It is high time that we returned to the Eastern theatre of war. In Chapter XXXIV. of Volume II. you were told that at the end of September 1914 the Russians, after their crushing defeats of the Austrians, had advanced through Galicia to within a hundred miles of Cracow. At that time it seemed to us in the West that the Russian left would be almost certain to capture the great Galician fortress, and advance into Silesia and across the Carpathians towards Vienna within the next few weeks. Meanwhile we believed that the Russian right would be over the German frontier in full march for Berlin. It was rumoured--falsely, as we now know--that the Austrians shared our belief, and that their Government had decided to leave Vienna for Salzburg[151] or Innsbruck.[152] Though the Allies in the West were held up by the Germans on the Aisne, the prospects of their rapid and complete success in the East seemed very bright indeed. Then suddenly came a great disappointment. We learnt that, instead of advancing on Cracow, the Russians were retreating from Galicia. By the middle of October they were back again on the San, with nothing to show for their victories and their weeks of hard fighting. Why had they retreated? They were not pushed back by the Austrians; they were retiring of their own accord in order to meet a new and dangerous movement which the Germans had begun to make in Russian Poland. On the frontier of East Prussia there was a deadlock, and von Hindenburg had come to the conclusion that all the victories that could be won in that deadly region of lake and swamp would avail him nothing. His business was to destroy the Russian armies, and that could not be done by even a dozen successful campaigns in East Prussia. He must strike hard at the Russian centre--somewhere across the Polish plain, which was then but lightly held by his enemy. At what point in the Russian centre should he try to break through?--that was the question. There was one point that seemed to beckon him with the promise of full and speedy success. I have already told you that on the Vistula, half-way between the German fortress of Thorn and the Galician frontier, stands the great city of Warsaw.[153] It is not only a great place of manufactures, but a powerful fortress and the capital of Russian Poland, which contains twelve million people--Poles, Germans, Russians, and half a score other races. Amongst these mixed peoples Germany had many friends who would spy for her, and otherwise help her to win the city. Though the Tsar had promised to set up the old kingdom of Poland again if all went well with his arms, nobody yet knew whether the Poles would be loyal to Russia, or whether they would throw in their lot with the Germans. The Kaiser's agents had been secretly at work amongst them, striving hard to show that Codlin was their friend and not Short.[154] They believed that if the Germans could seize the capital of Poland the Poles would declare for them.