POSITION IN FLANDERS.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 30, Issue 17, 1 March 1918, Page 8

POSITION IN FLANDERS.

A writer in Country Life compares the fighting in Flanders in the end of the last year to a game of chess. “When tho board is set,” ho says, “and two strong players are opposed to one another, you do not expect a crash, as when a rook player is opposed to a champion. The first manoeuvres are made in order to gain position, and in real war, as well as in its mimic counterpart, position is everything. When tho pieces of one player are well developed so that they occupy the commanding spots and are well backed up one by the other, the experienced player can easily see tho end of the game, even though the pieces on each side are numerically tho same. But what gives them a clue is that one party has been thrust into a state of defence and the development of his pieces has been obstructed. Many of the most powerful are of no avail because they are forbidden any field of operation. The point is that Sir Douglas Haig has so far been playing for position and has won it. Wherever one goes on the fronts, the relative position of the opposing armies is reversed. Whereas at the beginning of trench warfare tho Germans held the heights and therefore commanded the line of the British army on the plains, to-day it is the British Army which holds the commanding positions and the Germans who arc forced down to the watery plains. It is so in a marked degree at Yimy Ridge, where the observation posts of the British Army command a wide sweep of the surrounding country and of the German lines entrenched in it. At Verdun, Germans behind the dunelike ridges, so that they have no aid from direct sight, but must trust wholly to their aeroplanes for locating the situation of the hostile guns. Sir Douglas Haig has had a formidable task in establishing a similar position on the Belgian front. Hot only were the points of vantage occupied by the enemy, but the German leaders had been fully alive to the fact that on the poscssion of those ridges which one by one have been captured by the valour and dogged persistency of the British Army lay their hopes of retaining Belgium. And that was by no means all. Belgium counts enormously in the German calculations because part of the country supplies them with an outlet for their submarines. The task of forcing a retreat from Zeebrugge and the bank of the Scheldt has become infinitely more within the grasp of the British Army since Passchendaele and the heights beside it have been captured. The French military authorities hold that Passchendaele is the key to the German positions, and that after it has been gained the task of unlocking the Hun grip upon Flanders must become comparatively simple.