Form used in parts of Nature and location of geo- Name usually used in

Trier

Mainz

Vlissingen

Maas

Europe.

graphical feature.

.City in Germany.

..City in Germany.

America.

..Treves
..Mayence

Waal, Lek, and Ijssel.. Names of the distributaries of the Rhine River in

Diedenhofen

Donau...

Lwów...

Krakau

Genf

Braunschweig

Brügge

Kjöbenhavn

Holland, the Waal being the main Rhine and

going by the name Maas in western Holland.

...City in Germany... ...Thionville

Byzantium or Stamboul.. City in European Turkey.. Constantinople

Livorno

Firenze

Cervin

Albania

Mountain in Swiss Alps...Matterhorn

Newly-constituted inde

pendent state north of

..Leghorn

.. Florence

THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA.

THE

By Lawrence Martin

University of Wisconsin

GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES

HE Russian campaign against Germany and Austria has been carried on in a great plain between mountains and the sea. 1. The situation is similar to that in the war in western Europe, where the armies faced each other in October and November, 1914, along a continuous northwest-southeast line, 350 miles in length, from the Jura Mountains in Switzerland to the English Channel. In the eastern campaign the general direction of the sinuous line is more nearly north and south. In this case it will be recalled that the Carpathian Mountains (Fig. 1) are about 350 miles from the Baltic Sea and the line of campaign stretches across the plain in the states of (a) Austrian Galicia, (b) Russian Poland, and (c) German East Prussia, which are about as large as the states of South Carolina, New York, and Maryland plus Delaware, respectively. Little of the plain is as much as 700-1,000 feet above sea level. East Prussia contains a great ridge and is drained by the Niemen or Russ or Memel River and the smaller Pregel and Passarge Rivers which flow north to the Baltic. The master stream in the plain of Poland is the Vistula or Weichsel, whose three chief tributaries are (a) the Narev from the north, (b) the Bug from the east and southeast, and (c) the San from the south. In western Poland is the small River Warta, a tributary of the Oder. The Bug and San rise in Galicia, but most of the province drains southeastward to the Black Sea by the Dniester. The Carpathian foreland in Galicia is similar to the Swiss Plateau north of the Alps. Part of it is called the Podolian Plateau. The plain between the Carpathians and the Baltic contains much forest and many large swamps. The rivers have severe spring floods. North of the Podolian Plateau and east of the Bug River is the basin of the Pripet, a tributary of the Dnieper River. In its headwater region, just east of Poland, is the Pinsk Marsh, an area of morasses, trembling forests, and swamps, now partly

*The best English accounts of the geographical features of the field of the Russian campaign are to be found in Lyde's new book on The Continent of Europe; in Partsch's Central Europe; in Penck's Carpathian Lands, Aitoff's Russian Empire, and Kirchoff's German Empire, all in Mill's International Geography; and the standard works of Reclus in The Earth and Its Inhabitants and Chisholm in Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel. Davis has briefly described the haffs of the Baltic Coast, near Danzig and Königsberg in East Prussia, and the valleys of the Rivers Vistula and Netze, near Bromberg west of Thorn, in a paper on Large Scale Maps as Geographical Illustrations, (Journal of Geology, Vol. IV, 1896, pp. 484-513), where he refers to the detailed maps. Among the good general maps for following the campaign are those in the large encyclopedias and atlases, and those in the inexpensive small atlases such as Sydow-Wagner's Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Bartholomew's Comparative Atlas, and Stanford's Handy Atlas of Modern Geography. Sheet XL in Romer's Atlas Geograficzny covers the whole eastern campaign very well on the scale of 1:5,000,000. The topography is unusually good, but the names are in Polish.

drained. It is 250 miles wide and covers about 35,000 square miles, being nearly as large as the state of Indiana. Because of remoteness from the ocean, the East Prussian ridge, Polish plain, and Carpathian foreland have hot summers and cold winters, a climate less favorable for a winter campaign than that of Belgium, France, and western Germany. The harbors of Riga and

Fig. 1. Map showing field of eastern campaign and its railways. (Modified from a French map issued in August, 1914, by War College Division, General Staff, United States Army). The name of Warsaw appears as Varsovie, Cracow as Cracovie, Baltic Sea as Mer Baltique, Poland as Pologne, East Prussia as Prusse Orientale.

Memel north of Königsberg are closed by winter ice for over 4 months, that of Danzig for less than three, that at Greifswald north of Berlin and west of Stettin not quite two, while the port of Lübeck east of Kiel is frozen only a little over a month, and Hamburg never has ice. This shows how the severity of the winter increases from west to east.

RUSSIAN ADVANCE, RETREAT, AND READVANCE IN PRUSSIA.

The international boundary traverses a plain and seems to be determined by no natural geographical features. Consequently it was easy, while Ger

L

many was engaged in her unsuccessful lightning campaign against Paris, for the Russians to invade East Prussia where they chose, as soon as Germany declared war on Russia the first day of August. The facts and dates cited in this article were obtained from the New York and Chicago daily papers, from the weekly issues of two American periodicals (the Nation and the Literary Digest) two German papers (the Deutsche Tageszeitung and the Tägliche Rundschau of Berlin) and the weekly edition of the London Times.

Northeastern Prussia is a lowland with many swamps, but southward near the Russian frontier is the Baltic Ridge, an enormous terminal moraine of the Scandinavian ice sheet with rough topography, hills reaching an altitude of 500 to 1000 feet, and great numbers of lakes. The lake district is called Masuria. The extent to which these topographic features have figured in determining exact routes and affecting battles in the campaign in East Prussia is not apparent from the meagre newspaper dispatches thus far available. The Russian invasion followed three lines, crossing the Prussion frontier on August 16th (a) at Eydtkuhnen (Fig. 2) east of Königsberg, (b) near Lyck, 50 miles to the south, and (c) at Neidenburg, 80 miles farther to the southwest. Northern Germany, east of the Vistula, projects some 160 miles farther into Russia than do the southeastern states of Posen and Silesia, so that this Prussian campaign was evidently aimed at Königsberg and Danzig rather than at Berlin (Fig. 1) which is only 180 miles from the Polish frontier south of Thorn and east of Posen, or about as far as from Chicago to Indianapolis or from New York to Baltimore. This Prussian campaign may have been undertaken in order to divert German troops from the line opposing the Allies in northern France or from the main Russian army in Poland, or to prevent a flanking movement from East Prussia into northeastern Poland, or even in part for moral effect, as has been suggested regarding the French invasion of Alsace-Lorraine. This invasion came about almost exactly as was suggested over 15 years ago by Partsch in his remarkable analysis of the strategic geography of this situation (see "Geographical Conditions of National Defense," printed elsewhere in this magazine).

Gumbinnen, 20 miles inside the Prussian frontier, was reached in 3 or 4 days, then Insterburg and Tilset, and finally points only 17 to 35 miles from Königsberg. Farther to the southwest Bialla, Johannisburg, Ortelsburg and Soldau fell into the hands of the Russians the last week in August, although the Germans had won skirmishes at some of these places earlier in the month and actually held Mlawa, 5 miles inside the Russian frontier, on August 18th. By August 28th the Russians had advanced 50 to 70 miles into Prussia, reaching the dashed line in Fig. 2. The area invested is largely inhabited by Poles, while the region to the north near the Baltic has Germans. There was fighting at Allenstein nearly 60 miles from the boundary. Here the Germans won an important victory, as they did also at Tannenburg in the terminal moraine south of Osterode on August 29th, where the Russians lost many

men. Being reinforced by troops from the French campaign, the Germans drove the Russians back out of Prussia by the middle of September and 50 miles into Russia to Grodno on the River Niemen, along which a week-long battle was fought about the last of September. The only geographical feature which seems to have counted in this part of the campaign is the River Niemen, whose shallow valley was not a strong natural line of defense, and yet along which the Russians checked the German advance toward Vilna and Riga. Subsequently the Russians have readvanced to or past the Prussian frontier winning victories at Suwalki, Drusskeniki and Augustovo, the latter being a great five days battle ending about October 4 (Fig. 2). Lyck, which is 15 miles inside the German frontier, was re-occupied by the Russians on October 7th. Gumbinnen, Johannisburg, Soldau, Goldap, and Augerburg were taken by the Russians during the second and third weeks in November, the latter being 37 miles inside the German frontier. The tangle of glacial lakes in Masuria seems to favor the German defense, except when covered with winter ice. The 50 miles from Augerburg southwest to Johannisburg, for example, are without a place to cross, except at Lötzen where the narrow road between two crooked lakes is defended by a strong German fortress.

The absence of attack upon Königsberg, Memel, and Danzig by the Russian navy seems to be due partly to the geographical feature of shallow water in the haffs (lagoons) behind the nehrungs (sandbars with dunes) on the Baltic coast, but chiefly to the mines in the entrances to these three harbors and to the ease with which ships from the German fleet could proceed eastward from Kiel to the defense of these ports. It is not known whether the larger part of the Russian fleet is at Libau, which is 120 miles northeast of Königsberg and only 40 miles from the German frontier near Memel, or at Kronstadt near Petrograd, or at Helsingfors in Finland. It seems probable that it is not at Libau, where a small fleet of German vessels bombarded the town on August 8th and November 17th, attempting to blockade the port by sinking merchant vessels.

AUSTRIAN DEFEAT IN GALICIA AND POLAND

The second part of the eastern campaign has been fought out in Galicia and southeastern Poland, taking place at the same time as the fighting in East Prussia. Most of Galicia east of the San is inhabited by Russians. Austria north of the Carpathians is wide open to Russian invasion. The Podolian Plateau which is partly in Galicia and partly in Russia, has a 600 foot escarpment on the Russian side near the Bug and Dnieper Rivers, but the frontier has no topographic aid to defense. Less than a quarter of Galicia is forested. The Carpathian foreland has a height of 800 to 1500 feet so that the tributaries of the Dniester and the San have cut valleys 200 to 500 feet in depth and these seem to have guided the lines of invasion to some extent. By August 10th the Austrians had 3 army corps in the field east of Lemberg.