With regard to the natural configuration of the wild and mostly desolate country constituting the wide area of the battle-ground, a few words of explanation will be useful. There is little high ground until one comes to the southern border of the great Polish plain, where the Carpathian range forms a natural rampart. To the north the ground falls away rapidly to the plain. There are numerous rivers and streams, and great tracts of forest-clad land. Eastward of the Upper Vistula a low rise of ground runs first northerly and then trends to the north-east, forming “the water-parting” between the rivers that flow to the Baltic and the Black Sea. Still eastward of this we come to the Marshes of Pripet, or Pinsk, to which I have already referred. Imagine to yourself some thirty thousand square miles of stream, pool, and swamp, by its very character utterly unsuited to the marching or fighting operations of a great army. In the northern region of the plain we find, between the Vistula, the Narev, and the Baltic Sea more wide-extended tracts of swamp-covered forest land, pools, lakes, and little rivers. Altogether, it is one of the worst countries, physically speaking, for the transport, much less the manœuvring, of masses of men, horses, and heavy artillery. This historic battle-ground was once the old kingdom of Poland, the scene of some of the greatest political and military crimes and blunders of past ages. “Across the plain,” writes the military critic whom I have already quoted, “winds the broad, sluggish stream of the Vistula. The great river is to this eastern land what the Rhine is to Western Europe.... On its banks, in the midst of the plain, stands Warsaw, the old capital of Poland and now the political, military, and business centre of the Russian province. There is only one other large town in Russian Poland--Lodz, not long ago a country village, now a busy industrial centre. This paucity of large towns is characteristic, not only of Russian Poland but of the whole Empire. The last census shows that in European Russia there are only twenty-four places that claim a population of over a hundred thousand. Russia is a country of agricultural villages. There are more than 150,000 of them between the Vistula and the Ural! The plain of the Vistula is not an absolute dead level, but there is nothing that can be called a hill. There are wide stretches of woodland, the refuge of the insurgent bands in the Polish risings of 1830 and 1863. Between the woods are open lands with many villages, rich lands with a deep soil somewhat primitively tilled.” So much for the appointed battle-ground and the “lie of the land.”