In any case, nothing of first-class importance has been lost. The allied front has not been broken. The roads to Paris, toward which the offensive was turned on the third day, are blocked. The ruins of Rheims are nearly indefensible, but the road to Châlons is barred. The plateaus between the Oise and the Aisne and between the Aisne and the Ourcq stand like bastions of a vast fortress. Château-Thierry is lost, and the eastern railway and the high road are locally interrupted, but the Marne and the Paris road beside it are covered. Finally, the enemy has engaged fifty divisions of his reserves in this battle, and many of them have suffered very heavily. AT CHATEAU-THIERRY The attempt of part of the German 36th Division to cross the Marne at Jaulgonne was frustrated brilliantly by the Americans and French. It appears that a few men succeeded in getting across the river Thursday night [May 30] at this point, eight miles east of Château-Thierry, where the Marne makes a loop by the north. They took shelter in the cutting and tunnel of the Paris-Châlons railway, which runs along the south bank, and though they lost seriously and their pontoons were destroyed, they got reinforcements over to the strength of a battalion. An attack to clear them out was, therefore, organized, and this took place Sunday night, [June 2.] By that time the Germans had put twenty-two light bridges across the stream, of which four had been smashed by the French artillery, and had established a bridgehead with six machine guns and a hundred men in the railway station on the south bank opposite Jaulgonne. This post was frontally attacked by a section of dismounted cavalry who, however, were held up by machine-gun fire until American machine guns came into action. Two sections of French infantry simultaneously fell upon the bridgehead and the Germans broke before them. The prisoners, of whom there are a hundred, declare that their officers abandoned them at the beginning of the attack. A few men escaped by swimming, and thirty or forty others gained the northern bank by the pontoon boats. The rest of the battalion was wiped out. The German losses in the action at the bridge of Château-Thierry were severe. It is estimated that a thousand bodies lay by and near the bridge, and the American machine gunners fired tens of thousands of cartridges. HOW THE BATTLE BEGAN _In his dispatches on June 2 and June 5 Mr. Perris gave these further details of how the battle began:_