146 The Great War Joseph had been fixed as the term of the Hapsburg Empire. The rise of the Balkan States, of Servia, so small in area, so large in recent events of world history, had been accepted as final signs of the com- ing dissolution. If the battle now in progress in Galicia in the last week in August, a battle where hundreds of thousands of men were units should turn against the Austrian — and the fall of Lemberg was already accepted as an indication of waning fortune — then as the victorious Slav armies went forward, what of the Ruthenian and the Pole of Galicia, the Czech of Bohemia and Moravia, the Slovak beyond the Carpathians? What, too, of the Serbs and Croats along the Danube and the Drave? Would they not welcome the Russian as a fellow Slav, would not Austria, Inundated from the East by victorious Russian armies, be faced by the uprising of 26,000,- 000 of Slavs who had long and Impatiently endured the stupid tyranny of German and Hungarian rulers? Such, at least, was the question the world outside was now asking. The plain purpose of Russian military opera- tions was now revealed. Precisely as Germany sent her whole field army to France and kept only a screen to face Russia, the Czar had turned only a relatively weak army against Germany and sent his great force over the boundaries into Austria. To destroy Austrian armies, to crush the forward thrust from Galicia of the main field army of i.ustria,