Deadly Machine-Gun Work
Meanwhile throughout the day the English battalions had been sustaining heavy assaults, breaking the enemy against their front. The Leicesters, especially, had fierce fighting about Voormezeele, where, as I told yesterday, the enemy was in the centre of the village. German storm troops advanced against our men here and along other parts of the line with fixed bayonets, but in most places, except Voormezeele, where there was close fighting, they were mowed down by Lewis-gun fire before they could get near. Line after line of them came on, but lost heavily and fell back.
Over the ground east of Dickebusch Lake some Yorkshire troops saw these groups of field gray men advancing upon them, and the glint of their bayonets, wet in the morning mist, and swept them with bullets from the Lewis guns and rifles until heaps of bodies were lying out there on the mud flats in the old Ypres salient. The most determined assaults were concentrated upon the 25th Division, but it held firm and would not budge, though the men had been under fearful fire in the night bombardment, and their machine gunners kept their triggers pressed, and bullets played upon the advancing Germans like a stream from a garden hose.
The troops in the whole division yielded no yard of ground and they hold that they killed as many Germans as any battalion in this battle. It was a black day for Germany. More than ten German divisions, probably thirteen, seem to have been engaged in this attempt to smash our lines and encircle the three hills. They included some of the enemy's finest divisions, so they lost quality as well as quantity in this futile sacrifice of man-power—man-power which seems to mean nothing in flesh and blood and heart and soul to men like Ludendorff, but is treated as a material force like guns and ammunition and used as cannon fodder.
Brilliant French Fighters
Referring to the French troops in this battle, Mr. Gibbs wrote:
Today again I have been among the thousands of French soldiers. It is splendid to see them because of their fine bearing. They are men in the prime of life, not so young as some of the British and with a graver look than one sees on British faces, when they have not yet reached the zone of fire. They are men who have seen all that war means during these years of agony and hope and boredom and death. They have no illusions. They stare into the face of death unflinchingly and shrug their shoulders at its worst menace and still have faith in victory.
So I read them, if any man may read the thoughts that lie behind those bronzed faces with the dark eyes and upturned mustaches under the blue painted helmets or the black Tam o' Shanters.
They are not gay or boisterous in their humor, and they do not sing like the British as they march, but they seem to have been born to this war, and its life is their life, and they are professionals.
The Tricolor passes along the roads of France and Flanders, and French trumpets ring out across the flat fields below Scherpenberg, and all the spirit of the French fighting men, who have proved themselves great soldiers in this war, as for thousands of years of history, is mingled with our own battalions. Together yesterday they gave the German Army a hard knock.