They were hard days, and it was necessary constantly to carry to the fighting men munitions and food, and especially water. Everybody did his best, and we continued our success. Little by little our progress, indicated by a cloud of dust, resulting from the combat of the grenades, brought us to an extremity north of the Labyrinth. The fighting continued in the Eulenburg and other trenches daily, and ultimately the Labyrinth belonged to us.
The Germans lost an entire regiment. We took a thousand prisoners. The rest were killed. A Bavarian regiment also was cut to pieces.
Our losses were 2,000 men, among whom many were slightly wounded.
The resistance was as fierce as the attack. Despite the nature of the ground and the organized defenses, which had been in preparation for seven months, and despite the artillery, the bomb-throwers, and the quick-firers, we remained the victors.
THE FRENCH “CURTAIN OF IRON.”
By Wythe Williams.
[Special Cable to The New York Times.]
Paris, June 1.—I have just completed another trip to the front, probably the most important one accorded any correspondent since the war began. For several days, in the company of three Paris editors, I was escorted by an officer of the General Staff through the entire sector north of Arras where the French have been making brilliant gains in the last few weeks.
The trip was arranged suddenly by the War Ministry in order to prove the truth of the French official communiqués and the falsity of the German reports. I was the only neutral in the party. In fact, the day before we started I was informed that trips to the front had temporarily been abandoned because the fighting was too hot to take correspondents to any place on the line. During the entire time I was under heavy artillery fire and got more intimately acquainted with modern war than on all my previous trips to the front. I was especially fortunate to be picked out by the War Office over all competitors as the single foreigner permitted to go, for it so happened that we covered the same sector of fighting as that traversed last February on my first officially authorized visit to the battle zone. Thus I was able to make comprehensive comparisons of just what had been accomplished since that time.
On this trip I covered a large stretch of territory that until a few weeks ago—some places only a few days ago—Germany had claimed as her own by right of conquest. I walked through miles of trenches that only last February I peered at from other trenches through a periscope; cautiously, because they were then occupied by Germans; fearfully, because any instant the periscope was likely to be struck from my eyes and shattered by a hostile bullet.