The first big attack of the Germans launched directly against an American line occurred on April 30, in the vicinity of Villers-Bretonneaux, below the Somme, where the Huns were repulsed with heavy losses. The German preliminary bombardment lasted two hours and then the infantry rushed forward, only to be driven back, leaving large numbers of dead on the ground in front of the American lines.
AMERICANS BOMBARDED.
The German bombardment opened at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and was directed especially against the Americans, who were supported on the north and south by the French. The fire was intense and at the end of two hours the German commander sent forward three battalions of infantry. There was hand-to-hand fighting all along the line, as a result of which the enemy was thrust back, his dead and wounded lying on the ground in all directions. Five prisoners remained in American hands.
"Tell them back home that we are just beginning," said an American lad who was in the thick of the fight and severely wounded with shrapnel. "It was fine to see our men go at the Huns. All of us, who thought baseball was the great American game, have changed our minds. There is only one game to keep the American flag flying—that is, kill the Huns. I got several before they got me."
Details of the engagement show the Americans stuck to their guns while the Germans were placing liquid fire, gas and almost every other conceivable device of frightfulness on them. One of them, who lay wounded in an American hospital, had kept his machine gun going after the chief gunners had been killed two feet away and he himself had been wounded, thus protecting a turn in the road known as Dead Man's curve, over which some of the American couriers passed in the face of a concentrated enemy fire.
As indicating the violence of the offensive, French ambulance men who went through the famous battle of Verdun declared today that, comparatively speaking, the German artillery fire against the Americans was heavier than in any single engagement on the Verdun front at any time.
The German barrage began just before sunrise. In an attempt to put the American batteries out of action the Germans used an unusually large number of gas shells, but the American artillery replied vigorously, hurling hundreds of shells across the Teuton lines. Though successful in resisting the German attack, the Americans lost 183 men captured by the Huns, according to the British report.
Nothing in the history of naval warfare is more picturesque than the story of the raid made by English ships on the German submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge, on the Belgian coast, on April 22. Obsolete cruisers filled with concrete were run aground and blown up in the harbors. An old submarine filled with explosives was used to blow up the piling beside the Mole at Zeebrugge.
One German destroyer was torpedoed, and the British lost a destroyer, two coastal motorboats and two launches.
A fortnight later the old cruiser Vindictive was taken into the submarine base at Ostend and sent to the bottom, blocking the channel, making the attack thoroughly effective.