This fortress--whose remarkable orthography was the subject of a sly little joke by Mr. Lloyd George in a speech on the war--is stated to have been insufficiently garrisoned (30,000). It has not a large civil population, and after September 21 the extreme step was taken by the Commandant of expelling all persons who had not provisions for a siege of three months. The retreating Austrians did not have time to destroy the bridges over the San, and the almost complete isolation of Przemysl was rendered more acute by the announcement that, “as the crow flies,” the Russian advance-guard was not more than 135 miles from Cracow itself! The general line of the Austrian retreat was mainly towards that famous and historic city, where the hospitals and houses were already crowded with their thousands of wounded. Such a retreat would link them up to the right wing of their German allies, when they would become a more component part of the Kaiser’s forces. Comparisons were freely bandied about, in which the energetic Russian pursuit was likened to Kutusoff’s chase of Napoleon’s Grand Army in 1812, and to Lee’s pursuit by Grant in the American Civil War in 1864. In any event, the crumbling away of the Austrian defence of Galicia was now so significant as to dwarf minor considerations. The retreat towards Cracow was marked by a good deal of demoralisation and by the plundering of the estates of some of the Polish aristocracy. The capture of the railway junctions of Debica and Chyrov by the conquering foe further isolated the threatened fortress, while the passage of the Carpathians by way of the Uszok Pass was planting the Russian army firmly upon Hungarian soil, where there were no great places of strength to be reduced. The tables had been turned with a vengeance, and the invasion of Austro-Hungary was an accomplished fact. What would Germany do in face of these changed conditions? became for a week or so the burning topic among strategists and lookers-on at the great game. Coincident, presumably, with the expulsion of most of the civil population, the garrison of Przemysl were placed upon three-quarter rations. If one thing was humanly more certain than another it was that, except by a miracle, relief could not reach them--they gleaned as much from their wireless communications with the retreating arm, the Russians not having yet succeeded in destroying the wireless station.