"The lines waver in an indescribable jumble of gray, yellow, blue, and red uniforms, then seem to bounce back from the very force of the shock. Men appear, raised from their feet, and raised high in the air. "Caught in a vise between the British and the French, the Guard alone remains. Ten times the shattered remnants of the Kaiser's proud regiment charged, and ten times was thrown back, first against the French, then against the British. Crying, 'Comrades, comrades!' hundreds began throwing their guns aside. "At 2 o'clock it was over. The Allies had lost 1,200 men. Only prisoners remained of the Second Prussian regiment of the Guard. PROGRESS OF THE EASTERN CAMPAIGN The campaign in the eastern theater of war attracted the attention of the whole world in December, when the German operations begun in November under Field Marshal Von Hindenburg, the victor of Tannenberg earlier in the war, were continued with varying successes. Early in the month the Germans captured Lodz, the second city and chief manufacturing center of Russian Poland, with a population of about 500,000, after a bombardment of a week's duration, the city being set on fire in many places. The Russians made a desperate resistance, and the fighting around Lodz constituted the most bitter struggle of the entire war on this front. A general Russian retirement in the direction of Warsaw followed, but the Germans failed in their subsequent efforts to envelop the flanks of the Russian army to the north and south. Russian reinforcements from Warsaw coming up promptly, the Germans were in their turn compelled to retire. Two German army corps were then practically cut off by the Russians, but made a successful retreat, fighting their way back to safety with the bayonet in one of the most brilliant exploits of the war. Thus the net result of the German campaign in Poland in December left the general situation there practically unchanged and the Russian front unbroken, while in East Prussia, too, the Russian invasion continued despite German efforts to roll it back across the frontier. The losses on both sides in the eastern campaign in December were appalling, the fighting being of the fiercest possible nature. A typical struggle occurred a few miles west of Lodz in the little churchyard of Beschici, where the Russians, in one of the final phases of the struggle for the Polish city, showed that in spite of their defeats and discouragements they knew how to fight and die. This churchyard lies on a small eminence which formed a salient into the German lines. The Germans were able to make an attack from three sides with infantry and artillery. All the Russian trenches were enfiladed by shrapnel from one direction or another, but the Russians clung to their positions obstinately. When the Germans finally captured the trenches 878 Russian corpses were found in a space about eighty yards square.