The Russian trenches are scarcely more than shallow grooves in the ground with earth thrown up in front of them, making barely sufficient cover for prone riflemen.

At once the German outer positions were carried by storm with ghastly carnage.

“We didn’t dig much,” said a Russian officer to me.  “We knew we shouldn’t stay there.  We should either go forward or back, and we were sure to go forward.”

The cloud of patrols, mostly Cossacks, which flits unceasingly along the German front is the subject of innumerable stories.

When the news was issued that the Kaiser had come east to take command of his army on this front a Cossack came in, driving before him a plump, distressed Prussian Captain whom he had gleaned during the day’s work.

“I’ve brought him,” he announced.  “I knew him by his mustache,” and he produced an old picture postcard from his breast showing the Kaiser with his characteristic mustache.

Near Augustowo the roads are literally blocked in many places with abandoned German transports which became trapped in the terribly muddy country.  Dead horses in hundreds lie everywhere and the Russian Sanitary Corps is busy burying them.  Yet the Russians who are still moving about this country retain not only their usual average health, but do not even complain.

Between Augustowo and Raigrod a small stream is actually blocked with German stores, including much gun ammunition.  The German advance which ended in this debacle has been the costliest defeat in point of materials which they have yet suffered.

The First Fight at Lodz

By Percival Gibbon of The London Daily Chronicle.

WARSAW, Dec. 5, (by Courier to Petrograd.)—­I have wired you previously of the German force which advanced around Lodz and was cut off south and east of the town.  This consisted of two army corps—­the Twenty-fifth Corps and the Third Guard Corps.  The isolated force turned north and endeavored to cut its way out through the small town of Breziziny.  It was at Breziziny that final disaster overtook them.

The town and road lie in a hollow in the midst of wooded country, where the Germans were squeezed from the Vistula and pressed to the rear.  They had fought a battle during the slow retirement of five days and were showing signs of being short of ammunition.  On the fifth day they made their final attempt to pass through Breziziny.  That was where that fine strategist and fighting man who held Ivangorod on the Vistula brought off the great dramatic coup for which he had been manoeuvring.

The Germans were holding the town and pouring through when he began his general attack.  Breziziny underwent nine hours of furious shelling and only half the town is now remaining.  The Russian infantry again proved its sterling quality, and, supported by the tremendous fire of its own guns, drove home charge after charge, smashing the German resistance completely.  By nightfall out of two army corps, numbering 80,000 men, there remained only a remnant.