It was on May 30 that the assaults began, our regiments marching out from different points. Their ardor was admirable.
Everywhere, except on the right, we captured the first line. Behind this were a great number of barricades and fortlets. We took some of these, while others stopped us. One hundred and fifty prisoners, surprised in their holes by the furious charge of the French infantry, fell into our hands.
From this moment the war of the communicating trenches began. There were the trenches of von Kluck, Eulenburg, and the Salle des Fêtes, without counting innumerable numbered works, giving a feeling of unheard-of difficulties which our troops had to overcome.
Without a stop, from May 30 to June 17, they fought on this ground, full of big holes and filled with dead. The combat never ceased, either day or night. The attacking elements, constantly renewed, crushed the Germans with hand grenades and demolished their earth barricades. There was not an hour of truce nor an instant of repose. The men were under a sun so hot in the trenches that they fought bareheaded and in their shirtsleeves.
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"The Labyrinth"
On each of these bloody days there were acts of incomparable heroism. From three sides at a time we made way where the Germans had dug formidable shelters, ten meters under ground. The enemy artillery continued firing on our line without interruption.
Our reserves suffered, for in this upturned earth, where every blow from the pickaxe would disinter a body, one can prepare but slowly the deep shelters which the situation demands.
We lost many men, but the morale of the others was unshaken. The men asked only one thing—to go forward to fight with grenades, instead of waiting, gun in hand, the unceasing fall of shells.