Up by Locre the commandant of the left battalion found machine-gun fire sweeping his left flank, and his men had to face left to defend their line. Small parties of Germans with machine guns kept filtering down from the north and established themselves on the railway in order to rake the French with an enfilade fire.
One French company, led by devoted officers, counterattacked there five times with the bayonet into the sweep of those bullets, and by this sacrifice saved their flank. Another company advanced to hold the hospice. There was desperate fighting day after day, so that its ruins, if any bits of wall are left, will be as historic as the château at Vermelles, or other famous houses of the battlefields.
French and Germans took it turn and turn about, and although the enemy sent great numbers of men to garrison this place they never were able to hold it long, because always some young French Lieutenant and a handful of men stormed it again and routed the enemy. When it was taken last on April 29, the day of the enemy's severe defeat, the French captured 100 prisoners in the cellars there, and they belonged to fourteen battalions of four regiments of three divisions, showing the amazing way in which the enemy's divisions have been flung into confusion by the French fire.
Under Constant Shellfire
On the morning of April 26 French companies made six attacks, and in the afternoon two more, and though their losses were heavy, that evening both the village and hospice of Locre stayed in their hands. That night, their men being exhausted for a time after so many hours under fire, they withdrew their line a little to the Locre-Bailleul road by the Château of Locre and west of Dranoutre in order to reorganize a stronger defense. The German bombardment slackened on the morning of April 28 owing to fog, and those few hours on that day and one other were the only respite these French troops had from the incessant and infernal gunfire when, owing to open warfare, "en rase campagne," as the French call it, as in 1914, without a complete system of trenches or dugouts or other artificial cover, they were much exposed.
"There were ten big shells a second," one of these officers told me, "and that lasted, with only two short pauses, for six days all through the battle, and other shells were uncountable."
The enemy had brought up light artillery and trench mortars almost to his front lines in Dranoutre Wood and other places and attempted to take the French in an enfilade fire from Kemmel, but by this time many French guns were in position, reinforcing the British artillery, and on the 28th they opened up and killed great numbers of the enemy.
Allied aviators saw long columns of Germans on the roads by Neuve Eglise and in Dranoutre Wood, and signaled to the guns to range on these human targets. The guns answered. Masses of Germans were smashed by the fire and panicstricken groups were seen running out of Dranoutre Wood.
Night of Horror for Germans
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.