If the period since the beginning of the war is considered the numbers are greater. For instance of the 15th Corps one regiment has lost sixty officers and 2,560 men, and another has lost 3,000 men. These figures include casualties of every kind--killed, wounded, and missing. By dint of persistence the Germans succeeded in establishing on the west bank of the Yser a bridgehead at a point known as the Ferryman's Hut. They lost it, however, on November 27. The action (says the French official account) was particularly brilliant. Several German trenches were carried in succession. The operation was one of the most arduous and difficult tasks which our troops have accomplished. The object was to drive from the left bank of the Yser the Germans who had succeeded in establishing themselves there for a length of over a mile. The difficulty in the attack lay in the fact that the canal was bordered by marshes which could not be crossed, and the only way of approach was along the bank and on a very narrow front. Moreover, the right bank, where the enemy had taken up his position, dominated the left bank, which was exposed to a machine-gun fire. The assault on the Ferryman's hut was delivered by a detachment of 100 volunteers from the African battalions. Our men fought knee deep in the water in a downpour of rain. The Germans displayed the greatest courage, and our men had to kill one officer and fifteen men who refused to surrender. In the ferryman's hut itself, which had been turned into a little fort, there were fifty-three lying dead, two of whom were officers. They had been killed by our 8·6 shells. Close by was the wreckage of their searchlight and their machine guns. Across the Yser the Germans had tried to push their outposts westward as far as possible. Mr. A. Beaumont, special correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_, gathered the story of one of these expeditions which reached a ruined village: Amid the ruins the church alone was standing, though the belfry was demolished. A score of Germans on outpost duty had taken shelter in the church for the night. They found the sexton, an old man of more than seventy, and mercilessly flogged him because he would not or could not tell them where the enemy was. He crept out into the fields, found a French company concealed in some trenches, and told them his story. There was an instant rush of picked men into the village, the church was surrounded. The Germans taken by surprise hid in the choir, but to light up the place the old sexton found a bundle of straw, to which he set fire. As he held it up the Germans were slain on the spot.