The week's fighting in France has resulted in a rapid
Allied advance in the centre in pursuit of the retreating enemy and a slower advance on the right and the left—in the Meuse Valley and
in Flanders—against very strong enemy forces which are fighting hard not for victory but for time to effect -a retirement in good order. The battle of Cambrai and St. Quentin and our advance to Le Cateau, combined with= the steady progress of the French in Champagne, had left the St. Gobain. hills as the head of a narrow enemy salient between the Oise and the Aisne. On Saturday last the enemy abandoned his fortresses round St. Gobain and the Laon Plain behind them and fell back to the Serra. The French troops entered Laon last Sunday. Strange to relate, the old cathe- dral city had not been burnt, and many of the istigbittents after four years of captivity remained to welcome General Mangin. The fall of Leon is a fresh, triumph for Marshal Fooh's strategy. The enemy has thus lost the hinge of the line which he had held since September, 1914, and his retreat to the Meuse is inevitable.
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