CHAPTER VIII THE GERMAN RETREAT AND THE RUSSIAN PURSUIT TO THE FRONTIER 157 CHAPTER I THE SITUATION AFTER LEMBERG The capture of the important town of Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, by the forces of the Tsar during the first week of September may be said to have marked an epoch in the operations of the gigantic armies contending for the mastery in what had come to be popularly known as the Eastern Theatre of operations in the world-war. It was a very solid advantage, and one which gained for the Russian Army a substantial foothold upon Austrian territory. The struggle of the nations had endured for some weeks, and the victory of Lemberg was all the more welcome and popular because it happened at a time when our Russian Allies needed a really heartening and enlivening success. For it would be absurd to say that the so-called “Russian steam-roller” had moved on from triumph to crushing triumph with that irresistible impulse which the arm-chair critics had so comfortably predicted for it. Indeed, after the threat to Danzig itself implied in General Rennenkampf’s brilliant raid into Eastern Prussia, and his victory over the army of General von Hindenburg in the first decisive engagement of the war at Gumbinnen, the rushing back of masses of German troops from the western to the eastern theatre of operations had completely changed the situation. By admirable generalship, too, Von Hindenburg had turned the tables on his foe, and had inflicted a signal defeat on the invaders of East Prussia at Tannenberg. From this point, then, the Russians became for the moment no longer an attacking force. If they had inflicted, they had also suffered, immense losses. General Rennenkampf’s brisk offensive through East Prussia had been definitively checked, and it behoved the Tsar’s military advisers to find, and find speedily, what the American soldier-critic described as “another way round.”