not seem to be a very big achievement, but it is all in one direction. We have secured the ascendency, instead of being pushed back, as we were before Verdun, yard by yard, until the Germans got nearer and nearer to the fortress itself. What is happening now? We are pushing the enemy on the Somme, and the French are doing the same. Near Verdun, instead of being driven back gradually day by day and week by week, the French are regaining ground that they had previously lost.

All that is a change, but in order to convert that into a real victory, a victory which will enable us to impose the only terms that will make it worth our while for having entered into this war, it is necessary that we should get every possible support that this country or the dominions can give us. It is upon that support and upon the equipment of Russia, with heavy guns and heavy ammunition, that victory depends. During the whole of these fateful months the enemy knows perfectly well that if Russia had been equipped with heavier artillery and ammunition her progress would have been much more rapid than it has been. It is upon considerations of that kind, which involve greater sacrifices, still greater drafts upon our tenacity and courage, that the one great question whether we shall see the end of this war in the coming year depends.

Germany's Chance Gone

We have captured the ridge; we can see, at any rate, the course of the campaign. I think in the dim distance we can see the end. The enemy has been driven off the dominant position which he held at the beginning of the campaign, and that in itself is a great achievement. He has lost his tide. He had France not fully prepared, and yet the best prepared of all; the most finely organized country in the alliance was

still, in a sense, unprepared. Russia, also, was unprepared, and Britain with practically no army in the Continental sense. We had an army for policing the empire, but we had no army in the sense of an army for a great Continental campaign. I am the last man to disparage the work which our first expeditionary force rendered. I have no doubt when the history of the whole war comes to be written it will be said that the action of that gallant little force saved the situation.

Now France is equipped, and Russia is rapidly becoming equipped. The Italian equipment is getting along in a way which has amazed even her best friends. We have now in the field one of the greatest armies any empire could command. Germany has missed her chance and she knows it.

Without in the least pretending to predict times and seasons, it would be a mistake for us to anticipate an early victory; that would only produce disappointment; I have never in the least underrated the greatness of our task; I never cried out victory when, as a matter of fact, we were sustaining defeat, as I have always thought it better to tell the people frankly and fairly exactly what was happening, because the people of this country are not the kind of people to be terrified by any facts, and I knew that their exertions would be in proportion to the difficulty of their enterprise. Having always taken that view, and now surveying the whole situation in the light of existing facts and upon the advice of those who are far more competent to express an opinion than I am, I have no hesitation in saying that all this country and the Allies have to do is to march together steadily, work together loyally, as they have done in the past, and then victory, assured victory, will rest in their hands.

W

E have been forgetting the north end of the Russian battle line in watching the absorbing drama of the south. But at the north end also there has been vital fighting. Kuropatkin, who was far greater on the defensive than in attack -and of whom it was said that, at the battle of Mukden, in its time the greatest battle of history, he had ten matured plans for withdrawal but not one for an advance has gone south to his beloved Turkestan; Ruzsky, one of the hardest hitters in the Russian Army, who shared with Brusiloff the honors of the first great aggressive in Galicia, has taken Kuropatkin's place, or, more truly, has returned to his own post which Kuropatkin was holding for him; and, with the return of the "fighting General," the northern Russian line has moved steadily forward. Not on the grand scale of Galicia and Bukowina, it is true, but there are good reasons for that; first, although Russia has an apparently inexhaustible host of young, well-trained soldiers, and literally mountains of shells, which are pouring in daily from England, from Japan, from Russia's own new munition works in the iron regions of the south and east, and also from America, yet of necessity the enormous calls made both on men and munitions by Brusiloff's vast offensive and now by the new invasion of Bulgaria through the Dobrudja, have left Ruzsky in the north with comparatively limited means. Let us see what he has been able to accomplish with them.

The Dwina Front

Riga, a city of 600,000 population, (as large as Baltimore or Pittsburgh,) and, after Odessa, the greatest port in the empire, was the first goal of Hindenburg's great drive; Dwinsk, with 100,000 inhabitants, was the second. The distance between is about 120 miles, or, along the curved line of the Dwina and

the trenches, more than 150. All along this line, (which is about equal to the line on the western front from Ostend to Rheims,) Ruzsky has been attacking, fighting against lines organized exactly like those we are familiar with in the descriptions of the fighting on the Somme. And the result of this fighting is that, along the greater part of the line, the Russians have captured the German first-line trenches and are firmly installed on the western side of the Dwina.

While the trenches themselves were splendidly organized with reinforced concrete, forests of barbed wire, subterranean caves, deep connecting trenches, the whole well defended by multitudes of machine guns, bomb throwers, rapid-fire cannon, yet, according to Russian reports, the German army defending them was worn, nervous, inadequately fed and clothed, and the trenches were undermanned. But there was no lack at all of munitions, nor of fierce determination to hold the trenches. In general, when Ruzsky's men attacked, after a tremendously heavy artillery preparation, with high explosive shells of the largest calibre, they found that the German defenders had, during the bombardment, practically given up the first-line trenches; only small groups were left, in the deepest burrows, at the telephone stations from which wires, deeply buried in the earth, maintained connections with the second lines. German prisoners who had remained at these first-line telephone stations said that, so tremendous was the Russian bombardment, nothing could stand against it; barbed wire entanglements were mowed down like reeds, concrete trenches were first smashed up into great fragments, as old-fashioned housewives used to pound up their sugar loaves, and then the chunks of concrete were literally pounded into dust.

When the Russian foot soldiers charged with the bayonet, over the stupendous