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This was before they came to Fundu, so they could not tell us whether the boat turned into the Bistritza or continued on up the Sereth. At Fundu we could not hear of any such boat, so she must have passed there in the night. I am feeling very sleepy. The cold is perhaps beginning to tell upon me, and nature must have rest some time. Godalming insists that he shall keep the first watch.

South of Berezovica-Velka the Germans conducted an intense artillery fire. The strategic effect of the German operations in East Galicia was continually becoming more powerful. The Russians began retreating from the northern Carpathian front. From the Sereth to the wooded Carpathians the Germans were pressing forward over a front of 155 miles wide.

By July 23, 1917, the victorious German army corps had forced their way over the Sereth, crossing to the south near Tarnopol. Near Trembowla desperate Russian mass attacks were repulsed. The Germans advanced beyond Podhaytse, Halicz, and the Bystritza Solotvina River. The booty was large. Several divisions reported 3,000 prisoners each.

On August 13, 1916, fighting occurred along the entire Galician front, from the Dniester up to the upper Sereth. The Zlota Lipa was again crossed on that day at some of its numerous turnings. After a very stubborn fight the village of Tustobaby, northwest of the Dniester, strongly defended by fortifications and machine guns, fell into the hands of the Russians.

Before forcing this line it was necessary to capture Stanislau, an important point on the Czernowitz-Lemberg railway. Between the Bug and the Dniester lines of defense Lemberg was secured in the east, and still farther by a third line of natural defenses. This was formed by a series of northern tributaries of the Dniester, of which the most important were the Sereth, Strypa, and Zlota Lipa Rivers.

The Galician drive had furnished the territorial means for the attack on the southern side of the Polish triangle; and although Ivanov was farther pushed back from the Gnilia Lipa to the Strypa and thence almost to the Sereth, this Eastern advance became irrelevant to the main strategic design, and German reinforcements were collecting mostly under Gallwitz, Scholtz, and Von Eichhorn along the Narew and the Niemen for an onslaught on the north-western side of the triangle.

According to their official statement, the Russians made about 8,500 prisoners in the Sereth sector on August 5 and 6, 1916, captured four cannon, nineteen machine guns, eleven trench mortars, a large number of mine throwers and much war material of all kinds.

The whole southern group, from the Nida to the Sereth inclusive, was under the supreme command of General Ivanoff.

Security for the Rumanian forces could not, however, be found short of the Sereth, which would give them a straight line with the Russian frontier protected by the impassable delta of the Danube on their left, and a flank in the Carpathians on their right; and from the fall of Bukarest to the end of December Averescu the Rumanian commander, and Presan his chief of staff, retreated to this line fighting rearguard battles on the way.

Backward and backward fell the Russian lines during the following weeks until by the end of October, 1915, the two sides of the erstwhile triangle had disappeared entirely, and the Russian front was found now along the base of the triangle stretching from Riga through Friedrichstadt, through a point somewhat west of Dvinsk, thence almost due south, skirting Pinsk slightly to the east, and again running south in front of Rovno, entering Galicia at a point about halfway between Zlochoff and Tarnopol, and following, slightly to the west, the River Sereth to a point on the Dniester only a few miles west from where it had ended in August, 1915.