Under the command of the Archduke Eugene the Austrian troops--all that were available--were formed into three separate armies. For convenience sake we will designate them A, B, and C. Army A, under General Boehm-Ermolli, was ordered to the section from the Dukla Pass to the Uzsog. It was charged with the task of cutting a way through to relieve Przemysl. Army B, under the German General van Linsingen, who also had some German troops with him, was to assail the next section eastward, from the Uzsog to the Wyszkow Pass; and Army C, under the Austrian General von Pflanzer-Baltin, likewise supplied with a good "stiffening" of German soldiers, was accredited to the far-eastern section--the Pruth Valley and the Bukowina. These three armies represented the fighting machine with which Austria hoped to retrieve the misfortunes of war and recover at the same time her military prestige and her invaded territories. We have no reliable information to enable us to estimate the exact strength of these armies, but there is every reason to believe that it was considerable, having regard to the urgency of the situation and the bitter experience of the recent past. Hence the figure of 400,000 men is probably approximately correct. Somewhere about January 23, 1914, after a period of thaw and mud the weather settled down to snow and hard frost. Then the machine began to move. A snow-clad mountain rampart lay spread before; over 200 miles of its length embraced the area of the projected operations. Here we may leave this army for a while in order to review some of the political and strategic considerations underlying the campaign, which is the scope of this chapter.