Last month we left operations around the Gulf of Riga in a condition which seemed to foreshadow an attack by sea and land upon the Russian naval base at Reval and opposite, upon the coast of Finland, with a possible naval demonstration before Petrograd. The bulk of the Russian Baltic fleet of some twenty ships, having lost the battleship Slava and some small craft, was apparently locked up in that part of Moon Sound which lies between Dagö and Oesel Islands and the mainland by a strong German fleet of fifty, which, according to Russian reports, had lost six light units in combat and had been crippled to the extent of sixteen. On Oct. 21 the German expedition reached the mainland, effecting a landing at Werder and operating from Moon Island, which lies north of the sound. Meanwhile the Russian ships supposed to have been effectually trapped in the sound escaped.

The Kaiser, who had just returned to Berlin from his visit to his ally the Sultan at Constantinople, highly praised the Riga operation as proving the "preparedness of my navy," and there were criticisms of the British Admiralty in the London press for not having sent a fleet to engage the enemy in the Baltic-criticisms which were met by the reply that the channels leading from the Skagerrak to the Baltic were too dangerous to penetrate, particularly as their waters, commanded by Denmark and Sweden, might at any time be rendered unneutral by a German coup.

Henceforth, the operations in the Riga region and, indeed, throughout the entire eastern front became influenced by two widely different events: The desperate call of Austria for troops to defend her territory along the Julian Alps from the Italians and the attempted coup d'etat of the Bolsheviki against the Provisional Government as represented by Kerensky at Petrograd, which began on Nov. 6. The first of these events, which is essentially

military, caused a shortening of the Teuton lines by consolidation in the rear to the east of the City of Riga by a withdrawal toward the Skuli-Lemberg line in the south, and by a postponement of the development of the expedition against the mainland east of the Gulf of Riga. The consequences elsewhere, on the Austro-Italian front, have already been treated of. The second of the events is largely political, although fraught with the ebb and flow of civil war, and with it this review has no particular concern, except to say that so paralyzed had become the Russian forces at the front that the withdrawal of forty-seven Teuton divisions hence offered no particular inspiration to renew hostilities.

The Holy City Invested

As these pages are going to press, one of the most romantic campaigns of the war is being developed upon the plains of Palestine. The Holy City is invested from three sides, and, although it may be days, even weeks, before the particulars of the campaign come to hand-the meagre bulletins of the British War Office have made known bare facts-famous Biblical sites have fallen before the advance of the British-Egyptian army and the Turks have lost over 20,000 men, nearly half of whom have been registered as prisoners.

In my last review, with the aid of a map of Asiatic Turkey, the season's opening activities of the Anglo-Indian army in Mesopotamia were recorded and their strategic relationship was shown with the Russian Caucasus army in the north and with the British-Egyptian army away in the west, in Palestine, and some emphasis was laid on the Turkish army concentrated at Aleppo, the junction of the Bagdad and Damascus-Medina railways, under the command of the German Field Marshal Mackensen, erroneously announced in the cable dispatches to be leading the Austro-German forces in Italy.

The Aleppo army has not yet come upon the scene but, save for the fact that the Anglo-Indian Army on Nov. 6 occupied Tekrit, on the Tigris, ninetyseven miles northwest of Bagdad-the

Turks retiring from thirty to fifty miles north in the direction of Mosul-the army in Palestine has consistently claimed the attention of the month. For, not only has the British-Egyptian army operating there under the direction of General Allenby captured or destroyed over 20,000 Turks and won a formidable strategic point on the Abushusheh Ridge commanding Jerusalem from the northwest, but almost every step of the invading armies has revived Old Testament memories.

The Changed Situation

Moreover, Allenby's victories have served to allay the fear that had been augmenting since last Spring, and guardedly referred to in a former review, that possibly all was not well with the army in Palestine. A moment may now be taken to explain the causes of this fear:

On March 29 the British War Office announced that on the 26th and 27th inst. heavy losses had been inflicted on the Turks, who had lost 900 prisoners, a

And so the situation stood, with uncomfortable rumors about Mackensen's activities at Aleppo, until the good news of this month.

On Oct. 31, after a night's march, Allenby's army made a sudden attack upon Beersheba, and before the sunset had occupied the city, taking 1,800 prisoners. Thus did the British-Egyptian army enter the "Promised Land "-extending from Beersheba, forty miles southwest of Jerusalem, to Dan, about 100 miles north of the Holy City-" from Dan to Beersheba."

The next to fall was Gaza, three miles

from the sea, on the 6th. Gaza was the city whose gates Samson is said to have carried away, (Judges XVI., 3.) It has an Assyrian, Median, and Egyptian history as well as a Jewish. The Crusaders found it a heap of ruins in the twelfth century, but in 1799 Napoleon found it sufficiently restored to merit invest

ment.

Victorious March to Jaffa

Following the fall of Gaza with 1,900 casualties to the Turks a series of minor engagements took place the mounted troops cleared the way through Jemameh and Huj, French and British warships cannonaded the Turkish lines of communication near the coast, and aircraft bombed their bases. By Nov. 9 the whole Turkish Army was moving rapidly northward, leaving the coastal railhead at Beit Hanun in Allenby's hands.

Four hundred prisoners and ten guns had been picked up on his victorious way to Askalon on the coast and he estimated the enemy's casualties to date at 10,000, exclusive of prisoners.

By Nov. 15 the junction point of the Beersheba-Damascus railway was taken from the Turks with the loss of 1,500 prisoners and several pieces of artillery. Continuing his drive, Allenby then pushed on from the Surar (Brook Kedron) northward to the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, and then swept eastward along the railroad to its junction with the Beersheba-Damascus line, only twelve miles from the Holy City.

By the 15th the British-Egyptian army had reached a line from Er Ramleh and Ludd to a point three miles south of Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem. The next day they seized the Abushusheh Ridge, five miles southeast of Ramleh. Here 431 Turks were killed and 360 surrendered. Ramleh is on the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, twenty-two miles northwest of the Holy City. On the 16th the British War Office reported that the number of prisoners

verified since Oct. 31 exceeded 9,000. On Nov. 17 Jaffa was occupied by Australian and New Zealand mounted troops without opposition.

Americans at the Front

On Oct. 27 it was officially announced that the American troops in France had begun to finish their intensive training in the trenches "of a quiet sector on the French front." Less than a week later, just as the Germans were completing their retreat across the Ailette, they announced the capture of some American patrols on the front of the Marne Canal, which connects the Rhine with the Marne via Toul and Nancy. Since then a number of raiding parties have had their adventures in No Man's Land on this front; casualties have been received and inflicted under French tuition. There have been artillery duels, and Americans have been killed by German shells.

Following the loss by torpedoing of an American destroyer on Oct. 16 and the transport Antilles on the 17th, homeward bound, came the news of the sinking on Nov. 5 by the same means of the converted yacht Alcedo. In the first case one man was lost; in the second, seventy men were reported missing; in the third, twenty.

Other events of more or less military importance have been the destruction of four Zeppelins in France as they were returning from a raid on England, on the night of Oct. 19-20; the destruction of nine neutral vessels and two British destroyers by a couple of German cruisers, between the Shetland Islands and the coast of Norway, on Oct. 17; the bombardment of the outlying depots of Metz within a radius of twenty-five miles of the fortress, on Oct. 29; the destruction of a German cruiser and ten patrol ships by British destroyers in the Cattegat, on Nov. 2, and a clash between British and German light squadrons off Heligoland, the results of which, on Nov. 18, had not been officially reported.

T

HE world was startled in the closing days of October, 1917, by the news that Austro-German armies had burst through the Italian front in the Julian Alps and along the Isonzo and were sweeping southwestward into the Venetian Plain. The retreating Italians fought heroically, trying to stop the enemy flood in each successive valley as they fell back, but in vain, until they finally checked the invaders at the Piave River. At the present writing-Nov. 19-the precarious Piave line still holds, but the Austro-Germans are almost within firing distance of Venice.

The story of this Italian disaster, with the loss of more than 250,000 prisoners and 2,300 guns in the first week, will require time to fill in some of its tragic details, including those of its causes. The outstanding fact is that on Oct. 24 a sudden attack by German and Austrian infantry in the Julian Alps resulted in their capturing the Italian positions near Plezzo and Tolmino and in the northern portion of the Bainsizza Plateau. The Plezzo-Tolmino sector was held by the Italian Second Army, under General Capello, and at least one unit of that army failed to resist-threw away its arms and fled, or surrendered without fighting. At this point the enemy burst through, threatening the rear of the Third Army, on the south, and forcing the hasty retirement of the whole Italian force along the seventy miles of hard-won front from the Carnic Alps to the sea.

The Italian War Office in its bulletin next day charged certain units of its own troops with "cowardice," and, though the word was afterward modified, General Cadorna summed up the cause of the initial break in this terse sentence: "The violence of the enemy's attack and inadequate resistance broke our left wing on the Julian front." The "inadequate resistance" has been explained as follows:

Opposite the Second Italian Army the Austrians had placed regiments composed largely of Socialists, and these utilized the war-weariness of opponents similarly infected to convince the latter that an end of the fighting would come if the soldiers on both sides should refuse to kill each other any longer. Fraternization followed, and an exchange of promises to do no more shooting. Then the demoralized and demoralizing — Austrian division was withdrawn, and in its place were put German shock troops. These it was that almost unopposed smashed through the Italian line and began the flanking movement of which the results have been so disastrous to Italy."

Story of the Retreat

Glimpses of the great retreat of the next two weeks are afforded by the eyewitness narratives of several press correspondents caught in the swirl of its movements. It was an orderly retreat, often masterly in its strategy and always illumined by the heroism of the men who fought the rearguard actions, sacrificing themselves in order to delay the enemy and give their own armies time to withdraw. Perceval Gibbon, who was at Udine, the Italian headquarters, when it was evacuated, wrote on Nov. 1:

"It was on Oct. 27 that the news arrived that a retirement had been decided upon. I had telegraphed the previous day regarding the events which culminated in the enemy's occupation of Caporetto, a little village on the upper Isonzo, where a great series of dams had been constructed by which, if need were, Cadorna could have drained the Isonzo dry by nightfall. On Friday his columns were driving northwest against Monte Stol and southwest along the Natison Valley and toward Tarcento. Further east and south, along the Isonzo Valley, Italian troops were fighting desperately. Guns which had been lost were being re

taken by hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet among batteries, and on Monte Nero the heroic Alpini, isolated from the rest of the army and hard pressed by the Germans, were holding out victoriously, sending messages by carrier pigeon announcing that they would continue to maintain their positions to the death.

"On Saturday night I spoke to the Major commanding one of those superb battalions. He had been wounded and had been rushed out on an ambulance under fire just before the roads were cut. He was desperate for nothing but an opportunity to get back to his battalion, but a breach in the line toward Caporetto made his heroism vain. The Germans were already actually in the rear of certain sectors, and by Saturday night the retreat had been begun.

Poison Shells Harass the Retreat "The withdrawal from the front line was a manoeuvre of infinite difficulty, which a touch of panic would have converted into the ruin of the army. The enemy maintained his terrific fire upon the Italian communications, so that the troops withdrew into the tornado of shells of every kind that makes a hell of war. Gas shells loosed vapors that haunted the roads invisibly; acid shells set the men suddenly gasping and strangling; tear-producing shells half blinded them. Nothing could have brought them help but the dozen rearguard actions roaring and flaming at their heels and superb and long-confirmed discipline.

"While they withdrew, a force of those splendid desperadoes who volunteer for rearguard fighting smashed its way up to Liga and delivered attacks which cleared the army's feet on that sector.

"Further south the Duke of Aosta's Third Army was giving proof of fine soldiership. It answered the ponderous enemy attack upon Selo on the Carso by a counterattack which actually carried its line forward to Stari Lokva and which under any other circumstances would have given it a permanent gain of ground; but its business now was to withdraw its retirement under unceasing pressure over the terrible ground of the Carso, made more terrible by the

thrashed

down

blinding rain which throughout Saturday. With the Isonzo to cross and the infinitely delicate and perilous operation of the rearguard action to carry out, it was a feat which no defeated army could have attempted. It was one of the great achievements of the war. The British artillerymen, who bore a part in the action, saved all their guns.

Udine Is Left Empty

"During Saturday the civilians of the threatened districts of Udine and its adjoining villages began their flight westward. The little City of Udine poured itself along the great level highway which runs westward toward the cities of the plain, and by Sunday morning the poor little town with its shuttered shops and vacant streets, wherein one's footfall echoed forlornly through the deep arcades which shade its sidewalks, had taken on the air of a cemetery.

"I walked to each of the city gates in turn. There were forgotten dogs sitting at the locked doors of abandoned houses, whining feebly. A terrified cat inside a window grating cowered and shivered in the station whence the last train had departed. A little group of walking wounded who had arrived too late were sitting on the platform waiting for some one to counsel them. Near the Aquileia Gate a row of great warehouses and factories belonging to the Department of Munitions had been set on fire and was burning with tremendous clear, red flames, which waved hundreds of feet high in the wet and rainy air.

"Toward noon it was evidently time to leave. I think I was the last civilian to go. I took a last look around from the summit of Castle Hill. Rain squalls inhabited the wide landscape like a population. Roads seemed to crawl and writhe with their dense westward traffic, and from Cividale, where the army had set fire to military depots, there arose great spires of flame and smoke. In Udine no chimney smoked. The little Palazzo, the most dreamily beautiful thing in Northern Italy, showed no flag; only under its columned loggia the frescoes of Pordenone glowed in their immortal colors.