In the north alone a certain relaxation of the enemy's pressure was noted. Abandoning the attempt to turn Dixmude by way of Oud Stuyvekenskerke, the Germans seemed anxious to push on to Pervyse and Ramscappelle, from which they were only separated by the embankment of the Nieuport railway. The Grossetti Division endeavoured to stop the way with the remnant of the Belgian divisions, and sent a battalion of the 19th Chasseurs to relieve us at Oud Stuyvekenskerke. Commander Jeanniot at once went into the reserve trenches of the sector. His men were utterly worn out. The companies which had occupied the outer trenches of the defence, and which had not been relieved for four days, were not less exhausted. The enemy's fire on the Dixmude front never ceased, the town heaved and shuddered at every blast, the paving stones were dislodged, every window was shattered, houses were perpetually crumbling into heaps of rubble, and after each explosion immense spirals of black smoke rose as high as 100 metres above the craters made by the shells. "During the night of Sunday, the 25th," notes the Marine R., on duty with Commander Mauros, of the third battalion, "we were thrice obliged to evacuate the houses in which we were, as they fell in upon us." "Dixmude is gradually crumbling away," wrote Lieutenant S. on the following day. The Carmelites had left on October 21; their monastery, where the chaplains of the brigade[44] continued to officiate imperturbably, had received three big shells during the day. The belfry still held, but it had lost three of its turrets, and the charming Gothic façade of the town-hall had a great hole in the first storey. It looked like a piece of lace through which a clumsy fist had been thrust. The enemy did not even spare our ambulances. "A chapel in the middle of the town, protected by the Red Cross (Hospital of St. John), was shelled from end to end," says Marine F. A., of Audierne; "not a single one of the surrounding churches and belfries has been left standing."[45] The worst of it was that our forces, greatly tried in the last encounters, no longer sufficed for the exigencies of the defence. We had to be making constant appeals to the dépôts. The winter rains had begun, flooding the trenches. If it had not been for the heavy cloth overcoats insisted on by a far-seeing administration, the men would have died of cold. Many who through carelessness, or in the hurry of departure, had left their bags at Saint-Denis, went shivering on guard in cotton vests, their bare feet in ragged slippers. All their letters are full of imprecations against the horrible water that was benumbing them, diluting the clay, and encasing them in a shell of mud. [Illustration: (Newspaper Illustrations) THE TOWN-HALL AND BELFRY AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT] But their salvation was to come from this hated water. FOOTNOTES: