or not the modern era was to fall under
the sword, as did the democracy of Greece and the mighty Roman
Empire, was again to be decided on battle grounds that for seventy
centuries have devoured the generations. The mountain passes were
once more to reverberate with the battle cry--the roar of guns,
the clank of artillery, the tramp of soldiery. The rivers were
to run crimson with the blood of men; cities were to fall before
the invaders; ruin and death were to consume nations. It was as
though Xerxes, and Darius, and Alexander the Great, and Hannibal,
and all the warriors of old were to return to earth to lead again
gigantic armies over the ancient battle fields.

While the war was gaining momentum on the western battle grounds
of Europe, gigantic armies were gathering in the East--there to
wage mighty campaigns that were to hold in the balance the destiny
of the great Russian Empire; the empire of Austria, the Balkan
kingdoms-Serbia, Montenegro, Rumania, Bulgaria. The Turks were
again to enter upon a war of invasion. Greece once more was to
tremble under the sword. Even Egypt and Persia and Jerusalem itself,
the battle grounds of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Trojans,
the bloody fields of paganism and early Christianity, were all to
be awakened by the modern trumpets of war.

Before we enter upon these campaigns in the East it is well to
survey the countries to be invaded, to review the battle lines and
travel in these pages over the fighting ground.

The eastern theatre in the first six months of the war, from August
4, 1914, to February 1, 1915, includes the scenes of the fighting
in the historic Balkans and in the Caucasus. But the eastern front
proper is really that region where the Teutonic allies and the
Russians opposed each other, forming a fighting line almost a thousand
miles long. It stretches from rugged old Riga on the shores of the
Baltic Sea in the far north, down through Poland to the Carpathian
Mountains, touching the warm, sunlit hills on the Rumanian frontier.
When the total losses of the Great War are finally counted it will
probably be found that here the heaviest fighting has occurred.

This is the longest battle line in the world's history. Partly on
account of its great length, and partly because of the nature of
the country, we see the two gigantic forces in this region locked
together in their deadly struggle, swaying back and forth, first
one giving way, then the other. This w