The number of prisoners reaches the total of about 20,000, and of the remainder fully 80 per cent, were killed or wounded.  This is the estimate supplied to me.  Owing to the small area on which the fighting was concentrated, the dead are lying in great mounds and walls at points where the charges were pushed home.  For miles the countryside is dotted with dead.

In the sparser grounds an unknown number of fugitives, most of whom are wounded, are lurking in the woods.  From Rawa, south of Skierniwice, midway between Lodz and Warsaw, to Lodz on the line of the former German retreat and present advance, not a single village remains.  All the burned-out district is utterly desolate.

On Dec. 1, 2, and 3 the force conducting the defense of the town of Lodz was all but surrounded.  The German positions were at Royicie on the southern road, within four miles of the long, straggling street which comprises most of the town of Lodz, while at Zgierz, seven miles to the north, they had a battery of heavy guns with which they shelled the town itself, killing several hundred civilians.  The fire was chiefly directed on the railway and station and the Russian guns were unable for some time to locate the battery.  It was discovered and reconnoitred at last by an aeroplane.

[Illustration:  The War in the East (with Net Change of Battle Line Up to Jan, 1, 1915) from Eastern Prussia to Galicia.]

Then followed an act of heroism and harebrained enterprise which is now the talk of the whole army.  On Thursday night last the Colonel of Artillery made his way out and with a little group of assistants contrived to drag a field telephone wire within half a mile of the German battery.  While a searchlight was swinging over the face of the country, he lay on the ground, and from there directed the Russian guns, which with his help actually succeeded in silencing the battery.  The Russian guns were at this time placed in the streets of Lodz.

On Thursday night, when the attack culminated, there were 700 guns in action at one time on both sides, and throughout the night all was alight with flashes from the guns and bursting shells, and the thunder of the guns was faintly audible on the outskirts of Warsaw, sixty miles away.

Then there followed a general assault of the Germans, a charge of huge masses of men, who followed up into the glare of the searchlights under an inferno of gunfire.  Here again the Siberians demonstrated the qualities which have made them famous throughout the war.  They met the Germans with a rifle fire from the trenches which not only stopped them but shattered them.  They again played the old trick of allowing the enemy to approach within fifty feet, meanwhile holding their fire, and then blowing them off their feet with rifle fire and their use of the mitrailleuse.

The attack failed utterly, and from the very manner of it the Russian losses could not be otherwise than light, while the German losses in the whole of the operations against Lodz and the neighboring positions exceed a hundred thousand killed.  No guess at the number of their wounded can be attempted, but we know that score upon score of trains filled with them have gone west along the Kalisz line, and still continue to go.