None of these efforts availed. Nor are the reasons why they did not avail far to seek. Such tactics were wholly at variance with modern German military training. The training aimed at a crushing movement in masses; the tactics to be successful, demanded alertness and initiative. So sudden a change in method and so complete a break with tradition meant, at any rate, that the mass of these German forces were but indifferent practitioners; they might know much of the abstract science but they knew little of the practical art of war. In one thing only were they thorough. They made up for their defects in practical military skill by their energy in plunder and destruction.[6] [6] Dr. Ludwig Tasker, of the R.A.M.C., from the rear of the British line at this date wrote: "Some of the villages are nothing but masses of ruins. We are covering ground passed over by the Germans. They have not left a cupboard or a drawer alone. We respect all property, and when we go where the Germans have been we tidy the things up so that the place looks very much better by the time the people return. Day after day the same thing goes on here--fighting, fighting, fighting, collecting the wounded, and burying the dead." They were opposed besides in the British army to troops with whom alertness and initiative were valued as among the highest of military qualities. Those troops also were expert riflemen. Though standing on the defence under such conditions the Germans ought, like the Belgians at the outset of the war, to have inflicted far heavier losses than they themselves sustained, in fact, owing to the sweeping energy of the attack, their losses were out of all proportion the heavier. Through the defeat at Meteren and the drive of the Allied cavalry towards the Lys, their right flank had been turned, and the result was that they had been "bunched up" by the British in the tangled industrial district to the west of Lille. Bodies of them still held out at Aubers and at Herlies, two contiguous villages to the south-east of Laventie, but both those places were on October 16 attacked by the troops of the British 2nd Army Corps. This fighting went on amid streets obstructed by barricades, followed by hand to hand combats in the houses. The Germans had now brought up a mass of fresh forces, including their 14th Army Corps, additional battalions of jägers, and four divisions of cavalry. Notwithstanding these reinforcements both Aubers and Herlies were on October 17 carried by storm. In the assault upon Herlies the Lincolns and the Royal Fusiliers, under the command of Brigadier-General Shaw, displayed an undaunted gallantry.