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The chief danger to the Russians at this stage still threatened from the south, where the archduke and Mackensen had pushed forward irresistibly in their advance to the east of the Vistula toward the railway running from Warsaw through Ivangorod, Lublin, Cholm, and Kovell to Kiev and Moscow.
"There is only one way of avoiding this latter alternative, and that is by countering the plans of the Central Powers with regard to Poland by the proclamation of the Polish programme, which is that of the Allies. This programme is the restitution to Poland of the mouth of the Vistula, of Dantzig and of the Polish portion of the Baltic coastline.
It would be difficult to describe the joy thus evinced, and the respect with which they treated us. The French troops, however, were not quite so well pleased; they manifested the greatest repugnance to crossing the Vistula. The idea of want and bad weather had inspired them with the greatest aversion to Poland, and they were inexhaustible, in their jokes on the country."
They will disappear, and the union of the Warthe and the Vistula with Germany is irrefragable. For centuries we have existed without Alsace-Lorraine, but no one yet has dared to think of what our existence would be if today a new kingdom of Poland were founded. Formerly it was a passive power. Today it would be an active enemy supported by the rest of Europe.
Prince Eugene, with the Bavarians, advanced to Plock, on the Vistula; the Poles, Saxons, and Westphalians were united at Warsaw, under the orders of King Jerome; and the guard, who held Posen, were commanded by Mortier and Lefebvre. General St. Cyr was appointed to lead the Bavarians in the field, and General Regnier was responsible for the Saxons. The Austrians were to invade Volhynia.
That, indeed, was the number to which he had limited her after Tilsit; and he was unable to conceive that Scharnhorst's plan of passing men into a reserve would send triple that force into the field. As for the Russians, he writes, they are thinned by disease, and must spread out widely in order to besiege the many fortresses between the Vistula and the Elbe.
As he fell asleep smiling at these happy reflections, Desiree, far away in Dantzig, was locking in her bureau the letter which had been lost and found again; while, on the deck of his ship, lifting gently to the tideway where the Vistula sweeps out into the Dantziger Bucht, Louis d'Arragon stood fingering reflectively in his jacket-pocket the unread papers which had fallen from the same despatch-case.
She has been able to maintain her power at once on the Black Sea, seven hundred miles from her capital; on the Danube, at nearly the same distance, and on the Vistula, pressing on the Prussian frontier. In Constantinople she would have the most magnificent fortress in the world, the command of the head of the Mediterranean, Syria, and inevitably Egypt.
The Russian court was rent by dissensions, affairs at Constantinople were occupying much of the Czar's attention, and the force available for fighting in the North seemed too small for a decisive victory: he remained virtually inert. There was an effort late in February to drive the French left wing across the Vistula, but it failed.
Could we reasonably rely upon Austria? She had seen the Russian army pass the Vistula and advance as far as the Saale without offering any remonstrance. At that moment a single movement of her troops, a word of declaration, would have prevented everything.
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