PROGRESS OF THE WAR.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2415, 22 March 1915, Page 4

PROGRESS OF THE WAR.

Hard on the heels of the official warning that the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles had now reached a critical stage comes the news that three of the attacking battleships have been sunk. Such a loss cannot be dismissed lightly, hut at the same time the full and informative accounts supplied show that the loss, though hea-vy in itself, was iu no sense a disaster, but rather incidental to the prosecution of a smashing attack which has few parallels in the history of warfare. Although the British battleships Irresistible and Ocean and the French Bouvet have gone to the bottom it has yet to be shown that the buoyant hope expressed by the British Admiral of getting through by Easter, jjjoes ahead of reasonable probabilities. It has been recognised from the outset that ships pitted against strong forts are engaged in desperately dangerous service, and as a matter of deliberate policy the most dangerous work of all has been allotted to ships still efficient, but no longer fit to cope with the Dreadnoughts and super-Dreadnoughts which make up the strength of modern fleets. In the event three ships have been lost which before many years had passed would have found their way to the scrap-heap. Tbo loss of life is a much more serious matter than the loss of ships of this class. Few' men,_ happily, were lost in the British ships, the crews being rescued under the firo of the forts, but of the Bouvefc's complement of over 600 men only 64 were saved.

Heading the impressive accounts given of the terrific contest between ships and forts, it seems wonderful, not that some ships were lost, but that the Allied Fleet was able to accomplish so touch. Previous hard fighting had given the Allies a hold upon aliout a dozen miles of the Dardanelles inward from the Mediterranean entrance. Beyond this point the strait (at most parts of its length about three miles wide) narrows for several miles to a breadth of about a mile. It was against the strong forts and batteries guarding these narrows that the recent bombardment was direoted. _ The principal forts are Kilid Bah'r, on the European side, and Chanak, on the opposite side of the strait. These are the greatest .of all the strongholds guarding the Dardanelles, and when they have been definitely put out of action the Allied Fleet will have performed the heaviest portion of its task. Exact details of the damage done to the forts have yet to be supplied, but it seems to 'have been very great. 'The reports make it clear that in actual gun-fire the ships had all the best of it. The great super-Dreadnought Queen Elizabeth was a dominating in the combat, and the shore* artillery was evidently incapable of any effective reply to her 15-inch guns. Some of the other ships were severely battered, and one or two have been put temporarily out of action, but no ship was sunk by tho fire of the forts." The Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvct were all sunk by drifting mines. On tho other hand, the naval guns seem to have wrought tremendous havoc both upon the forts and on the subsidiary batteries with which the Turks supplemented their standing defences.

As if in anticipation of the losses which have been suffered, arrangements had already been made by the British Admiralty to reinforce the bombarding fleet with two. battleships, the Queen and Implacable, practically similar in date and type to the ships which have been sunk. Each carry four 12-inch guns and a secondary armament of twelve. 6inch guns. In the work of bombarding forts at the close range necessitated in the Dardanelles, a powerful secondary armament is of very great importance, since the guns of moderate size which it includes are capable of much more continued and rapid fire than the heavy ordnance upon which the most modern ships ■chiefly rely. The French are also reinforcing their section of the fleet, and as a whole it should soon be in better trim than ever to proceed with the enterprise of forcing the strait. * « * * While the subjection of the Dardanelles forts is proceeding apace it is reported that a- demonstration by the Russian Black Sea Fleet against the Bosphorus has caused renewed panic in Constantinople. No doubt these developments go far to explain the continued inactivity of tho Ottoman Army which has failed to develop the project of invading Egypt. The outposts of this force are said now to be four days' march 'distant from the Suez Canal —but this statement should not be taken as forecasting an early attack on the Canal. Tho Turks may attempt to create a diversion in this direction as a counter-move to the landing of Allied troops at the Dardanelles, but it looks as though the Sultan's German-led troops will be fully occupied nearer home.

Although the Russians seem to be again making their weight felt in East Prussia the actual position in that quarter is not very clearly indicated. According to an Amsterdam message there is tiie authority of an official communication from Berlin for the statement that the Russians have entered Memel, a Baltic port in the extreme north of East Prussia, and the news is confirmed by an official message from Petrograd. Petrograd reports also describe the Russians as having entered East Prussia on its northern border, about 60 miles south-east of Memel. Fighting continues near the Russian fortress of Osowiec, which stands in Poland twenty miles away from the south-eastern corner of East Prussia, and at other points the Germans have sustained minor defeats and are retreating towards their own territory.

Though the details available ate somewhat meagre, there seems to be no cloubt that the Russians are again assuming the initiative at the northern end of their line, opposite East Prussia, and that the Germans are feeling the pressure severely. The latest German statements sound a note of angry complaint. A declaration by the President of the East Prussian Diet that the Russians swept that territory bare of horseflesh and so paralysed agricultural industry, no doubt relates to tho invasion which was repelled by a German offensive some weeks ago, but accusations that tbc Russians have burned German villages presumably relate to riiore recent events. Such accusations come oddly from the nation which has surpassed all others in trampling on the rules of civilised warfare, and arc more than sufficiently met meantime by tho particulai'ii'suppiied by Ibe Russians ol tho havoc wroujiht by. their

enemies iu Poland. In that unhappy territory, it is stated, the Germans have burnt and devastated 95 towns and 4500 hamlets. A thousand of the latter were burned to the ground. In face of such a record the Germans have little cause for legitimate complaint even if reprisals in kind are inflicted.

While they are again taking the upper hand in North Pola.nd and East Prussia the Russians seem to have an equally comfortable grasp upon the position at the other extremity of their seven-hundred-mile line. At Czernowitz, in Bukowina (at the south-eastern extremity of Galicia), and elsewhere along the Carpathians, they have beaten off attacks and made some headway.

Accounts which come by way of New York of the preparations the Allies are making for a big advance in the West cannot be accepted as if invested with official sanction, but there is no reason to doubt that the broad facts of the position are correctly stated. It is probably quite true that the transportation of the new British Army of a million men has been in progress for a couple of months past, and that France nas a million fresh troops roady to take the field. These are developments which follow naturally and of necessity upon Germany's successive failures to strike a crippling blow in West and East or to institute a blockade of the narrow seas by means of her submarines. Foiling these attempts the Allies have earned full freedom to develop their plans and marshal their resources for the great effort about to be made and it would be ridiculous to suppose that they have not utilised these opportunities to the utmost.

Few developments are reported to-day in the Western theatre and such details as are given mainly describe the Allies as* firmly holding the positions they recently gained at Neuve Chapelle and elsewhere. An official message conveys an assurance from Sir John French that the original fighting qualities of the British troops have been in no way impaired by the long continued strain of the siege warfare in the trcnches.