Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 71, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1918 — WAR SUMMARY. [ARTICLE]

WAR SUMMARY.

The day after the day on which Hindenburg had boasted his army would be in Paris finds the great German wedge in Picardy encased on both sides by walls of granite and its spearhead badly battered on one side while desperately “craning” forward on the other, taking fearful punishment, and evidently preparing to make a new smash at Arras to gain room. The Prussian eagle’s wings are as if tied fast, unable even, to make the slightest fluttering move. They .are in great danger of being momentarily clipped.' Meanwhile the “beak” is desperately hacking away—toward Amiens. The twelfth day of the battle brought the Germans only insignificant gains in this “hacking” movement, but netted them a bloody harvest of losses. With the fatalistic persistency of a losing gambler Hindenburg is hurling man after man into the center on the front between Montdidier and Marcelcave, which has the ominously significant length of some thirteen miles. He pursues, despite the indescribable blood bath in which thousands upon thousands of his best fighting men have suffocated during the ten days of the win-or-lose tussle, the same aims which he set out, but failed to, gain, in violent sweep—-separation of the French and British armies. Paralyzed on both sides, forced to dig on the south, where he had intended to roll up the allied wings, he still hopes to penetrate further and further in the center, reach Amiens, cut the Paris-Calais rail and automatically release his flanks from the grip in which they are now held. In the marshy angle between the Avre river and the Lucebrook he is throwing new divisions into combat as a last desperate chance.