19 OCTOBER 1918, Page 2

Between our right flank at Le Cateau and the Argonne,

the French armies by brilliant manceuvring and hard fighting have effected a great ohange in the war map. The- persistent attacks of General Mangin, with the help of an Italian corps, on the heights of the Aisne west of Reims, and the vigorous offensive of General Gouraud in Eastern Champagne, led on Friday week and Saturday last to a general retreat of the enemy on this whole front from La Fore on the Oise to Vouziers on the Upper Aisne, thus evacuating the St. Gobain hills and the Chemin des Dames, the plain of Laon, and all the plateau between the Suippe and the Aisne. General Gouraud's Fourth Army alone in the battle of seventeen days in Champagne captured 21,667 prisoners and over six hundred guns, so that the total losses of the enemy in the stiff fighting on this wide southern flank must have been very great. The enemy, as we write on Thursday, still clings to the angle bounded by the Oise and-the Sens Rivers east of La Fere, and to the north bank of the Aim above Bethel, but this broken line is untenable for long.