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Updated: June 7, 2025
An assault by the kaiser's troops under General von Einem was made on a five-mile front east of Tahure, with the center about at Maisons de Champagne Farm, close to the Butte de Mesnil. At this point the French had held well to the ground won during the previous September.
Of the troops that were advancing to the north of Perthes, some made for the eastern border of the wood of Bricot, where they penetrated into the camps, ousting the defenders and surprising several officers in bed. Late in the afternoon a French regiment had reached the road from Souain to Tahure. Other units were marching straight toward the north, clearing out the little woods on the way.
At the same moment, in the open country to the north of Perthes, the French troops surmounted the three first-line trenches and, preceded by artillery, made a quick march to the York trench and occupied it almost without striking a blow. Farther to the east, along the road from Perthes to Tahure, the French advance encountered greater difficulties.
A third French attack on 6 October secured the village and Butte de Tahure which commanded the Bazancourt-Challerange railway, the first of the lateral lines of communication which it had been the object of the campaign to break; and later in the month the French made some local progress in other parts of the front.
From midday onward the rate of progress slackened, the bad weather making it impossible for the French artillery to see what was going on, and rendering the joining up movements extremely difficult. From the Buttes de Souain and Tahure the Germans directed converging fires on the French, who were advancing there along very open ground.
The assault was made in three different directions: on the west in the direction of Hills 167 and 174; in the center along a line running parallel with the road from Souain to Pomme-Py, in the direction of the farm of Navarin; on the east in the direction of the woods intersected by the road from Souain to Tahure, and in the direction of the Butte de Souain.
They succeeded, though, in penetrating a small salient of the French line between the road from Navarin and that of the St. Souplet. They also captured, on the 12th, some sections of advanced trenches between Tahure and Somme-Py, gaining more than 700 yards of front. In the Vosges a similar series of local engagements occupied the combatants.
At dawn the reconstituted regiments made another forward rush which enabled them to establish themselves in immediate contact with the second German position from the Butte de Souain to the Butte de Tahure, and even to seize several advanced posts in the neighborhood.
The German trenches form a powerful curtain between these two bastions, behind which a thickly wooded undulating region extends as far as Tahure. To the north of Beauséjour, a bare terrain easily traversable, with a gentle rise in the direction of Ripon to the farms of Maisons de Champagne.
But on 30 October German counter-attacks, which had failed elsewhere, succeeded in recapturing the Butte de Tahure and recovering the use of the railway; and while the French had advanced on a front of fifteen miles to a depth of two and a half in places, the net result of the great attack was to leave them without appreciable advantage save in the disputable respect of greater German losses and the withdrawal of some divisions from the Russian front.
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