If the objection should be made that the delay which actually occurred could not have been reasonably anticipated, and that Paszkewicz might have immediately advanced to the attack of Warsaw, still, without entering for the present into more detailed considerations in support of my opinion, it will be enough to answer, that if twenty-four hours merely were to be had, those twenty-four hours should have been employed in fortification rather than manoeuvring, for it was not at Lowicz, but under the walls of Warsaw, that the enemy were to be fought. As it was at Warsaw, then, that the decisive encounter must inevitably have taken place, would it not have been the most judicious course, to have confined our operations on the left bank of the Vistula, to the strengthening of the defences of Warsaw; to have in fact adopted in regard to the enemy, who had now transferred his strength to the left bank of the Vistula, the same course of operations which we had hitherto pursued against him while he was in occupation of the right; in short, to have made of Warsaw another Praga. Our course of operations should in fact have been just reversed, to correspond with the change which the enemy's passage of the Vistula had made in our relative positions. While he was on the right bank, the region on the left of the river was open to us, and there were our resources; but now that he was acting with his main army on the left bank, it should have been our aim, by annihilating his detached corps, to have opened to our operations the whole region of the right, which was far more extensive than the other, and which, besides, had the advantage to us of being contiguous to the insurrectionary provinces. In case of an attack on Warsaw, which of course could not be an affair of a few days only, that part of our forces operating on the right bank could be withdrawn in ample season to present our whole strength to the enemy in its defence.