he Russians was swept over by the German Allies. By the
close of the day the Germans had taken twenty-eight officers, 6,380
men, and nine machine guns.

The Germans, prepared in the recent pause in the fighting, by the
bringing up of their artillery on the long lines of communication
which now stretched behind them, with troops reenforced by such fresh
forces as they could muster, were hurling themselves upon the Russian
defensive positions everywhere along the line. Thus, on the forenoon
of July 17, 1915, the army of General von Woyrsch, whose objective was
the mighty fortress Ivangorod, operating just to the west of the upper
Vistula, broke through the Russian wire entanglements and stormed the
enemy's trenches on a stretch of 2,000 meters. The breach was widened
in desperate hand-to-hand combat. The Teutons by evening inflicted a
heavy defeat on the Moscow Grenadier Corps at this point and the
Russians were forced to retreat behind the Ilzanka to the south of
Swolen. Some 2,000 men were taken prisoners by the Germans in this
battle and five machine guns were captured.

Far in the northeast in Courland the army of General von Buelow, on
July 17, 1915, defeated Russian forces that had been rushed up at
Alt-Auz, taking 3,620 prisoners, six cannon and three machine guns,
and pursuing the Slavs in an easterly direction. Desperate fighting
was also taking place to the northeast of Kurschany.

Notes of anxiety mixed with consoling speculations had begun to appear
in the press of the allied countries when the vast German offensive
had thus become plainly revealed and had demonstrated its driving
force. A Petrograd dispatch to the London "Morning Post" on the 15th
of July, 1915, said of the German plan that it was to catch the
Russian armies like a nut between nut crackers, that the two fronts
moving up from north and south were intended to meet on another and
grind everything between them to powder. The area between the
attacking forces was some eighty miles in extent, north to south, by
120 miles west to east. The writer offered the consolation that this
space was well fortified, the kernel of the nut "sound and healthy,
being formed of the Russian armies, inspired not merely with the
righteousness of their cause, but the fullest confidence in themselves
and absolute devotion to the proved genius of their commander in
chief."

The dispatch pointed out that it was all sheer frontal fighting, that
the Germans had been tw