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By the 11th the Germans had lost to the French most of their gains in the June offensive, and to the British further ground between Albert and the Somme. On that day the German line ran in front of Bray, Chaulnes, Roye, and Lassigny to Ribecourt on the Oise.
At 2 o'clock each morning they were roused by artillery fire, and every day they fought a retiring action, pursued relentlessly by the guns. "It was a wonderful retreat. Daily the cavalry begged to be allowed to go for the enemy in force to recover lost ground, but only once were they permitted to taste that joy, at the village of Lassigny, which they passed and repassed three times.
In the night of March 10, 1917, the French carried out successful surprise attacks on the German trenches in the Lassigny and Canny-sur-Matz regions, and in the neighborhood of the Woevre north of Jury Wood, destroying defensive works in these operations and taking fifteen prisoners and some machine guns.
In the Lassigny sector a German machine hit by French guns fell in flames behind its own lines. The clear weather which prevailed during the day of October 16, 1916, tempted British airmen to renewed activity. They bombed successfully railway lines, stations, and factories.
Castlenau gave up his command of the 2nd to Dubail in Lorraine and took over the new 7th, and a 10th was entrusted to Maud'huy, another of the professors of military history to whom the French and the Russian armies owed so much of their generalship. By the 20th Maunoury had swung his left round until it stretched at a right angle from Compiègne north to the west of Lassigny.
They had brought up reinforcements to make a stand on that shortened front, and they stubbornly contested the French advance on the Lassigny massif. But its capture was completed by the 15th, and the number of prisoners had risen to 33,000 and of captured guns to over 600.
It was not until December 13, 1916, that any important engagement was fought, when a German attack was made on Lassigny, that part of the French front nearest to Paris. It was estimated by French headquarters that the Germans had brought together for this attack 40,000 troops and had concentrated corresponding quantities of artillery.
Von Kluck had been reinforced, and a desperate battle ensued from the 25th to the 28th, in which Castelnau was driven back from Noyon and Lassigny. This counter-attack was repulsed with great losses at Quesnoy and Lihons a little farther north, but Maud'huy was not less heavily engaged north of the Somme in a several days' struggle for the Albert plateau.
Now, instead of its proud château, Dives has a ruin even more lovely, though infinitely sad. As for Lassigny, it was battered to death: yet I think it was glad to die, because the Germans had turned it into a fortress, and they had to be shelled out by the French. Poor little Lassigny! It must have had what the French call "une beauté coquette," and the Germans, it seemed, were loth to leave.
Captain Boelke conquered his thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth foes. On October 27, 1916, French aeroplanes dropped forty bombs on the railway station at Grand Pré, eight on the railway station at Challerange, and thirty on enemy bivouacs at Fretoy-le-Château and Avricourt, north of Lassigny, where two fires were seen to break out.
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