whose sympathies were with the enemy, or whose hearts were not on the Austrian side. The Slav soldiers felt they were fighting against their brother Slavs of Russia, and there were also in the Austrian army in Galicia Italian regiments from the Venetian border about Trieste and Fiume. It was a sagacious move on the part of the Tsar’s Gover

At the beginning of November, just three months after the declaration of war, it seemed that the German invasion of Poland had ended in complete failure and that the battle before Warsaw would be decisive of the whole conflict in Eastern Europe. In August, while the Russian mobilisation was still incomplete, Rennenkampf had made his daring raid into East Prussia, with the view of helping the Allies in the west by forcing Germany to retain a large army for her own defence in the east. Though the