The struggle in its acute phase lasted for fifteen days and nights without the slightest pause or intermission. In the tracks of the German retreat from the Marne great gaps among the vineyards, where rose mounds of earth, marked the common graves of the slain. Along the boundaries of woods appeared the blackened sites of the hecatombs. Nevertheless, many of the fallen still lay in the woods or among the vines, unburied and infecting the air. Through this country and these scenes marched the reinforcements of the 5th French army. In the opposite direction flowed a ceaseless stream of civilian fugitives--poor people carrying their few personal belongings strapped on their backs, or pushing them along in wheelbarrows; women carrying children in their arms, and with other children trailing at their skirts; a procession on foot and in vehicles of every sort. Against Rheims the Germans employed much of the artillery and material and apparatus they had intended for the siege of Paris. On the eastern side of the theatre of hills behind the advanced island mass where stand the villages of Berru and Nogent l'Abbesse, they had mounted their huge mortars. From these positions and from others to the north-east they threw into Rheims an incessant crash of monster shells. Viewed from any of the villages of its circumference, this theatre of hills ten miles across presented during these days a spectacle at once grandiose and awful. The battle spread out round and below like a panorama of fire. Out of advanced positions among the woods on the south-west, across by Rheims, and to the north, hundreds of the French field guns searched the German positions with their terrible high explosive shells. At brief regular intervals amid the angry roar arose a deep resounding boom--the note of the enemy's great howitzers. The earth shook beneath the salvoes, for the French had also massed here their heaviest artillery. Amid the flash of bursting shells appeared here a village, there a mill a mass of flames, with the smoke drifting above it in a dense cloud. The roar was that of hurricane and earthquake rolled into one. And the uproar went on without ceasing through all the hours of daylight, and far into the night. Furious and destructive as it was, however, the artillery duel was not the deadliest part. The great slaughter occurred when the armies came to grips. The Germans launched an attack upon Rheims from the north and an attack at the same time from the south-east. Of the first attack the immediate objective was the suburb of La Neuvillette. That place is on the great road from Rheims to Berry-au-Bac, and if it could be seized the French positions along the transverse gap would be endangered, and their position at Craonne made untenable. The immediate objective of the second attack was the fort of La Pompelle, commanding the great road to Chalons. To the French both communications were vital.