Senator F. M. Simmons
SCENE OF THE NEW AUSTRIAN OFFENSIVE
It is thus of most vital influence upon the operations going on along the Piave that the British on the Asiago Plateau, on June 15, and the French on Monte Grappa, the next day, and the Italians elsewhere even covering a diversion at the Tonale Pass, should have hurled back with severe losses the initial assaults of the enemy in the mountain regions. On June 18 the Austrians claimed to have taken 30,000 prisoners and 120 guns since the 15th; the Italians and their allies claimed 2,500 prisoners.
That the Greeks are certainly in the war was revealed on May 31, when the news was published that they had, with the aid of French artillery, captured some 1,500 Bulgar-German troops on the Struma front in Macedonia. Meanwhile, however, General Guillaumat, who succeeded General Sarrail as commander of the allied armies there in December, has returned to France to take charge of the defenses of Paris.
Advices from Constantinople, via Moscow and London, indicate that the Turks, having reached an agreement with the Caucasus peoples, are assembling troops across the Armenian-Persian frontier, so as to block the advance of General Marshall with the Anglo-Indian forces up the Tigris. The left wing of the Turks, on June 14, reached Tabriz and Lake Urumiah, in Persia, 200 miles northeast of Mosul on the Tigris. Marshall is 60 miles south of that place.