WAR NOTES
To-day details are given of the British attack on the Scarpe reported yesterday. It appears that the Germans are offering very strong resistance ir> their efforts to delay the British advance until their defences ini the rear have been oomipleted:. An important attack has been) delivered between: GavreTle, Guemaprje. Fonlaine. and Croiselles, whicih. line is described as .the lastswitch' hereabouts .between the British and the main Hindenfourg line. Tt- is i clear that the fighting is in British favour, but all gains are hard-won, and no big prizes have been secured. Gavrelle is somewhere near the middle of a line oennectinig Arras and' 'Douai and the other places follow in a line south of Croisilles.
Artillerv duels are reported on the sectors where the French have been particularly active of late. It was not to be expected that the heavy fighting would continue without a stop for any length of time. The French recently attacked on a front spoken of as between Soissons and Rheims. These two towns are about 40 miles apart as the crow flies. Then it was reported that the fighting had extended east of Rheims to Auberive—an extension of 20 miles. It was somewhere on this front we are told by cable to-day that the Germans had intended striking a heavy hlow at France, but Neville got in first' and upset their plans for the time-being at any rate. If this be true it shows that the Allies have the situation as a whole well in hand, and possess the initiative in the real meaning of the term.
The western front has now assumed an aspect entirely different from any it has worn since it came into existence as a continuous line. To nut the thing shortly, about half of it. says a military critic, is liquifying under presure. Tt has been all along an extraordinarily solid front. Dints have been made in it by one side, or another, but they have made no real difference to the state or »bape of it as a whole. Yet now of ihe central half of it, the fulness of the curve, one part has fallen in and the vest, is being pushed in. The T-shaped back line that was drawn to represent the line of contact of v the opposing armies in the west when they all ; tqok to the trenches has served, nearly enough, ever since. It was almost impossible to show the effect of the Loos and even the Champagne fighting upon it. the Verdun effort only a little flattened one curve, and even the Somme fighting of last year made no more than a small and unimportant looking dent. Yet that dent was the beginning of things. The men who /He buried along the Pozieres ridge and about those hard-won villages along the banks of the Ancre before the German retirement began—they helped to bring about that retirement : it was they who pushed- Hindenburg back between Arras and St. Quentin. as surely as men now living pushed him out of Lagnicourt and off the Vimy Ridge. . • •
WAR NOTES
Nelson Evening Mail, 25 April 1917, Page 4
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