New Vistas

Only in Hungary was the Red Army active, but there it was developing a program of action that sent shivers up Ger man spines from Vienna to Berlin. Although Budapest was still German, the Russian campaign had widened out.

First the Russians had swooped far to the south to cut the Tisa River line, moved up between the Tisa and the Dan ube to the southern outskirts of Budapest.

Then they seemed to stall in mud and German resistance. But eastward a new threat developed. The Russians broke across the middle Tisa south of Miskolc, piled northwestward in a drive that might leave Budapest cut off far in the rear.

To Nuernberg and the Bastion. Ahead (see map) was the natural corridor be tween the Austrian Alps and the Carpathians to industrial Bratislava on the east bank of the Danube. From Bratislava the Red Army might divide into two forces. One could fight up the Danubian gateway to Germany through Vienna to Linz, Munich and Nuernberg. The other could follow the Moravian gateway to northern Czechoslovakia--the Bohemian bastion.* Other Russian forces now before Cracow could move in to join the Bohemian drive through the Oder Gap.

In the Present. But that was in the future. For the moment the battle was still joined on the Hungarian plain, its fields of yellow pumpkins punctuated by small lakes and farm buildings. Persistent rain had made the kind of mud that even stumped bullocks. Infantrymen were all but swimming in the thick goo and tanks were helplessly stalled. Nevertheless the Russians slogged on past the Tisa, past the abandoned German tanks and trucks littering the plains, and on toward the north.

Budapest itself was holding out but it was in trouble. Apparently the Germans were determined to fight to the last Hungarian, determined to make the romantic, sophisticated old capital another Aachen or Cherbourg. Refugees, food shortages and lack of bomb shelters had brought the city near to chaos. Pest, the section on the east bank of the Danube, was ordered evacuated. Pillboxes, barbed wire, tank obstacles blocked the streets.

The Russians might not attempt to take Budapest by frontal attack. But the forces moving northwest could wheel over to envelop the city from three sides, pounce down on Pest. Buda was in danger from a Russian force which was reported to have crossed the Danube far south in Yugoslavia, begun a march north on the west bank of the river. And northwest from Budapest the plain is flat.

--' Said Bismarck: "He who controls the Bohemian bastion controls Europe."

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