THE RUSSO-GERMAN CAMPAIGN—GREAT BATTLE AT SKIERNIWIÇE. ROUT OF THE RUSSIANS AND THEIR RETREAT ON WARSAW—HEAVY FIGHTING ON THE GALICIAN FRONTIER. (_From our Special Correspondent, Mr. Charles Lowe._) SKIERNIWIÇE, _May 18_. Strange is the irony of events. In the month of September 1884, this was the friendly meeting-place of the Emperors of Russia, Germany, and Austria, who were accompanied by their respective Chancellors—Bismarck, Kalnoky, and Giers; and now the chateau where they so ostentatiously feasted, embraced, and exchanged their pledges of peace, is a heap of smoking ruins. After this, who shall say that there is any stability in human affairs, or any trustworthiness in human foresight? The united Russian forces, consisting of the 5th and 6th Corps under General Gourko, and the 14th and 15th Corps under the Grand Duke Vladimir, have to-day suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the combined German armies of the Vistula and Silesia, commanded by the King of Saxony, and are now in full retreat on Warsaw. As I predicted in my last despatch, this has been the Waterloo of the Russo-German portion of the campaign, and it has been brilliantly won by the Germans—thanks mainly to the disconcerting effects of smokeless powder on the tactics of an enemy who fights better in the mass than in detail, no less than to the fact of the Russians having committed the radical error of provoking a war before they were completely equipped with the new magazine rifle, which, even with the aid of the French factories that received orders for half a million of the new weapon, will not be served out to the entire army of the Czar before the summer of 1894. In my last despatch I recorded how the Grand Duke Vladimir, in spite of his victory over the German Army of Silesia at Czenstochau, had refrained from following up his success in consideration of Gourko’s repulse at Alexandrovo, preferring—like Wellington, who had similarly beaten Ney at Quatre Bras, but was yet desirous of succouring the retreating Blücher, who had come to grief in front of Napoleon on the same day at Ligny—to retire towards Warsaw for the purpose of joining hands with his fellow-commander, on the latter being worsted by the King of Saxony. The distances, of course, were infinitely greater in the present case; but otherwise the principles of strategy were the same. A glance at the map will show that the junction-point for Gourko and the Grand Duke Vladimir could only have been Skierniwiçe, where the railways from Alexandrovo and Czenstochau converge; and it appears that, though the Grand Duke’s line of retreat to the common rendezvous was considerably the longer of the two, nevertheless the bulk of his forces had reached it first, by reason of the fact that he enjoyed a double line of rails, whereas Gourko had to move as best he could along a single track.