United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He knew every yard of the intricate mixture of land and water which made up the district of the Masurian Lakes, and had, unfortunately for Russia, defeated a German financial scheme for draining the country and turning it into land over which an invader could safely march.
They compelled the Russians to withdraw from Eastern Prussia, and from a part of Galicia, later on from Lodz, from the Masurian Lakes and Bukovina. Gradually Roumania saw herself bereft of what would have been her right wing and cover, and her military men, the most influential of whom had been against intervention from the first, now declared the moment inauspicious on strategical grounds.
Hurriedly mobilised, imperfectly equipped, not too brilliantly led, these legions, constituting the chivalry of Russia, became the prey of Prussia's perfect military machine. The Russian Government never dared to tell the Russian peasant the number of Russian souls who were mutilated by high explosives and smothered in the cold Masurian marshes in that sublime effort to save her friends.
The events of the early spring, the bloody failure of British generalship at Neuve Chapelle, the naval disaster in the Dardanelles, the sinking of the Falaba, the Russian defeat in the Masurian Lakes, all deepened the bishop's impression of the immensity of the nation's difficulties and of his own unhelpfulness.
Winter, however, brought less respite from war on the frozen plains of Poland than on the sodden soil of Flanders. The first and second attacks upon Warsaw were followed by a third in January; there was a winter battle by the Masurian lakes in February, and a fierce struggle along the Niemen in March; and the Russian offensive across the Carpathians was only stopped by the German spring campaign.
The grey flood of frightfulness rolled over Belgium; and every morning, and again in the afternoon, the front page of the Leesville newspaper was like the explosion of a bomb. Twenty-five thousand Germans killed in one assault on Liege; a quarter of a million Russians massacred or drowned in the swamps of the Masurian Lakes; so it went, until the minds of men reeled.
The folk versions are, in this instance, peculiarly poor, and I have therefore had largely to rewrite, preserving, however, the common incidents. Formula. Parallels. Besides the four sources used by Sir James Frazer, he gives two variants of the Breton from Melusine, i., cols. 300, 374, and the "Seven Wise Masters" version, with six variants: Russian, Masurian, two Basques, and a Turkish one.
During any orderly advance, an army proceeding through the Masurian Lakes will strictly confine itself to the great causeways and to the railway. During any retreat in which it is permitted to observe the same order it will be similarly confined to the only possible issues; but let the retreat be confused, and disaster at once threatens.
The Masurian Lake district can best be appreciated by some description of its geology and its landscape. It was probably moulded by the work of ice in the past.
Meantime, troops could be sent to the west front, and perhaps enable Germany to overwhelm France. By this time almost all of Poland west of the Vistula was in the power of the Germans, while three-fourths of Galicia was controlled by Russia. Von Hindenburg now returned to his old battle-ground near the Masurian Lakes.
Word Of The Day