WESTERN FRONT STORMING OF BUVAL'S BOTTOM

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 146, 22 June 1915, Page 7

WESTERN FRONT STORMING OF BUVAL'S BOTTOM

GREAT ATTACK BY FRENCH TROOPS. PARIS, 21st June. The villages north of Arras are reduced to jumbled heaps of brick and mortar. Huge chasms, lined with sandbags, twist through the streets, with machine-guns hidden under cupolas of armoured steel and the blockhouses with sandbags and armoured plate. The enemy had burrowed so deep that the bombardment losb much of its efficiency. The attacks were sustained by showers of hand-grenades and short, furiouslydetermined infantry rushes, combined with the patient rounding up of the enemy overlooked in the first dash, who attempted to continue the fight in tho inner recess of the trench maze. The French nicknamed the Buval position "The Mouth of Hell." It was sheltered by a ravine on the south-east Hank of Lorette. It was a natural stronghold, bristling with subterranean forts and redoubts. The French invested it on three sides, and then avalanches of metal prepared the way for attack. Two sides pressed on until their forces converged. The Germans fought with the ferocity of cornered rats. Owing to the steadily narrowing area of fire, their machineguns wiped out many of their own men. In places the Germans took cover behind the piles of their own dead. The French, ' now swarming up the rugged western slopeß of Hill 119, which is directly south-east of Souchez,, soon obliged the enemy to abandon the fortress widen they were defending on the road from Lieven to Lens. The slowness of the Allies' progress has given the Germans time to prepare a strong second-line at Givenchy brickfield, and Hill 140, east of the NeuvilleGivenchy road. Recent battles are proving the value of aerial torpedoes, which the French are able to regulate with great accuracy.

menfc of advance, while the Germans 'did not know when and where the attack would fall. The first infantry rush was at 6 o'clock in the evening. Inside an hour the front line of trenches was taken and most of the defenders killed. The fight continued in the darkness, lit up by a constant succession of flares, while the Germans hurried up reinforcements in trains and motors. "We, however, had got our teeth in a bulldog grip, which would not come away without tearing out the piece."