ns to the west of the Wieprz, captured thousands of prisoners
and many guns, and once more thrust back the Russian front between the
Vistula and the Bug. On the evening of the 29th they attained the
Warsaw-Kiev railway at Biskupice, about halfway between Lublin and
Cholm, thus crowning their efforts to get astride their important line
of communications. The Russians were destroying everything of value in
the country as they retired, even burning grain in the fields.

On the afternoon of July 30, 1915, Lublin at last was occupied by the
army of the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, and on the 31st the Germans of
Von Mackensen passed through Cholm. Thus the Teutonic armies were now
across the important railway from Warsaw and Ivangorod to Kiev, on a
broad front, running all the way down to the Vistula at Novo
Alexandria. In Courland the Germans continued to push forward, so that
on the 12th of August they were enabled to seize the important railway
center Mistan.

Hope in Russia died hard. Press correspondents up to July 29, 1915,
still spoke of the possibility of the Russians standing a siege in
their principal fortress on the Warsaw salient. On the 29th, however,
reports came from Petrograd that the fortresses of the Warsaw defense
were to be abandoned and the capital of Poland given up to the army.

The correspondent of the New York "Times" on July 29, 1915, in a
special cable summed up the situation in an announcement that the fate
of Europe hung on the decision that Russia might make on the question:
"Shall Russia settle down to a war of position in her vast
fortifications around Warsaw, or shall she continue to barter space
against time, withdrawing from the line of the Vistula and points on
it of both strategic and political importance, in order to gain the
time which Germany has already stored in the form of inexhaustible gun
munitions?" The reply was the evacuation of Warsaw.

The decisive blow to Russia's hopes came with the crossing of the
Vistula about twenty miles north of Ivangorod on July 28, 1915,
already noted. It showed that Warsaw was being rapidly surrounded. The
Russian communique of the 30th of July told of the crossing over of
the Teutons on both sides of the Radomka, a tributary of the Vistula,
to the right bank of the Vistula on pontoons, and of attempts to throw
bridges across the great rivers. Von Woyrsch's troops that had crossed
over were irresistibly pursuing still farther east on the 30th,
defe