tween the Jasiolda
and Pripet Rivers. Considering that this city is, in a direct line,
more than 220 miles east of Warsaw, this accomplishment was little
short of marvelous, especially in view of the fact that the territory
surrounding Pinsk--the Pripet Marshes--offered immense difficulties.
However, the same difficulties were encountered by the retreating
Russians in even greater measure, because, while there is some solid
ground west of Pinsk, there is practically nothing but swamps to the
north, south, and east of the city, the direction in which the Russian
retreat necessarily had to proceed. It was thus possible for Von
Mackensen to report on September 17, 1915, the capture of 2,500
Russians south of Pinsk.

In the Volhynian and Galician theatre of war the struggle continued
without any abatement. Neither side, however, succeeded in gaining any
lasting and definite advantages. One day the Russians would throw
their enemies back across the Strypa, only to suffer themselves a like
fate on the next day in respect to the Sereth. More or less the same
conditions existed east of Lutsk and along the Ikwa, in both of which
regions the Russians continued their attempts to drive back the
Austro-Germans by repeated attacks.

After the conquest of Pinsk, Von Mackensen's army for a few days
continued its advance from that town in a northeasterly, easterly, and
southeasterly direction. But here, too, the advance stopped about
September 23, 1915, after some detachments which had crossed to the
north and northeast of Pinsk, over the Oginski Canal at Lahishyn, and
over the Jasiolda between its junction with the canal and the
Pinsk-Gomel railroad, had to be withdrawn on that date. In this
sector--from the Jasiolda to the Styr at Tchartorysk just south of the
Kovel-Kieff railway--the fighting assumed the form of trench warfare,
just as it did along the rest of the front south of the Vilia River.
The front there was along the Jasiolda from its junction with the
Oginski Canal, swung around Pinsk and east of it in a semicircle,
through the Pripet Marshes, crossed the Pripet River at Nobiet and
then continued in a southerly direction to Borana on the Styr, along
that river for a distance of about twenty miles, across the
Kovel-Kieff railroad at Rafalovka to Tchartorysk on the Styr.

Farther south the Russians gained some slight successes, and even
forced the Germans to retreat to the west bank of the Styr at Lutsk.
The fighting in th