etreated
to their dugouts, but the Zouaves captured them and their
fortification. At that stage of the fighting the French aviators saw
German reenforcements on their way to take part in the battle. The
aviators signaled to their troops this information. Two German
battalions were being hurried in motor cars from Roye to the east of
the Oise; but before they reached the scene of the fighting the
Germans managed to mass for a counterattack. It was ill-planned and
executed. French shrapnel and machine guns annihilated those making
the counterattack. In the meantime the French sappers were fortifying
with sacks of earth the ends of the salient, so that by night the
French were in a position to hold what they had gained. The
precautions which the French had made were shown to be extremely
timely, for that night the reenforcements from Roye made eight
desperate attacks.

The lack of success throughout the night did not prevent the Germans
from making a reckless attack on the French works at both ends of the
salient on the morning of June 7. The Germans made their advance along
the lines of the communicating trenches. They were greeted with a
shower of hand grenades. By nightfall the Germans seemed to have
wearied of the attacks. The total German loss in killed in this
engagement was three thousand. The French had lost only two hundred
and fifty killed and fifteen hundred wounded. They captured a large
amount of equipage and ammunition, besides twenty machine guns.

The French front south of Pont-a-Mousson, on the Moselle, through the
gap of Nancy to the tops of the Vosges experienced only slight changes
during the spring and summer of 1915. The Germans assumed the
offensive in the region of La Fontenelle, in the Ban-de-Sapt, in April
and June. The French engineers had built a redoubt to the east of La
Fontenelle on Hill 627. The Germans found they could not take it by an
assault; so their sappers went to work to tunnel under it; but they
had to bore through very hard rock and the work was necessarily slow.
The French, learning of the mining operations of their foes, started a
countereffort with the result that there was a succession of fierce
skirmishes under the surface of the earth. Finally the German sappers
were lured into a communicating tunnel which had been mined for the
purpose and they all perished. The greatest activity of the sappers
was between April 6 and April 13, 1915. On the night of the latter
date the of