But they had failed, after suffering heavy losses, and the Commander-in-Chief had to call upon the French for help, realizing that without strong assistance the salient made by that battle of Loos would be a death-trap. The French Tenth Army had failed, too, at Vimy, thus failing to give the British troops protection on their right flank. “On representing this to General Joffre,” wrote Sir John French, “he was kind enough to ask the commander of the northern group of French armies to render us assistance. General Foch met those demands in the same friendly spirit which he has always displayed throughout the course of the whole campaign, and expressed his readiness to give me all the support he could. On the morning of the 28th we discussed the situation, and the general agreed to send the 9th French Corps to take over the ground occupied by us, extending from the French left up to and including that portion of Hill 70 which we were holding, and also the village of Loos. This relief was commenced on September 30th, and completed on the two following nights.” So ended the battle of Loos, except for a violent counter--attack delivered on October 8th all along the line from Fosse 8 on the north to the right of the French 9th Corps on the south, with twenty-eight battalions in the first line of assault. It was preceded by a stupendous bombardment which inflicted heavy casualties upon our 1st Division in the neighborhood of the chalk-pit, and upon the Guards holding the Hohenzollern redoubt near Hulluch. Once again those brigades, which had been sorely tried, had to crouch under a fury of fire, until the living were surrounded by dead, half buried or carved up into chunks of flesh in the chaos of broken trenches. The Germans had their own shambles, more frightful, we were told, than ours, and thousands of dead lay in front of our lines when the tide of their attack ebbed back and waves of living men were broken by the fire of our field-guns, rifles, and machine-guns. Sir John French's staff estimated the number of German dead as from eight to nine thousand. It was impossible to make any accurate sum in that arithmetic of slaughter, and always the enemy's losses were exaggerated because of the dreadful need of balancing accounts in new-made corpses in that Debit and Credit of war's bookkeeping.