Rout in Slow Motion

If the Germans continue to be annihilated at the present rate, they will be driven as far west as Smolensk by the spring thaw. Compared with Russia's gains in the past month, this is a considerable distance. But in terms of Germany's lightning drives from Smolensk to Bryansk and from Bryansk to the outskirts of Moscow, it is relatively small for the time spent. Yet the wishful thinking of the press has given birth to a widespread notion that the counter-attack is a large-scale rout, although any amateur pin-pusher can discover that the Soviets are doing in months what the Nazis did in weeks.

From all indications, the Russian drive is progressing steadily, but it is far from the "rout" that has been filling the dispatches. It has yet to show a spurt at all comparable with the blitzkriegs that so recently went in the other direction. Sometimes the gains hailed by the press as fantastic have been so slight in terms of space as not to show at all on a good sized map. Some gains seem to occur more than once, such as the capture of Kozelsk, which has been announced and cheered twice recently, with two weeks intervening. Reports like these remind one of the ones from Libya, where the British took suspiciously long to put the finishing touches on surrounded Axis "remnants," which for a time seemed permanently on the verge of final destruction. They are also reminiscent of the old cowboy flickers which showed the rescue party speeding around the same bend in the road each time they were flashed on the screen.

There is little doubt that the Red offensive is getting somewhere, or that the Germans are being pushed out of strategic positions. In spite of the daily capture of "several unnamed villages," things are not moving nearly fast enough to be considered in the "rout" stage. Hitler's armies are being pushed out, not chased out, and slowly enough to prove that there is still plenty of fight left in them.