Many gallant counter-attacks along the ever-widening front were repulsed with heavy slaughter. At any given point, the Russians appear generally to have possessed a preponderance of numbers, while the sense of victory kept the men in thoroughly good heart. The last days of October and first days of November saw nothing save the same succession of hard-fought rearguard actions. On November 7 Russian Poland had been almost cleared of the invaders, and at more than one point the Tsar’s vanguards had crossed the German frontier. On the right Rennenkampf was again entering the East Prussian lake region near Lyck. On the right centre north of the Vistula, from Lomza to within a few miles of the fortress of Thorn, the Russians were close up to the frontier, driving the German left before them through the marshy forest region of Northern Poland. In the centre the frontier of the Prussian province of Posen had been passed by the Cossacks south of Thorn. In South-western Poland the Germans and Austrians were still retiring through Russian territory; but they had abandoned Lodz and Kielce, and it was generally expected that their retreat would only stop at Cracow and on the Upper Oder about Breslau. On the extreme Russian left the Austrians had been forced back half way to Cracow, Jaroslav had been reoccupied by General Brussiloff, and Przemysl was again besieged. During the retreat through Poland the Germans, under cover of their fighting rear-guards, had very thoroughly wrecked the railways, and done considerable damage to the few paved highways of the district. This work of destruction was evidently carried out deliberately by order of Von Hindenburg and the Headquarter Staff. A large force of engineers must have been used to effect it, and an enormous quantity of explosives employed in the work. Along the railways every station had been thoroughly wrecked. The buildings were burned, the rails torn up at all the junctions, curves, and crossings--the points at which the relaying of the line would require special material--the water-towers for the locomotives had been blown up, and all signals thrown down and telegraph apparatus destroyed or removed. On both railways and roads every bridge had been blown up, and the roads themselves had been very seriously damaged in a way that showed that a very large number of men must have been employed in the work of destruction. The metalled or paved surface of the roads had been broken up with the help of explosives, the surface being destroyed, not always from side to side of the road, but checker-fashion. Patches of the pavement being alternately destroyed on the left and the right side of the roadway, where explosives had been freely used, the road had thus become a kind of zig-zag line of yawning craters. This wrecking of the roads and railways seriously delayed the Russian pursuit, for the country, twice traversed by large armies, had been exhausted of what supplies it could