That night the Germans seemed to be relieving their troops, and again the French and British guns flung shells into them, and for the enemy it was a night of death and horror; but the next day, the 29th, the enemy made reply by a prolonged bombardment, more intense even than before, and then attacked with new troops all along the line. But the French also had many fresh troops in line--not those I met yesterday--who at 2 o'clock in the morning went forward into attack and took back the village. This defeated the enemy's plan of turning the French left.
All through that day the enemy's desperate efforts to break through were shattered, and that night the French held exactly the same ground as before and had caused enormous losses to the German divisions, at least 40 per cent. of their strength, as it is reckoned on close evidence.
That night even the German guns stopped their drumfire, as though Sixt von Arnim's army was in mourning for its dead. It was a night of strange and uncanny silence after the stupendous tumult, but for those French regiments who had been holding the line for nearly a week it had been a day of supreme ordeal.
_There were no general engagements during the preceding five days nor up to May 18, but incessant artillery fire was kept up and raids were constantly made. On May 5 Mr. Gibbs described the difficulties encountered by the Germans in preparing for a new advance:_
The enemy has many divisions, both up in the Flemish fields and on the Somme, divisions in line and divisions in reserve--divisions crowded in reserve--and there are few roads for them down which to march. There is not much elbow room for such masses to assemble, and not much cover in trenches or dugouts from high explosives or shrapnel. So we pound them to death, many of them to death and many of them to stretcher cases, and relief comes up, gets wildly mixed with the divisions coming down, and at night there is mad confusion in the ranks of marching men and transport columns, which gallop past dead horses and splintered wagons and wrecks of transport columns, and among the regimental and divisional staffs, trying to keep order in the German way when things are being smashed into chaos, while the Red Cross convoys are over-loaded with wounded and unable to cope with all the bodies that lie about.