This post was frontally attacked by a section of dismounted cavalry who, however, were held up by machine-gun fire until American machine guns came into action. Two sections of French infantry simultaneously fell upon the bridgehead and the Germans broke before them.
The prisoners, of whom there are a hundred, declare that their officers abandoned them at the beginning of the attack. A few men escaped by swimming, and thirty or forty others gained the northern bank by the pontoon boats. The rest of the battalion was wiped out.
The German losses in the action at the bridge of Château-Thierry were severe. It is estimated that a thousand bodies lay by and near the bridge, and the American machine gunners fired tens of thousands of cartridges.
HOW THE BATTLE BEGAN
In his dispatches on June 2 and June 5 Mr. Perris gave these further details of how the battle began:
As further details which I have received of their part in the beginning of the battle clearly show, these divisions, the 50th, 8th, 21st, and 25th, were, it will be remembered, tired from bitter and repeated actions in the course of the northern offensive. They had been on the front only seventeen days when last Monday's attack was made, and therefore had hardly had time to become thoroughly acquainted with the sector. The main force of the enemy assault fell on the front of the 50th and 8th Divisions, against whom there were four German divisions in line and two more in immediate reserve. The odds against the British on this day were two and a half to one.
The 50th Division on the left was doing well on the Craonne Plateau, when in the course of the morning they suddenly found that the enemy was behind them. Owing to this surprise, the neighboring brigade of the 50th Division suffered badly.
By afternoon General Fritz von Below's men had got to the line of the river, and in the evening the British were back at Guyencourt. By Wednesday evening they held a large crescent around Fismes from Lopeigne on the west through Coulanges and Lagery back to the Vesle at Muizon. By this time the fighting strength of the British units was greatly reduced, but reinforcements were coming up and the worst of the crisis was over. The full story of the splendid episode can hardly yet be told, but some day it will shine among the greatest achievements of the war.
Some time must yet elapse ere we can know fully and exactly what occurred on the Chemin des Dames at and after 4 A. M. on May 27. Many of the combatants have died a martyr's death and been buried by alien hands where they fell. Many more will long languish in prisoners' camps; but the remnants of some regiments have now come down from the front to rest, and by piecing together the narratives of these weary men it is possible to make the first outline of the story that will one day be told in all its pitifulness and terror.
One of them is the French infantry regiment which had long held the central sector of this front. For this last trial it had been prepared by months of trench raiding and strengthening its defenses. Submerged by a storm of fire and poison gas and by wave upon wave of assault, it went down in a single morning, fighting the hopeless fight to the bitter end. A small number lived to cross the Aisne in the afternoon, and these had to continue the struggle for four days and nights, practically without respite. Few are those, even in this war, who have survived such agony.