There is very much more than this.  A great town cannot but contain, if you have long occupied it, the material of your organization; you will probably abandon documents which the enemy should not see.  You will certainly, in the pressure of such a flight, lose accumulated stores.  Again, the transverse streets are so many points of “leakage,” into which your congested columns will bulge out and get confused.  Again, you will be almost necessarily dealing with the complication of a mass of civilian conditions which should never be allowed to interrupt a military operation.

In general, to fight in front of a great town, when the chances are against you, is as great an error as to fight in front of a marsh with few causeways; so far as mere topography is concerned, it is a greater error still.

Lemberg did not, indeed, fulfil all these conditions.  It is very large (not far from a quarter of a million people), with all its suburbs it is nearly two miles in extreme extent, and its older or central part is a confusion of narrow streets; but it is not highly industrialized, and the position of the Austrian armies was such that the retreat could be effected mainly from either side of the built area, particularly as the main enemy pressure had not come in front of the city along the Busk Road, but far to the east and south in the open field.  But Lemberg was an exceedingly important railway centre (seven lines converge there), and it contained an immense amount of war munitions.  When, therefore, the retreat was tardily undertaken, the fact that the more precipitate retirement had begun in front of the city and not behind it was of considerable effect in what followed.

To some extent von Auffenberg, in spite of the tardiness of his decision to retire, had protected his retreat.  The main line of that retreat was established for him, of course, by the main Galician railway, which runs back from Lemberg to Przemysl.  He prepared a position some two days’ march behind Lemberg, and defended with a rearguard at Grodek the belated withdrawal of his main force.  But from the nature of the Russian advance, Russky, upon von Auffenberg’s left, perpetually threatened this railway; and Brussilov, upon his right, pressed the rapidly-melting mass of the varied contingents opposed to him through the difficult, hilly, and woody country of the foothills.

[Illustration:  Sketch 71.]

It was upon the Friday, September 4th, that the Austrian evacuation of Lemberg was complete, and that the Russian administration was established in the town.  Before Monday, the 7th, the Austrian right had already half converted their retirement into a rout, and the great captures of prisoners and of guns had begun.  That important arm, the irregular light cavalry of the Russians, notably the great Cossack contingent, found its opportunity, and the captures began upon a scale far exceeding anything which the war had hitherto shown