“You may be surprised,” wrote Mr. Granville Fortescue in the _Daily Telegraph_, “at the rapidity of the advance on Cracow. It resulted from the precipitate retirement of the German and the Austrian forces through South-west Poland. I am told that this withdrawal was so rapid that the Russian pursuing cavalry almost lost touch with their foes. The enemy did not stop until he was under the walls of Cracow. The force which is to attack it from the north had an almost free passage. Another Russian force coming from Tarnow had to fight for every inch of the ground occupied. The Austrian force, which has been retreating stubbornly along the Rzeszow-Neu Sandec Railway, has given considerable trouble.” The same journal, commenting upon the extraordinary extent of the battle-zone and the probability of the final fight for the Russo-Austro-German frontier extending over weeks rather than days, rightly remarked that the average workaday intellect failed to grasp the magnitude of the giant conflict in point of mere numbers alone. It hazarded the conjecture that over five hundred miles of front three and a half millions of Russians would be giving battle to a couple of millions of Austrians and Germans! A tide of refugees, estimated at not less than a hundred thousand in a few days, was flying towards the city of Berlin from the East Prussian and Silesian borders. What a change from the “To Paris--to London!” of a few weeks previously. It was no longer practicable to conceal from the mass of the people the news of the total breakdown of the Polish invasion and the Austrian debacle. Events would still be slow-moving, since the mighty military machine of All the Russians, however well oiled, could only proceed at a certain regulated pace. Reports told of a new conception whereby the Germans hoped, northwards of Thorn, to concentrate masses of troops flanked by the river Vistula on the one hand and the river Warthe on the other. Here they would have the advantage of a battle-ground on a slightly raised platform as compared with the marshy wildernesses of the recent Polish operations; but the Masurian Lakes of East Prussia were by this time in Russian hands. The pace was quickening. Mr. Fortescue, writing from Petrograd in praise of the bearing and discipline of the Tsar’s millions moving ever westward, could not refrain from an expression of his appreciation of the marked improvement discernible after the lapse of a decade in the Muscovite “Tommy Atkins”: