eliminary bombardment lasted two hours and then the infantry rushed
forward, only to be driven back, leaving large numbers of dead on the
ground in front of the American lines.

AMERICANS BOMBARDED.

The German bombardment opened at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and was
directed especially against the Americans, who were supported on the
north and south by the French. The fire was intense and at the end of
two hours the German commander sent forward three battalions of
infantry. There was hand-to-hand fighting all along the line, as a
result of which the enemy was thrust back, his dead and wounded lying on
the ground in all directions. Five prisoners remained in American hands.

"Tell them back home that we are just beginning," said an American lad
who was in the thick of the fight and severely wounded with shrapnel.
"It was fine to see our men go at the Huns. All of us, who thought
baseball was the great American game, have changed our minds. There is
only one game to keep the American flag flying--that is, kill the Huns.
I got several before they got me."

Details of the engagement show the Americans stuck to their guns while
the Germans were placing liquid fire, gas and almost every other
conceivable device of frightfulness on them. One of them, who lay
wounded in an American hospital, had kept his machine gun going after
the chief gunners had been killed two feet away and he himself had been
wounded, thus protecting a turn in the road known as Dead Man's curve,
over which some of the American couriers passed in the face of a
concentrated enemy fire.

As indicating the violence of the offensive, French ambulance men who
went through the famous battle of Verdun declared today that,
comparatively speaking, the German artillery fire against the Americans
was heavier than in any single engagement on the Verdun front at any
time.

The German barrage began just before sunrise. In an attempt to put the
American batteries out of action the Germans used an unusually large
number of gas shells, but the American artillery replied vigorously,
hurling hundreds of shells across the Teuton lines. Though successful in
resisting the German attack, the Americans lost 183 men captured by the
Huns, according to the British report.

Nothing in the history of naval warfare is more picturesque than the
story of the raid made by English ships on the German submarine bases at
Ostend and Zeebrugge, on the Belgian coast, on April 22. Ob