The recent decision of the Finnish Government still further to evacuate the inhabitants of Viipuri (Viborg), even after all but about 7,000 of its 80,000 inhabitants had left the city, is obviously justified by the manner in which the Russians are seeking to reduce it to the condition to which the German air arm reduced Warsaw. Bombing and shelling of the empty town has been going on for some days past, and a flourishing city is in danger of becoming no more than a mass of ruins. It is reported that, up to a late hour on Tuesday, only two civilians had been killed as a result of this bombardment, showing that the Russian intention to slaughter the civilian population has been completely thwarted. Meanwhile the Russians are maintaining their onslaughts on the Mannerheim Line along a 60-mile front in the Karelian Isthmus, subjecting the fortification to an intensive bombardment in the hope of being able to break through. There is every indication that, now other theatres of war have been reduced to a state of inactivity because of the cold, the Russians are striving their utmost to make progress towards Viipuri and Helsinki, and are concentrating all their efforts to that end. The casualties which are being inflicted upon them suggest that the Soviet troops are resorting to the old-fashioned mass attacks, which are rarely successful nowadays against well placed machine-gun nests, and the fact that these latter have not been wiped out suggests that Soviet artillery preparation is not so efficient as it should be, or that it is unable to smash a sufficiently wide opening in the system of defences which go to make up the Mannerheim Line. Indeed they are faced with precisely the same task as either the Allies or the Germans would be in trying to force the Western Wall or the Maginot Line, and there is every reason to expect that, before the Mannerheim Line can be successfully breached, the Russians will have paid an enormous toll in casualties. The only question which arises is whether the Finns will have enough material to keep up the defence sufficiently long to wear down Russian patience, but if the nations which sympathize with Finland go to their assistance before the spring that point should be settled satisfactorily to the brave little people who are putting up so magnificent a show.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.