While there has been comparatively little news coming out of Greece for the past two weeks, it is known that during that time General Cavellerc, the latest appointed commander-in-chief to endeavour to retrieve fallen Italian fortunes in Albania, has been conducting a series of counter-attacks in the hope of stopping the Greek advance. That during those attacks he succeeded in holding the Greeks up is clear, but at an enormous cost, so great that the initiative, which for a while he succeeded in wresting from his opponents, has again passed into the hands òf the Greeks who beat off repeated Italian onslaughts, and are now reported to be again advancing. They are said to have reached iDukati Bay, the southern arm of the Gulf of Valona, and are now only about ten miles from the port of the same name. It is stated that they have captured the last fortified position barring the way to Valona, and if they succeed in capturing the town in the course of a few days no great amount.of surprise will be occasioned. There also appears to have been some slight progress made in the centre of the front, though the Italians there seem to have been able to offer a better resistance.
Upon the fall of Valona Italy will be left with two Albanian ports through which to fnmaintain communications with the Italian forces in the Balkans—Durazzo and San Giovanni di Medua. The latter is a very small place and nót adapted for handling heavy war material If the Greeks succeed in capturing Durazzo they will have struck a blow against the Italians in a port which has been ill-omened in Italian history. Epidamnus, as it was originally named was closely involved in the commencement of the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians. A century later it passed under the sway of the Romans, who disliking the name, as suggesting what damnation means in English, changed it to Dyrrachium, under which name it became the main point of debarkation of the Roman armies destined for the East. From it ran the great military road to Thessalonica. Here it was that Pompey esta-lished his headquarters after Cesar had crossed the Rubicon.
The ill-omened connection between Durazzo and the Italians is emphasized by the fact that Mussolini took his fatal decision at Florence to invade Greece on October 24, the anniversary of that unhappy date in 1917, when the Austro-German forces first broke through at Caporetto. Singularly enough he launched his ultimatum to Greece on another date of bad fortune;—October 28 at the very hour almost when the Second and Third Italian armies fled in confusion in 1917. Indeed in the story of the Italian invasion of Greece, ancient Greece lives again. If Epidamnus was the Sarajevo of the Peloponne sian war, Corcyra (Corfu) was its Belgium. The Italians in their early advance down the west coast of Epirus reached the Acheron,—the river of Woe in the dark realm of Hades. Had they gone much further south they would have come, just north of Preveza, to what remains of Nicopolis, the city of victory founded by Augustus to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and Antony, it Will be remembered was a Roman who dreamed Egyptian dreams, as Mussolini does from which these Ionian waters roused him to meet the death he did.
It is not suggested for one moment that the forces of ancient history are arrayed against the legions of Mussolini, but merely that the whole region in which he embarked upon his adventure holds painful memories for the old Romans and for the new Italians. But if they are painful to them they are encouraging to the Greeks who are fighting over the battlefields with which their origins are so closely connected, and upon which so much legendary bravery was shown. They may be safely entrusted with the task of seeing that in this age Durazzo shall eventually be but another pain in the Italian neck, They are going about the work in excellent shape, and, given the luck which their courage should command, should ulti-"mately inflict upon Mussolini that defeat for which he has so rashly asked.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.