May 29--There has been very severe fighting today, with results necessarily favorable on the whole to the enemy because the allied reserves are only just beginning to reach the front. A strong thrust toward Soissons and the road and railway from Soissons to Coucy-le-Château at the moment when the head of the columns of the offensive were striking south of the Vesle from Braisne, Bazoches, and Fismes suggests that the armies engaged have already been reinforced. [See maps in preceding pages.] So far an almost insolent boldness has won through, but the French resistance is steadily increasing, and more prudence will soon be necessary. For instance, the River Aisne is a most awkward obstacle to have on your line of communications. The enemy was able to prevent the Allies from destroying all the bridges during the withdrawal, but it is not too late, and the bombarding squadrons of the Allies will doubtless find telling work to do in the early future. Last evening when the enemy had got across the Aisne near Pontavert part of the British brigade was falling back. A group of French territorials, firing continuously upon the swarming graycoats, were taking refuge in Germicourt Wood and being gradually surrounded. Some Englishmen and older Frenchmen decided to make their last stand, to die there together or to beat the enemy off. A handful of territorials got away to tell the tale. The Englishmen fell to a man. The French officer who told me of this episode of the battle spoke also of the gallant work of a British cyclist battalion fighting with the French before Fismes, and of the fate of some British officers who lost their lives in blowing up Aisne bridges near Craonne. There was no time to take the usual precautions, but the thing had to be done, and they did it. My informant showed that he felt all the nobility and pathos of these sacrifices, and he wished, as much as I, that the folk at home should hear of them. The first reports seemed to indicate that the success of the German assault on the British sector led the defenders by a threat of envelopment to retreat from the Aisne heights. This was not so. The Germans first crossed the river further west, and the British left was therefore obliged to fall back. TERRIBLE BOMBARDMENT It was the left, and particularly the 50th Division, that had to bear the heaviest of the shock. The bombardment, which lasted three hours, was of indescribable intensity, the chill night air being soon saturated with poison gas, and when at dawn the German infantry, hideous in their masks, broke like a tidal wave upon the thin British line it was overwhelmed. The 50th is a territorial division. A counterattack toward Craonne failed under a flank fire from tanks and machine guns, and step by step the heroic line was withdrawn through wooded and marshy ground to the Aisne.