Though there was no great offensive on the Western front during the rest of the year, fighting continued in Champagne during October. The Germans sent reserves to this region, and on 6th October the French made an effort to carry the village and Butte of Tahure, in order that they might command the cross-railway which supplied the German front. After a long and strong bombardment by massed guns the French carried the crest of the Butte, and their guns now cut off the Germans in the village from support and reinforcements. Then they swept from the west and south into a wood in which the enemy had constructed seven lines of parallel trenches, and, after carrying them, entered the village, where over a thousand prisoners were taken. The summit of the Butte was now in the hands of the French, and this was the farthest point they reached during the year 1915.
This success and the capture of very strong trenches to the north of the Navarin Farm drove the Germans to desperate efforts. They knew that another vigorous thrust would push them back from their railway and force them to retreat. On the night of 8th October they made a great counter-attack on the Butte, but achieved nothing. Meanwhile their hold on the Butte of Mesnil, which formed an awkward sag in the French lines, had been greatly shaken. On 24th October the French carried a very powerful fortress in this position, and afterwards beat off numerous attacks. They had thus removed a danger from their flank and were enabled to straighten out their line.
On the 30th of the same month the Germans attacked the Butte of Tahure and retook the summit, capturing 21 officers and 1,215 men. They forced the French back to the southern side of the hill, but they could do no more. Nevertheless, they had eased their position. They could still use the cross-railway for supplying their lines during the winter's lull which was soon to set in.
A correspondent who visited the battlefields of Champagne during the month of September tells us that the ground over which the struggle had raged looked and smelled like a garbage heap. "Over an area as long as from Charing Cross to Hampstead Heath, and as wide as from the Bank to the Marble Arch, the earth is pitted with the craters caused by bursting shells, as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. Any of these shell-holes was large enough to hold a barrel; many of them would have held a horse; I saw one, caused by the explosion of a mine, which we estimated to be seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the terrific blast that caused it five hundred German soldiers perished."
The battlefield was thickly covered with unexploded shells, hand-grenades, and bombs. In a captured trench the correspondent saw one of the steel revolving turrets, some six feet high and eight or nine in diameter, in which the Germans had installed a quick-firing gun. The door of the turret was fastened by a chain and padlock, and when burst open the bodies of three Germans were discovered. They had been locked in by their officers, and left to fight and die with no chance of escape.
CHAPTER XLIII.
THE BATTLE OF LOOS.—I.
You will remember that, in order to prevent the Germans from massing their forces to resist the great French offensive in Champagne, the Allies had prepared attacks on other parts of the enemy's line. While the French were pushing forward across the miry downs of Champagne, six separate assaults were launched on the German front between Lens and Ypres—four to the north of the La Bassée Canal and two to the south of it. The four attacks which were made to the north of the canal were merely for the purpose of distracting the enemy's attention; the two attacks which were made to the south of the canal were part of the main movement against the enemy's lines of communication. While the French in Champagne strove to capture the railway by which the Germans maintained themselves in this region, the French and British tried to seize the railway junction of Lens and open a road into the plain of the Scheldt. Had these thrusts from the south and the west fully succeeded, the enemy would have been forced to retire, probably into Belgium.