ed section type with which the Bulgarians drove the
Turks to Chataldja; but there is something else that they have learned.
Since the first days of the mobilization that brought them from their
homes there is not a man among them that has tasted strong drink. In
1904 the men came drunk from their homes to the centres; one saw them
about the streets and on the railways and in the gutters. But these men
have been sober from the start, and will perforce be sober to the end.

Of all that elaborate and copious machinery of war which Russia has
built up since her failure in Manchuria there is nothing so impressive
as this. Her thousand and odd aeroplanes, her murderously expert
artillery, her neat and successful field wireless telegraph, even her
strategy, count as secondary to it. The chief of her weaknesses in the
past has been the slowness of her mobilization; Germany, with her plans
laid and tested for a mobilization in four days, could count on time
enough to strike before Russia could move. She used her advantage to
effect when Austria planted the seed of this present war by the
annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; she was able to present Russia in
all her unpreparedness with the alternatives of war in twenty-four hours
or accepting the situation. But this time it has been different.

At Petrograd one sees how different. Hither from the northern and
eastern Governments come the men who are to swell Rennenkampf's force.
Their cadres, the skeletons of the battalions of which they are the
flesh, are waiting for them--officers, organization, equipment, all is
ready. The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns
through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus--foresters,
moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians,
tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or
biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the
Russian soul, and all sober. No need now to make men of them before
making soldiers; no inferno at the way side-stations and troop trains
turning up days late. It is as if, at the cost of those annual
780,000,000 rubles, Russia had bought the clue to victory.

West beyond Eydtkuhnen, under the pearl-gray northern sky, lies East
Prussia. Hereabout it is flat and fertile, with lavish, eye-fatiguing
levels of cornland stretching away to Insterburg and beyond to
Koenigsberg's formidable girdle of forts. Here are many villages, and
scatter