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At Briey, the station was damaged and the railway line cut, two of the birdmen descending to within a few hundred yards of the track. Enemy batteries at Brimont suffered damage. The next day a German machine was shot down near Colmar, in Alsace, and its two occupants captured. With the return of spring, 1915, came renewed activity among airmen on all fronts.
The next day his notebook records two more victories: "Attacked with Adjutant Bozon-Verduraz, four Albatros one-seaters, above Brimont. Downed one in flames north of Villers-Franqueux, in our own lines. Attacked a D.F.W. which spun down in our lines at Moussy." These victories, his forty-sixth, forty-seventh, and forty-eighth, were his farewell to the Aisne.
Progress along the whole French front continued in October; Gouraud's right pressed on to a level with, and then in advance of, the American left towards Challerange and Grandpré; his centre advanced towards Machault, and on his left Berthelot took Loivre, Brimont, and forced the passages of the Suippe at Bertricourt and Bazancourt, and of the Aisne at Berry-au-Bac.
General Foch had known how to post his defense, and within twenty-four hours he had made the line between Pouillon and the Mountain of Rheims almost as strong as the German line between Brimont and Nogent l'Abbesse. Poor Rheims lay between, wide open to the eruption of destruction that belched from the throats of the German howitzers.
On the same night, March 21, 1915, three bombs were thrown upon Villers-Cotterets, fifteen miles southwest of Soissons. There was small damage and no casualties. But the two raids emphasized that a few weeks more would see intensive resumption of war in the air. French aviators shelled Bazincourt, Briey, Brimont, and Vailly on March 22, 1915.
Repeatedly I noticed that the men who worked the big German guns were rarely so cheerful as the men who belonged to the other wings of the service; certainly it was true in this instance. We halted two miles north of Rheims in the front line of the German works. Here was a little shattered village; its name, I believe, was Brimont.
The Mayor of Rheims, M. Ruinard de Brimont, had not a moment's rest. At the consecration of Louis XV., about four hundred lodgings had been marked with chalk. For that of Charles X. there were sixteen hundred, and those who placed them at the service of the administration asked no compensation.
The line extends from a point north of Verdun, on the heights of the Meuse, across the wooded country of the Argonne and the plain of Champagne to Rheims, thence northwest to Brimont, crossing the Aisne near its confluence with the Suippe, and from thence proceeding to Craonne, whence it takes a westerly course along the heights of the Aisne to the Forest of the Eagle, north of Compiègne.
On September 19, 1914, therefore, the situation of the armies was much as follows: The Germans, acting under the general command of Field Marshal von Heeringen, controlled Rheims under the gunfire of their heavy artillery from two points, the heights of Nogent l'Abbesse to the southeast of Rheims, and the hill of Brimont a little over half a mile to the northeast.
One flotilla bombarded the railroad between Ypres and Roulers, near Passchendaele, tearing up the track for several hundred yards. German bivouacs in the region of Longueval, west of Combles, also were shelled from the air, and German organizations on the Brimont Hill, near Rheims, served as targets for French birdmen.
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