From West to East.

Fierce Resistance to Russian Advance.

Progress of Our Eastern Allies.

Desperate Fighting in the West.

NEWS from all fronts show that ceaseless fighting is going on, yet with no great result recorded.

The anxiety of the German High Command is increasing, but there is no weakening in its determination. So far from that there is the will and, to a large extent, the ability to make the task of the Entente Powers more and more difficult.

Although apprehensions respecting the Russian progress is Galicia is marked, yet the enemy feels safe in hurrying reinforcements thither from other parts of the theatre of war, even from the Somme and the Aisne.

Von Hindenburg’s hand is to be seen in this – in accumulating evidence that, be the cost what it may, the danger of Lemburg again falling to the Russians must, if possible, be averted.

There is exceedingly heavy fighting in the Halicz region, where Russian troops are now only a few hundreds yards from the railway station on the north of the river, the town itself being on the south.

The railway is of great strategic importance in the movement towards Lemberg, and in the efforts to preserve it a large contingent of Turkish troops are employed. These men, it is said, fight with intense fierceness, having been told by their German masters that if captured by the Russians they will be massacred.

Yet, in spite of the stout resistance offered by them, the German troops, we are told, show marked depreciation in general morale as compared with those employed in the same region a year ago, even the much-vaunted Prussian Guard being affected by the canker of decay.

Discussing the operations here, The Times correspondent remarks that with the immense efforts of the Germans to hold this front and to make sweeping movements by the Russians become increasingly difficult, the campaign promises to become similar to that in the West, where the enemy’s lines must be slowly digested mile after mile.

It is to be sincerely hoped that rapidity on the part of the Russian and Roumanian Armies will avert this danger, for if the designs of the enemy’s High Command are as suggested and they prove successful, the war will be indefinitely protracted.

For, however confident we may feel as to the ultimate triumph of our cause, it would be worse than folly to assume that our enemy’s vital forces are being rapidly dissipated. Such is not the case; at best the struggle must be severe and long.

Having no doubt as to the result of the war, Mr Winston Churchill in an article in the London magazine remarks that favourable facts mentioned by him “do not in any way indicate a speedy conclusion of the struggle. The distances to be traversed on the Eastern front are very great.

“The German is fighting with the same stubborn efficiency as ever. The astonishing apparatus of his military power is in no respect broken, or even weakened. His formations are undiminished, his ranks are refilled, his front is still held with the utmost firmness at all points.”