With the French Armies in the Field, May 16.
Five armies on the Western Front got their first baptism of real fire yesterday as the Allies continued to pour troops into the Lowlands and the German General Staff deployed its advance guard to shield the concentration of its main army.
But the real battle in Flanders has not yet begun, and it may be another week before heavy artillery can be brought up to begin the systematic hammering of the Dutch and Belgian fortresses in an effort to blast a passage for the stalled blitzkrieg vehicles of Germany.
For the next few days war communique will read like those issued early in August, 1914, because the setting is the same—the same flat fields where the Armies have been meeting for centuries—and the methods are the same. Except for the modern touch, the use of German parachute troops to try to paralyze the Dutch and Belgian armies from the rear, the war is unchanged. The same forts are playing the same roles they did more than a quarter of a century ago. But this time the Allies have been given an advantage by the swift arrival of reinforcements to bolster the small Dutch and Belgian armies attempting to hold the German orces near their own frontiers.
I stood for hours and watched the Allied armies roll across Holland and Belgium to go into action. It was an Operation carried out with all the precision of a modern machine, Army division commanders had only to open sealeti orders and do what they read there. "The result was almost automatic.—United Press.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.