GERMAN “NUT-CRACKER”
A Petrograd dispatch to the London Morning Post said on July 15:
The Germans have opened a new campaign for the conquest of Russia. Their plan is to catch the Russian armies like a nut between nutcrackers.
The German line of advance from the northwest lies between the Mlawa-Warsaw Railway line and the River Pissa and from the south from the Galician line. On paper the German scheme is that these two fronts shall move to meet one another and everything between them must be ground to powder. But the nut to be cracked is rather a formidable area of space and well fortified, the kernel 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 area referred to cannot be less than eighty miles in extent, north to south, by 120 miles west to east. That is the mere nucleus and minimum area, as contained between the Novo Georgievsk fortress in the north to the Ivangorod fortress in the south and the Russian lines on the Bzura in the west to Brest-Litovsk on the east.
The German battle line on July 24, in Russian Poland.
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The Germans have an incalculable amount of fighting to face before they win to that area, the nut to be cracked, and then the cracking is still to be done. It is all sheer frontal fighting. The Germans have been twelve months trying frontal attacks against Warsaw on a comparatively narrow front, and in vain. What chance have they of success by dividing their forces against the united strength of Russia?
BREAKING RUSSIA’S LINES
An official German bulletin dated Berlin, July 17, reported: