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battlefield into a veritable quagmire, almost halted the great offensive the next day. For the most part the day was spent by the British and French in consolidating positions won, or in beating strong German counter-attacks. At two points near Ypres the Germans, using masses of men, were successful against the British, but this advantage was offset in the Zillebeke and Yser Canal sectors, where the British and French acting together advanced their lines. The losses of the Teutons had thus far been heavy, the ground at various points being covered with their dead. Some of the killed were schoolboys and seemingly unfitted physically for the arduous trials soldiers had to undergo. In addition the British alone had taken more than 5,000 prisoners-4,000 of them on the Yser salient. While the rain and the morass thus served to hold the Allied forces in leash, they were not effective in keeping the Germans from throwing counter-attacks with large forces of men against several newly won sectors of the front held by the British and French, nor in bringing about a cessation of the violent artillery-duel along the entire line. Crown Prince Rupprecht concentrated the strongest of his counter-offensive operations on an attempt to regain lost ground, but his efforts went for naught, British artillery- and infantry-fire raking advancing forces, putting an end to attacks and adding materially to the already heavy casualties the Germans had suffered.

The commander of the German Fourth Army was no despicable antagonist for the British. He had suffered a sharp defeat at Messines; but he had the type of mind which reacts against failure, and, as he had done a year before on the Somme, so now he adapted his defense to the British mode of attack. In Flanders the nature of the ground did not permit of a second Siegfried line. Deep dugouts and concrete-lined trenches were impossible because of a waterlogged soil, and he was compelled to find new tacties. Von Arnim's solution was what were known as "pillboxes," already used at Messines. These were small concrete forts, sited among the ruins of a farm or in some derelict piece of woodland, often raised only a yard or two above the ground, and bristling with machine-guns, with entrance at

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the rear. The ordinary pill-box held from twenty to forty men. It was easy to make. The wooden or steel framework could be brought up on any dark night and filled with concrete. Their small size made them a difficult mark for heavy guns. As they were protected by concrete at least three feet thick, they were almost impregnable to the ordinary barrage of field-artillery.

In the Flanders fighting what Max Osborne, a German war-correspondent, described as "never-ending howls and piercing screams" were rending the air from the sea to

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the river Lys, while "accessory noises like growls and blows seemed to spring from everywhere on the Yser, in front of Dixmude and Langemarck, around Hollebeke and Warneton." The whole of West Flanders was "one large, steaming pot, in which death and devastation were brewing." With the sun smiling its brightest, terrific, never-ending thunderstorms were raging over the land, "amid noises such as the old earth never heard before, a crop of new battles and new wars between nations growing to maturity." What were the battles of the Somme, Arras,

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the Aisne, and the Champagne against this earthquake of Flanders, Osborne asked. It was like a "Cyclopean concert of unheard of brutality, made to celebrate with becoming fitness the end of the third year of universal madness." When the battle had lasted for days, it still was "that continuous roar that effaces, or rather consumes, all individual noises, that makes even fierce explosions close by you indistinguishable." The air carried it a hundred miles distant, "and tremblingly men listened, south and north, west and east, where they can not see the horror of all this." It was "like the bowels of the earth exploding."

As the offensive was developed, it became a heavy British attack against the Passchendaele Ridge, which was a portion of that series of ridges that had enabled the Germans to hold northern Belgium so long. From Passchendaele, the most northerly of the series, which rises abruptly from a dead level plain to a hundred and fifty or sixty feet, the lowlands of Flanders stretch out for miles toward the east. There is hardly a spot of ground in all this distance not readily visible from this crest. With the ridge in British hands, the great advantage held by the Germans would pass to the British and the extreme northern pedestal of the famous Hindenburg line would be lost. As the battle of Vimy Ridge had been planned before the spring campaign, so was that of the Messines Ridge and that of the Passchendaele Ridge, the latter only a continuation of the Messines Ridge. The idea was to seize important heights at each point on the line and then, making use of all advantages, to begin the great push. The plan to a large degree was completely spoiled by the Russian revolution, but certain important features of it were put into effect by the taking of the Vimy and Messines Ridges.

Vimy fell before Canadians, assisted by an avalanche of shells which British gunners hurled into the German trenches. Messines came next, and then followed the most difficult task of all-the occupation of Passchendaele, or the remainder of the Flanders high land. Here the British had been on the plains in the western lowlands while the Germans occupied the ridge, with strong intrenchments and excellent positions for observation and for artillery. In spite of these ad

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