By Perceval Gibbon.
[Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.]
ZYRARDOW, Poland, Jan. 5, (Dispatch to The London Daily
Chronicle.)--Once again Poland has seen a great German general attack
along the whole line of the Bzura and Rawka positions from Gradow to
Rawa. For thirty-six hours the battle has shifted like a moving flame in
a long line. Now that its intensity is abated, it is clear that the
German purpose has again failed of accomplishment, and at several points
the Russian line has advanced.
We have no key to the German mentality which inspires these attacks so
wasteful in lives of soldiers, so ineffectual in their general result.
In the records of this struggle along the courses of the two little
rivers I have notes of upward of 100 attacks in considerable force,
of which not a single one resulted in shifting the imperturbable Russian
infantry from a trench, but each of which has been accompanied by
ghastly loss to the Germans.
A fight characteristic of the operations on this front took place west
of Gradow, where the German attack was exceptionally heavy throughout
New Year's Day, culminating in an assault by infantry on the same night.
Throughout the day they shelled the Russian trenches, spending
ammunition with their customary lavishness. The day's shelling justified
the Russian opinion that of the German forces their artillery and
cavalry are the weakest arm and their infantry is the best. The
positions are not greatly disturbed by the day-long aspersion with
shrapnel, and the Russians are more than ready for the attack. On this
front the infantry attacks usually in line, but this night they came up
in dense columns. The Russian guns were at work promptly with the fuses
of the shells reduced, so that they burst almost at the gun's mouth, and
from the trenches a steady, schooled infantry fire tore gaps in the
masses of the enemy.
At Gradow the Russians were utterly outnumbered. To this extent the
German concentration of forces was successful, but no further. They
succeeded in reducing the Russians' tactics from a mere defense of the
trenches to delivering a counter-attack; but this was the limit of their
success.
I have talked with three Russian officers here who were wounded during
the counter-attack. Five machine guns were at work on them as they left
their trenches in a charge. One of the officers was shot through the
chest as he climbed the bank of the trench; the second got perhaps
twenty yards before being hit in the head; the third, however, led his
men home into the German trench. Of the Russians who set out only eighty
were alive and unhurt when they reached the German trench, but this
eighty took it with the bayonet, killing about five times their own
number of Germans.
At Gradow, on the morning of Jan. 2, the ground resembled the strewn
battlefield of Brzezny or the body-littered valleys between the woods
of Augustowo in October. As in those other tragic defeats where the
ruthless Generals sacrificed their soldiers like water, there were heaps
and ridges of gray-clad dead. Gradow is only one single point in the
line which the Germans assaulted, yet here alone they lost upward of
6,000 killed. The same night they attacked positions corresponding at
the villages of Guzow, Radziwillow, Msczonow, and Rawa. In every place
they were beaten back with heavy losses. The estimates from various
sources, some official, state that their losses for the single night's
abortive fighting, giving them nowhere an advance of a single yard of
territory, were assuredly not fewer than 30,000 dead on the ground and
three times as many wounded or dead within their own lines.
I am cured of prophecy, but through the fog of imminent events certain
happenings are dimly indicated. Roughly speaking, the next fortnight is
Germany's final opportunity. During that time they may pour out lives
with the same hope as hitherto of making an impression on the steadfast
line of the Bzura and Rawka. Then that last glamour of hope of success
in Poland vanishes.
In the highest opinions the Austrian Army is finished, and it remains
only to clear up the mess they have made and then again the great
advance on poor, dim, beautiful Cracow will proceed. Przemysl is at its
last gasp, and then the Russian armies will be in Silesia, the source
and headquarters of Prussia's industrial wealth, the one province she
cannot afford to see invaded. Within a time, which I hear estimated
between three and six weeks, these wind-swept, icy plains of Poland must
see a stage in the war completed.
Germans have been captured lately in whose possession was found the last
proclamation of the Kaiser that "if compelled to retire from Poland,
leave standing neither house nor town; leave only the bare earth
underfoot." Well, the road to Berlin does not end at the Polish
frontier.