The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1917. THE FIGHT IN FLANDERS.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 21 August 1917, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1917. THE FIGHT IN FLANDERS.

(With which is incorporated The Tainape Post and Waimarino News).

There is a battle raging in Flanders to-day that is being fought with an immense accumulation of power by the Allies and all the force that Germany can pit against it. The Allies are making gains, but they have by no means accomplished that which was a part of their objective. On one flank and in the centre of the line they have achieved all and more, but the resistance met with on their right is not yet overcome. The recklessness with which the German Command is sending its best battalions to destruction indicates that the positions in dispute are regarded as of extreme vital importance to German stay in that and surrounding neighbourhood. It is little short of miraculous that any troops should with any degree of victory attack the greatest force that the Central Powers can place against them. While the Germans were in their selected positions the British had to advance to the conflict oyer : ground that is described as "hideous." A term of this kind is all our language can / do in telling us how bad the condition of the country is. Our men had to pass, wade and flounder, through an area of shell holes, from three to ten feet deep, half filled with water and mud, many of them with water deep enough to drown in. It is amazing that our men should be able to fight at all. They knew they had to win; to accomplish their purpose; drive the Germans back J for to have to go back over the country they were crossing to the fight would mean annihilation. They more than performed the work set them on most of the front, and where they failed to gain all they expected to get they took possession of that which is just short of the whole. The Germans tried to recover the positions lost and they poured in counter-attacks after counter, losing men in thousands and making their ground before the coveted positions a veritable shambles. There is a perplexing aspect to the battle now raging, in that it seems to have no limits to the neighbour-

hood in which it is being most desperately fought. The real objective, the immediate purpose is to bring about the fall of Lens, but while this bloody encounter is going on the heaviest of heavy artillery preparations are being pursued by the British and French northward |right to the sea. The famous correspondent, Phillip Gibbs, told us that so many battle Knas were engaged tjhat the outcome was still in doubt. He did not mean that there was any doubt about ■the Allies being successful, but he referred rather to the degree of success, whether the full objective would everywhere be attained. Now we realise what was meant by so many battle lines, for while one artillery preparation has finished and infantry tanks and machine gunners are at their bloody work in one sector, artillery preparations are progressing further along the line, right on to the very sea on the Belgian coast. Soon this whole line will be engaged much as that position is in the Ypres-Lens sector. This sets us all wondering how the amount of success favouring our arms is going to affect Germany's hold on Belgium, \ " But this battle while Taging with unprecedented courage and desperation in one place is only developing in others, therefore we must wait for the result*.