While the British infantry had been entrenching, the artillery, with an equal energy, had hauled their guns up the steep roads, and in many cases up still steeper hillsides, and by the morning of September 15--another disagreeable surprise for the enemy--nearly 500 field pieces bristled from positions of vantage along the front. The reply to the German bombardment was a bombardment of the hostile trenches. The latter were crowded with men. If the German shells did a lot of injury to the landscape, the British shrapnel inflicted far heavier injury on the enemy's force. It swept the German trenches and field batteries with a regular hail of lead. Well-concealed though they to a great extent were, the German positions were not so well-concealed as the British positions. Both armies did their best to make themselves appear scarce, and beyond the deafening uproar of the guns belching from behind woods and undulations, there seemed at a distance few signs of life on either side. But, looked at from behind and within, the lines were very anthills of activity. The bombardment went on until midnight. Then came a night battle of almost unexampled fury. From the outline already given of the fighting on September 14 it will have been gathered that one of the most substantial advantages won had been the position seized by the 4th Guards Brigade along the Aisne and Oise Canal from Astel to Braye-en-Laonnois. At Braye and eastwards over the intervening spur of plateau to Vendresse the British positions were dangerously close to the narrow neck of the ridge. Across that neck, too, following the canal to its juncture with the Lette, and then up the short valley of the Ardon, was the easiest route to Laon, the main base of the 1st German army. Obviously the British must, if possible, be ousted out of these villages. Bombardment had failed to do it. Soon after midnight, therefore, a huge mass of German infantry moved down against the Guards' entrenchments by Braye. It was a murderous combat. Six times in succession the Germans were beaten off. But for every column of the enemy that went back, broken, decimated, and exhausted, there was another ready instantly to take its place. Advancing over the dying and the dead, the Germans faced the appalling and rapid volleys of the Guards with unflinching courage. They fell in hundreds, but still they rushed on. Machine guns on both sides spat sheets of bullets. At close grips, finally, men stabbed like demons. In and round houses, many set on fire, and throwing the scene of slaughter into lurid and Dantesque relief, there were fights to the death. No quarter was given or taken. The canal became choked with corpses. On the roads and hillsides dead and wounded lay in every posture of pain. Beyond the outer ring of the struggle, where shouts of fury mingled with cries of agony, the roaring choruses of the guns bayed across the valley with redoubled rage.