LAND 6r WATER 
September 26, 1918 
mountains from 5,000 to 6,000 feet high. Along the southern 
slope of it, long prepared defensive positions, constructed 
under the .eye of German and Austrian engineers, and very 
strong, were stretched out. They have been carried by the 
French and Serbians. The whole mountain range has been 
taken, and down the valley of the Cerna beyond the advance 
has reached the Yardar, and has cut the road and railway 
supplying the Bulgarian left. At the same time the light 
railway constructed during the war, which runs to Prilep from 
the Vardar line, has been cut and all the Bulgarian front, 
right as well as left, put in peril. 
The number of prisoners taken is puzzlingly small — about 
10,000 — in the breach of a line over 25 miles, and an advance 
northward of some 50 miles. The number of guns taken 
is also small, especially of heavy guns. What that means 
is that the position, on account of its very strength, was hghtly 
held, and we might expect a counter-attack upon the flank 
of the great pocket which the French and Serbians have 
formed. Yet that counter-attack has not taken place. One 
reason why it did not take place was that the British and 
the Greeks attacked just at the moment when concentration 
might have gone westward against the pocket. They 
attacked in the region of Lake Doiran, and pinned the Bul- 
garians there. But another reason is, and perhaps the most 
important, that the Bulgarian line consists of men the nation 
behind which is now hesitating upon the war. That affects 
supply, and it affects moral. 
If we were merely to consider the map, the great French 
and Serbian advance down the Cerna Valley is almost para- 
do-xical. It has in front of it mountain ridge after mountain 
ridge, country in which nothing decisive can be done ; the 
type of country wherein even guerilla resistance has delayed 
overwhelming forces in the past for months — and the Allies 
have not overwhelming forces compared with the Bulgarians. 
The advance has been made from a comparatively narrow 
breach, and has been pursued into an astonishingly deep 
salient. It has. it is tnie, cut the main communications of 
the Bulgarian ist and 2nd armies, but it cannot in such 
country roll up the Bulgarian line as a whole. That it has 
been possible must be due to the condition to which the 
Bulgarian State is reduced in the present phase of the war. 
The total number of Bulgarian divisions upon the whole 
line is, according to French accounts, 16 ; we may presume 
that the number holding the thirty-odd miles of the mountain 
front which has been broken was not more than four at the 
most, and probably only -three. But even so, the small 
number of prisoners taken is surprising, and still more difficult 
to understand is the absence of reserve troops behind. 
Of further details we have none. We do not yet know, 
save from very brief enemy accounts, what happened to the 
engagement near Lake Doiran, nor whether Italian action 
in the West is developing coincidently with this big drive 
in the centre, nor even where the troops are that were said 
to be feeling towards Prilep. But one big result is quite 
clear : the Franco-Serbian force is now right in between the 
ist and 2nd Bulgarian armies, and the immediate military 
interest of the future is whether these separated bodies, 
rapidly falling back northward, will be able to effect a 
junction or not; 
THE OPERATIONS IN PALESTINE 
The operations in Palestine have been of the greatest 
simplicity, and have had what nearly always goes witli 
simplicity in a military design — complete success. 
So far as one can judge from the accounts which have 
reached us, the situation was this : 
The immediate Turkish, line in front of the British lay due 
east and west. Four divisions, perhaps beyond Jordan-, 
having for their communications a road which nms north 
parallel with that river and the railway which joins Damascus 
to the Holy Places far away to the south. It should be 
Above 200me£res 
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