SWEEPING FOR MINES

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2397, 1 March 1915, Page 5

SWEEPING FOR MINES

The war news to-day is featured by thrilling events. The great Russian counter-stroke on the East Prussian line of operations has been delivered with shattering effect ait Przasnysz (about 50 miles north-west of Warsaw), and the enemy.is retiring along the whole front, abandoning war material and commissariat, stores in his haste. On the Niemen front, r-which swings on the Przasnysz flank as the Przasnysz front swings on tlie Plock flank, the Russians have also made excellent progress. - There is no naws of operations in Central Poland or from Gtalioia, where the fog of war seems to have been cast. In the Western theatre the Allies are making sound progress, and the French artillery is said to be developing extra- ' ordinary activity, on certain portions of the battle-front. The official and unofficial accounts of the opening np of the Dardanelles by the Franco-British fleet makes thrilling reading, for even the comparative brevity of the messages cannot dim the brilliance of the terrific battle which raged between the forts and the ships, a batt'e which culminated in the pulverising of the guardian forts, and the clearing cf four miles of mine-strewn waters in the Strait itself. Meanwhile the Germans aie busily fortifying the approaches to the Eosphorus, and the Turks are sadly dejected. Pro-war and. anti-war riots have oc- . , • curred in Italy, ?.nd the for both points of view have been ordered to refrain from further demonstrations. There is less news than has been usual of the operations of the piratical blockaders in British ooastal waters. A Swedish steamer has limped into 'a Dutch port seriously damaged, either by a submarine or a mine, while a French destroyer on convoy duty in the Adriatic has been mined off • Antivari (Montenegrin waters), and'sunk. The blockade negotiations' between Germany and America are said, in Berlin, to have reached the stage when an open rupture may at any time be precipitated by an. act of indiscretion on the part of one of the German submarine commanders. _