The last few kilometres of the road into Przemysl was alive with Russian transport plodding into the town, but the way was singularly free from troops of any sort. With the exception of a few Cossack patrols and an occasional officer or orderly ploughing through the mud, there was nothing to indicate that a large Russian army was in the vicinity. It is possible that it has already been moved elsewhere; in any case we saw nothing of it. Between the outer line of forts and the Wiar river are a number of improvised field works, all of which looked as though they could stand a good bit of taking, but of course they were not as elaborate as the first line. The railroad crosses the little Wiar on a steel bridge, but the bridge now lies a tangle of steel girders in the river. It is quite obvious that the Austrian commander destroyed his bridges west of the town because they afforded direct communications with the lines beyond; but the bridge over the Wiar has no military value whatsoever, the others being gone, save to give convenient _all rail_ access to the heart of Przemysl itself. The town was given up the next day and, as the natural consequence of the Austrian commander’s conception of his duty, all food supplies had to be removed from the railway trucks at the bridge, loaded into wagons, and make the rest of the journey into the town in that way, resulting in an absolutely unnecessary delay in relieving the wants of the half-famished garrison within. The only bright spot that this action presents to the unprejudiced observer is that it necessitated the dainty, carefully-shod Austrian officers walking three kilometres through the mud before they could embark on the trains to take them to the points of detention for prisoners in Russia. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the rank and file of the garrison were actually on the verge of starvation, and that the civilian population were not far from the same fate. As near as one can learn the latter consisted of about 40,000 persons. I am told that the prisoners numbered 131,000 men and some 3,600 officers, and that perhaps 20,000 have died during the siege from wounds and disease. This, then, makes a population at the beginning of nearly 200,000 in a fortification which, as experts say, could have easily been held by 50,000 troops. One officer even went so far as to declare that in view of the wonderful defensive capacity of the position 30,000 might have made a desperate stand. The fortress was thus easily three times over garrisoned. In other words there were perhaps at the start 150,000 mouths to feed in the army alone, when 50,000 men would have been able to hold the position. This alone made the approach of starvation sure and swift. The fact that in this number of men there were 3,600 officers, nine of the rank of General, indicates pretty clearly the extent to which the garrison was over officered. Kusmanek, the commander of the fortress, is said to have had seventy-five officers on