According to all accounts, the Allied position in the west, especially the British section thereof, is as “safe as the Bank of England,” to use the words of one of our officers already quoted; and though the Kaiser, recovered from his illness, has again returned to the front—­or, at least. the distant rear of the front—­he does not seem to have much refreshed the offensive spirit of his armies.  Nevertheless, the French communiques have suffered from no great diminution in the daily records of sporadic trench-fighting all along the Allied line—­fighting of a fluctuating, if on the whole favourable, kind for the strategic plans of General Joffre, as to whom, one German officer in Belgium said that he wished to God his country had such a War Lord, seeing that, apart from Marshal Hindenburg, all their Generals were only worthy of disdain.

In a telegram to his aunt, the Dowager Grand Duchess of Baden, only daughter of the old Emperor William, the Kaiser gave “God alone the glory” for a grand victory which was supposed to have been achieved by Hindenburg over the Russians in front of Warsaw—­a victory which caused Berlin to burst out into bunting and braying and comparisons to Salamis and Leipzig in its momentous results.  But this acknowledgment of the Kaiser to the Lord of Hosts, “our old ally of Rossbach”—­which must surely have inspired Hindenburg himself with a feeling of jealousy and sense of soreness—­turned out to have been altogether premature, and of the nature of shouting before they were out of the wood.

For a fortnight or so the fighting in Poland continued to be of a very confused kind, the telegrams from both sides being most contradictory, but on the whole the advantage seemed to remain with the Russians, who recorded their victories in very striking figures of killed and captured during their defence of several rivers tributary to the Vistula on its left bank.  Hindenburg the redoubtable—­the only General worth a rap (or a “damn,” as Wellington would have said), according to the German officer already quoted—­promised to let the Kaiser have Warsaw as a Christmas present; but, according to all present appearances, he is no nearer the capital of Russian Poland than his comrade von Kluck (who is now said to have been superseded) was to Paris on the day of his being tumbled back from the Marne.

scLondon:  December 28, 1914.

[Illustration:  A PRINCELY INDIAN GIFT:  MOTOR-AMBULANCES PRESENTED TO THE KING FOR THE FORCES BY THE MAHARAJA SCINDIA OF GWALIOR.

The Maharaja Scindia’s munificent Christmas gift for the soldiers and sailors consists of 41 ambulance-cars, 4 cars for officers, 5 motor-lorries and repair-wagons, and 10 motor-cycles.—­[Photo.  Illus.  Bureau.]

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THE ILLUSTRATED WAR NEWS, DEC. 30, 1914—­[Part 21]—­9

[Illustration:  SHELLED, BURNED OUT, AND FINALLY TAKEN BY STORM:  ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE FAMOUS CHATEAU OF VERMELLES.]