[Illustration: SCENE OF THE NEW AUSTRIAN OFFENSIVE]
It is thus of most vital influence upon the operations going on along
the Piave that the British on the Asiago Plateau, on June 15, and
the French on Monte Grappa, the next day, and the Italians elsewhere
even covering a diversion at the Tonale Pass, should have hurled back
with severe losses the initial assaults of the enemy in the mountain
regions. On June 18 the Austrians claimed to have taken 30,000
prisoners and 120 guns since the 15th; the Italians and their allies
claimed 2,500 prisoners.
That the Greeks are certainly in the war was revealed on May 31,
when the news was published that they had, with the aid of French
artillery, captured some 1,500 Bulgar-German troops on the Struma front
in Macedonia. Meanwhile, however, General Guillaumat, who succeeded
General Sarrail as commander of the allied armies there in December,
has returned to France to take charge of the defenses of Paris.
Advices from Constantinople, via Moscow and London, indicate that the
Turks, having reached an agreement with the Caucasus peoples, are
assembling troops across the Armenian-Persian frontier, so as to block
the advance of General Marshall with the Anglo-Indian forces up the
Tigris. The left wing of the Turks, on June 14, reached Tabriz and
Lake Urumiah, in Persia, 200 miles northeast of Mosul on the Tigris.
Marshall is 60 miles south of that place.
Captain Rizzo of the Italian Navy, who on the night of Dec. 9-10 sank
the Austrian pre-dreadnought Wien in the Harbor of Trieste and put
another ship of the 5,000-ton class, now known to be the Budapest, out
of commission, again distinguished himself on June 10, when with two
torpedo boats he cut through the destroyer convoy of two dreadnoughts
of the Viribus Unitis class (20,000 tons) and sent certainly one and
probably both to the bottom off Dalmatia--one being seen to sink before
his eyes and the wreckage of the other being subsequently picked up.
This exploit leaves only one of these mighty ships afloat, the first
having been torpedoed in the Harbor of Pola on May 15.