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Show ALLIES BRINGING HELP TO SERBIANS r i RAINS AND ROUGH ROADS IM- j PEDING THE MOVEMENT OF i TROOPS AND GUNS. j Germans Have Taken Offensive South ; of Riga, Capturing Larga Number of j Prisoners, While There is a Lull j in Fighting in the West. j Although there is very heavy fight- j ing at some points along the eastern j front as well as in the west, the Aus- ! tro-German and Bulgarian invasions j of Serbia and the efforts of the British j and French generals to bring help io j their little ally before it is too late, j continue to occupy the chief attention of the people of the belligerent coun- j tries. I The Serbians are being helped by ! the weather, which is cold and winter-like. winter-like. The rains have set in and are ' impeding the movement of troops and guns, which at the best must be slow j over what answer for roads in the j Balkan states. The Germans, however, claim to ! have taken the heights south of Bel- j trr3.de, while along the Danube the j army of General von Galhvitz is push- j ing the Serbians back. j The Bulgarians also lay claim to a ! rapid advance into Macedonia, a!- ' though the French -are already report- j ed to be in contact with them at Giev- i geli, while both the Frencn and British Brit-ish continue to land troops at Saloniki. I Neither Russian nor Italian a-sist- j ance has yet developed, but the Iial- j ians have begun a more vigorous of- i fensive along their frontier, and have ; captured Pregasina, an important ad-vanced ad-vanced point of the fortified Riva i group on Lake Garda. This will be of ; indirect aid to Serbia, preventing, as it does, the movement of any more 1 Austrians troops from that frontier. ; The Germans have, taken the offensive offen-sive south of Riga and forced the Russians Rus-sians out of their positions, capturing ; a large number of prisoners and some guns. On the rest of the eastern front the offensive remains in the hands of I the Russians, who are attacking wes; ; of Dvinsk, in the center and to the south of the Pripet river. On the whole it appears to observ- ; ers, says a London dispatch, as if the Germans were satisfied merely to hold j their present line, except in the north. : where they have made repeated at-tmpts at-tmpts to take Dvinsk. This would mean the fall of Riga and would com- pel the Russians to withdraw behind the Dvina river. This ambition has already cost the Germans many thousands thou-sands of men, but they keep on trying, try-ing, first in the north, the:i in the south and then on the Dvinsk front. At present their attacks are develop- ; ing the greatest force in the north. j There is somewhat of a lull in Flan- ders and Champagne on the western . front, probably the calm before another an-other storm of shells. Activity, for the moment, has been transferred to Lorraine, Lor-raine, where the French report the capture of a trench north of Reillon. and to the Vosges, where the Germans , have again withdrawn from Hart- , manns-Weilerkopf, which has changed hands many times. |