Of all that elaborate and copious machinery of war which Russia has built up since her failure in Manchuria there is nothing so impressive as this.  Her thousand and odd aeroplanes, her murderously expert artillery, her neat and successful field wireless telegraph, even her strategy, count as secondary to it.  The chief of her weaknesses in the past has been the slowness of her mobilization; Germany, with her plans laid and tested for a mobilization in four days, could count on time enough to strike before Russia could move.  She used her advantage to effect when Austria planted the seed of this present war by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; she was able to present Russia in all her unpreparedness with the alternatives of war in twenty-four hours or accepting the situation.  But this time it has been different.

At Petrograd one sees how different.  Hither from the northern and eastern Governments come the men who are to swell Rennenkampf’s force.  Their cadres, the skeletons of the battalions of which they are the flesh, are waiting for them—­officers, organization, equipment, all is ready.  The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus—­foresters, moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the Russian soul, and all sober.  No need now to make men of them before making soldiers; no inferno at the way side-stations and troop trains turning up days late.  It is as if, at the cost of those annual 780,000,000 rubles, Russia had bought the clue to victory.

West beyond Eydtkuhnen, under the pearl-gray northern sky, lies East Prussia.  Hereabout it is flat and fertile, with lavish, eye-fatiguing levels of cornland stretching away to Insterburg and beyond to Koenigsberg’s formidable girdle of forts.  Here are many villages, and scattered between them innumerable hamlets of only two or three houses, and a small town or two.  Most of them are empty now; the German army that leans its back on the Vistula’s fortresses has cleared this country like a dancing floor for its work.  It has rearranged it as one rearranges the furniture in a room; whole populations have been transported, roads broken, bridges blown up, strategically unnecessary; villages burned.  Nothing remains on the ground that has not its purpose assigned—­not even the people, and their purpose has been clear for some time past.  The Russians have been over this ground already, and fell back from it after their defeat between Osterode and Allenstein.  Their advance was through villages lifeless and deserted and over empty roads; the retreat was through a country that swarmed with hostile life.  Roads were blocked with farm carts, houses along their route took fire mysteriously, signaling their movement and direction, and answered from afar by other conflagrations; bridges that had been sound enough before blew up at the last moment.  What the Belgians were charged with, and their country laid waste for, all East Prussia is organized to do daily as an established and carefully schooled auxiliary to the army.