THE TASK IN MACEDONIA.

Western Star, 20 March 1917, Page 2

THE TASK IN MACEDONIA.

What will the New Year have in store for the Salonika force? asks Mr G. Waul Price in a despatch from Salonika published in London on January 16. The first and most urgent object of our endeavour here must clearly be to cut the railway which now connects Berlin with Baghdad. That line is the oesophagus of the Central Empires. Along it Germany brings foodstuffs and men from the great reservoir of both that she possesses in Asia Minor. Turkey in Asia is a granary which Germany is developing for the first time on scientific lines,, while it is also the home, as Bernhardi has pointed out, of 2,000,000 of some of the finest fighting men in the world, who are being trained byGerman officers and drill instructors, eventually to be used against us in the West, as they are already being used against us here and in Galicia. The present New Year finds us in the same position here as last, except that we ave in closer touch with our enemies, both in front and rear of us, than then. It can only he hoped that the reinforcements that will arrive in 1917 will make it possible by next New Year to have gut astride that vital traus-Balkan railway. There is another and much greater end, however, before the Allied armies in the Balkans than the immediate one of seven Ing Germany from her Eastern allies. It is to refashion-the Balkans in such a way that the German schemes which centre here shall be for ever thwarted. The war began in the Balkans because the German people have for'years been pushing down towards Salonika as a stepping-stone to new Dominions in India and the East. If they had reached Salonika they would have built there a Mediterranean Kiel, and Egypt would have been threatened with a fleet as strung as that in the North Sea.