All these plans, though particularly those of Ruzski and the Stavka, characterise a distinctively Russian style of warmaking, that of using space rather than force as a medium of strategy. No French general would have proposed surrendering the cherished soil of his country to gain military advantage; the German generals in East Prussia had taken the defence of its frontier to be a sacred duty. To the Russians, by contrast, inhabitants of an empire that stretched nearly 6000 miles from the ploughland of western Poland to the ice of the Bering Straits, a hundred miles here or there was a trifle
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