cuted simultaneous assaults-like the rushing together of two locomotives head on-and, as usual, the Canadians had the best of it. This coal city of closely packed dwellings has now be'come a citadel of reinforced concretepossibly the strongest single position that has ever confronted the Allies on the western front. They have already entered some of the isolated quarters of the town, and have firmly established themselves on the north at the Cité St. Laurent and the Cité St. Edouard; on the west at Cité Jeanne d'Arc; on the south at Eleu or Leauvette. But between these suburbs and the concrete citadel lie the coal pits with their fathomless depths of ages and the mysteries of kultural strategy. Meanwhile, the struggle there has become a succession of avalanches of gas, burning oil, rifle and machine-gun fire, and hand-to-hand struggles in which the German loss seems all out of proportion to the military value of the place with its present industrial uselessness. Less of an enigma is the fact that the besiegers are cautious in their use of big howitzers and high explosive shells.

The remainder of this front through Champagne and the Argonne has witnessed a constant application of attrition-artillery trition artillery duels, bombing, airplane combats, and raids carried out by the Allies-with particular emphasis on the St. Quentin sector, on the Aisne and in the Champagne. These three places and their relation as approaches to the great industrial city of Laon were sufficiently dwelt on last month. Toward the middle of September the British, by a series of small drives, had improved their positions amid the farms north of St. Quentin; on the Aisne and in Champagne the counter artillery bombardments of the French seemed to have gained dominance over those of the Crown Prince. The French raids, one of which in Champagne, between St. Hilaire and St. Souplet, on Sept. 12 swept over two of his trenches and established a line in the third, have accounted for many prisoners.

The wonders of the great Italian offensive begun on the night of Aug. 18-19

-scenic, strategic, and personal-will be found in a descriptive article elsewhere in this magazine. I shall merely try to conventionalize the stage of the great drama and record its acts and scenes.

Imagine a triangle erected on the forty-mile base extending from the Battery to Peekskill via Tarrytown, with its vertex at Boston. At forty miles on its northern side of 190 miles would fall Hartford; at forty-four miles on its southern side of 120 miles would fall Bridgeport. Place this triangle on a map of similar scale of the Austrian coastland, Carniola, Styria, and Lower Austria, with its base resting on Tolmino and Trieste, with Gorizia somewhere near Tarrytown, and Hartford would become the great Austrian fortress of Klagenfurt; Bridgeport, Laibach; while the vertex, Boston, would fall on Vienna. Superimpose the topography of Vermont and its Green Mountains, and we have a fair idea of the terrain over which the Italians are making their way, of the geographical obstacles which obstruct their path, and the remoteness of their objectives.

Their campaign of last year left them in the possession of Gorizia and its bridgeheads, but not of the heights, rising from 1,800 feet to 2,240 to the northeast and east of the town, and a foothold on the edge of the Carso Plateau, which is not unlike the approach to the Battery from Tarrytown, if only we imagine Manhattan Island strewn with volcanic heaps, some of them a thousand feet high.

No, the Hudson would not adequately represent the Isonzo, for between Peekskill (Tolmino) and Tarrytown (Gorizia) the river would have to become deep and swift and narrow and pass through gorges rising higher than the Palisades. On May 14 last, the Italians, in an attack which defied all rules of tactics, and almost the imagination of strategy, to say nothing of the forces of nature, crossed this gorge above Gorizia and won Monte Cucco, or Kuk, on the eastern bank of the river. In a sustained offensive of twenty-five days they developed their lines along this bank so as to include the Vodice Ridge and south to the step

ably rendered hors de combat over 100,000.

Italian Army's Achievement

Such was the situation when, on the night of Aug. 18, they began a second and still more spectacular offensive, the end of which is not yet. So far they have gained sixty-five square miles of tefritory. The Austrian casualties are calculated to be 150,000, over 35,000 of whom are known to be prisoners. The enemy has also lost an immense amount of war material, principally abandoned in the vast intrenched camps on Bainsizza or captured under convoy in the Chiapovano Valley, and over 2,000 cattle on the hoof.

But these figures give an inadequate idea of the vastness of the Italian achievement, its military and moral results, and its potentialities for the future. At the present moment it looms up the most important and longest sustained assault upon the enemy in his own territory since the war began.

For convenience it may be well to remember that four distinct forces, independent, yet each the complement of the other, are taking part: The Third Army, under General Cappello, in the north, on the Bainsizza Plateau, Monte Santo, Monte San Gabriele, and the approaches to San Daniele; the Second Army, under the Duke of Aosta, operating south to the sea, in the Valleys of Vippacco and Brestovizza, on the Carso, and before Hermada; the British and Italian monitors, which have bombarded Hermada and the Austrian ships and arsenals at Trieste and Pola; finally, the great Caproni aerial machines, which both on the battle line and over Trieste and Pola have ably aided the work of the soldiers and warships.

For weeks prior to Aug. 18 the Italians at sundown every night had by a great engineering feat diverted the water of the Isonzo above Anhovo, and had built in the shallow stream thus left ten-foot bridges, which were concealed from view when the water resumed its natural course each morning. On the eve of the crossing they supplemented these with four pontoon bridges laid while their searchlights blinded the eyes of the Aus

trians on the opposite cliffs. These bridges extended from Anhovo up to Loga, a distance of four miles. That night the stream remained diverted and the army of Cappello crossed, while the Duke of Aosta performed a diversion on the Carso.

On the Bainsizza Plateau

Thus a foothold on the northern part of the Bainsizza was gained, while simultaneously the right wing of Cappello's army descended upon the plateau from Monte Cucco and the Vodice and began to envelop Monte Santo and deploy into the Val Chiapovano. The Austrian army on the Bainsizza, threatened from three sides, made a rapid retreat to the ridge, 1,000 feet high, which bounds the eastern edge of the plateau from its sheer drop into the Chiapovano.

Bainsizza Santo Spirito-" The Windy Bath of the Holy Ghost "is called a plateau merely because it forms an elevated foundation upon which rest isolated masses of rock, just like the Carso. It is fifteen miles north and south and ten east and west. The Austrians had turned it into a series of intrenched camps and had burrowed into the hills for machine-gun nests and mid-calibre emplacements. All the material there which fell to the Italians showed that the Austrians believed that their stay would be permanent, protected as they were on the front by the deep-gorged Isonzo and on the south by the mountains from Cucco to San Daniele.

On Aug. 24 the tricolor of Italy was flung to the breeze from the summit of Monte Santo. From this commanding height of 2,240 feet it was seen from Loga to the Hermada. On Sept. 1 Cappello had penetrated to a depth of seven and a half miles on a front of eleven over the Bainsizza, occupying all fortified positions and more than 40 villages and hamlets. On Sept. 14, after several repulses, the Italians established themselves upon Monte San Gabriele, which rises 1,700 feet above the Isonzo and dominates San Daniele by 300 feet.

Meanwhile the Duke of Aosta had been engaged in complementary manoeuvres

in the south and with the object of enveloping the Hermada and clearing the Vippacco Valley and the approaches to Castagnavizza, and, on the low land in the extreme south, the marshes between San Giovanni and Duino. On Sept. 5 he suffered severe counterattacks from Castagnavizza (Kostanjevica) on the lines Castagnavizza-Korite and KoriteCelle, but he captured Selo in the Brestovizza and the Duino railway tunnel. From Aug. 19 to 22 his "diversion" before Hermada was assisted by the Italian and British monitors, commanded by Admiral Thaon de Revel, which later bombarded the shipping and naval depots at Trieste and Pola. On Aug. 29 a squadron of forty Caproni dropped more than 7,000 kilograms of bombs in the fortified woods of Panovizza.

An Austrian War Council

All this time the Austrians were attempting to create distractions by making heavy attacks in the Trentino region and along the Carnic Alps. Failing here, a council of war was called at Laibach on Sept. 7, presided over by Field Marshal Conrad von Hoetzendorf and attended by the commander on the Bainsizza front, General Boroevic, and the commander of the Carso, Field Marshal Koevess. There it was determined to hold the eastern ridges of the Bainsizza and concentrate attacks against the Duke of Aosta. Turkish and German reinforcements had already arrived on the front. According to Austrian Staff reports, made known at Laibach, the Italians had been able to concentrate 5,000 guns on a three-mile front, against 1,000 of the Austrians. On another front, half as long, 599 had been counted. These had discharged 91,500 projectiles of all calibres in fourteen hours. It was found that the shells discharged from the Italian monitors, which are really floats of a design never before used in warfare, were greater in calibre than those ever before fired from a warship.

I will leave to the imagination all speculations in regard to what the envelopment of Tolmino, the occupation of

Klagenfurt or Laibach (Lubiana)—Laibach would, of course, isolate the entire Istrian peninsula, with Trieste, Pola, and Fiume-may mean, and to the supplies of guns and munitions from her allies which, it is authoritatively stated, would enable Italy to secure a decision against Austria.

San Gabriele doubtless dominates San Daniele, but beyond, on the way to Laibach, rises the great Ternova plateau to an altitude at Mount Goliak of 4,400 feet. Still, the possession of San Gabriele should eventually make possible the outflanking of the Austrian positions on this plateau by way of the Chiapovano Valley on the northern side, and by the Laibach road at its southern base. With this accomplished, and with the removal of the danger of flanking which threatens the Duke of Asota's army on the Carso, the great Hermada might be carried by assault or covered," and the road opened to Trieste. The rest is all speculation, which invites poetry but dismays existing strategy. Still, already

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by their bridging feats on the Isonzo the Italians have performed the impossible. They may do so again.

The Fall of Riga

The dispatches which came from Petrograd between Aug. 22 and Sept. 15 were so clothed in political digressions that little was really learned of the causes which led directly to the fall of Riga on Sept. 2, or the subsequent military manoeuvres in that region. It was taken for granted that the Germans had merely reached out their hand and grabbed the city from its mutinous garrison; that the Kaiser was inordinately pluming himself on a great military victory, which was really a political one of doubtful value; and that Petrograd might as well be surrendered in the same way and the Government withdrawn to Moscow.

This interpretation of the Petrograd dispatches is entirely wrong; the Germans fought hard for Riga, and won it by their superior artillery. This halfGerman city is of little military value as long as the Russian fleet remains in being. To be sure, three roads are laid open to the capital; but has Germany

the men to deploy over 300 miles, and at this time of year, with a Russian Winter approaching?

General P. A. Letchitzky, who, in the great Brusiloff offensive of 1916, had captured 115,000 Austrians from June 4 till June 12, was appointed to succeed General Klemlovsky in command of the northern armies on Aug. 15. It has not been revealed how he found the morale of officers and men on the Riga sector; but he has stated to the War Committee in Petrograd that the defenses west and south of the city-from the coast near Kemmern south up the Kurland River Aa and across the Tirul Marsh cut by the Mitau-Riga railway-were never bad, while the artillery southeast along the Dvina was outclassed in both calibre and number by the German guns recently brought up. At that time the Russians are believed to have been reduced on this

front, from Riga to Dvinsk, a matter of 160 miles, to barely 60,000. Klemlovsky's predecessor, the Russo-Bulgar General, Radko Demetricff, had under him last Spring between 800,000 and 1,000,000

men.

Facing the depleted Russian line last month were the German Mitau detachment of eleven divisions and the First Reserve Army Corps-260,000 men, as far as Friedrichstadt, forty-five miles southeast of Riga-and thence the Eighth Army with four infantry and three cavalry divisions as far as Dvinsk. The German headquarters was at Shavli, fifty miles south of Mitau.

Story of the Retreat

The story of what happened is soon told. On Aug. 22 the Germans began to advance from Kemmern, between the gulf and the Aa, drove in the Russian