Manawatu Herald TUESDAY, JULY 3, 1917. THE BALKANS CAMPAIGN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1733, 3 July 1917, Page 2

Manawatu Herald TUESDAY, JULY 3, 1917. THE BALKANS CAMPAIGN.

THE difficulties of the campaign in the Balkans were recently described by Air G. Ward Price. He explained that the official title “Salonika army” is misleading, for the army does not spend its time around Salonika, but is spread along a ninety miles front, partly mountains, partly plain, but the whole of it is treeless, unsheltered, very cold and wet in winter, very hot and unhealthy in summer. The. British Army has changed the face of Macedonia. It has made roads and railways and how many hundred miles of trenches it has constructed no one. can do more than guess. In France all the conveniences of transport are ready made behind the lines. Here everything has to be constructed from the beginning in the mother naked land. In„ tlie~“same day there are Bulgarian positions in front of us which are natural fortresses, with advantages of site far greater than thos’e of the enemy lines in France. Finally, our army in the Balkans can never get away from the tremendous handicap of being on the outside of the circle while the enemy is all on the inside. The enemy can load up a railway truck with shell in an Essen factory yard and unload that same truck at his railhead eight miles behind the. front we are now attacking. It would take a long paragraph to relate the unloading and transhippings of a consignment of shells to the front from Woolwich to a similar railhead on our side. In a similar way the enemy can bring a whole new division, here from Germany in sis days;