h sides found their
position comparatively little changed and nothing but the thinned
ranks of the combatants reminded the observer that the most severe
kind of fighting had taken place for the best part of a day.

The following day, January 26, 1915, the action was resumed, and
the attack opened along the Bethune and La Bassee road. This soon
died out, as though by general consent, each side reoccupying their
position of the previous evening.

But on Friday, January 29, 1915, early in the morning, the Germans
again opened with severe artillery fire which directed its attention
particularly to the British line, where the First Army Corps lay
between La Bassee Canal and the Bethune road near Cutchy. After an
hour's shelling the Germans sent one battalion of the Fourteenth
Corps toward the redoubt, and two battalions of the same corps
were sent to the north and south of this redoubt. Now upon this
point and to the north of it stood the Sussex Regiment and to the
south of it the Northamptonshire Regiment. The attack was severe,
but the defense was equal to it and the net results were summed up
in the casualty lists on both sides. An attack upon the French,
south of Bethune, on the same day met with like results. The great
German objective was to open another road to Dunkirk and Calais,
and had they been successful in the engagements of the past few
days it is probable that they would have succeeded.

To the north in the coast district the Belgians had succeeded in
flooding a vast area, which served for the time to separate the
combatants for a considerable distance, obliging the Germans to
resort to rafts, boats and other floating apparatus to carry on a
somewhat haphazard offensive and resulting in nothing more than a
change from gunfire slaughter to drowning. The immense inconvenience
attendant to this mode of warfare decided the Germans to drain
this area and they succeeded in doing this by the end of January,
1915.

On the other hand the Belgians captured two German trenches in
the north on January 17, 1915, and the British sent a force to
attack Lille on January 18. The Belgian trenches were reoccupied
by the Germans and the Lille attack was successfully repulsed.

Then, for a week, there was nothing of importance until January
23, 1915, when the Germans made a strong attack upon Ypres which
was repulsed. On January 24 the Germans recaptured St. Georges and
bombarded a few of the towns and villages harboring al