This success and the capture of very strong trenches to the north of the Navarin Farm drove the Germans to desperate efforts. They knew that another vigorous thrust would push them back from their railway and force them to retreat. On the night of 8th October they made a great counter-attack on the Butte, but achieved nothing. Meanwhile their hold on the Butte of Mesnil, which formed an awkward sag in the French lines, had been greatly shaken. On 24th October the French carried a very powerful fortress in this position, and afterwards beat off numerous attacks. They had thus removed a danger from their flank and were enabled to straighten out their line. On the 30th of the same month the Germans attacked the Butte of Tahure and retook the summit, capturing 21 officers and 1,215 men. They forced the French back to the southern side of the hill, but they could do no more. Nevertheless, they had eased their position. They could still use the cross-railway for supplying their lines during the winter's lull which was soon to set in. * * * * * A correspondent who visited the battlefields of Champagne during the month of September tells us that the ground over which the struggle had raged looked and smelled like a garbage heap. "Over an area as long as from Charing Cross to Hampstead Heath, and as wide as from the Bank to the Marble Arch, the earth is pitted with the craters caused by bursting shells, as is pitted the face of a man who has had the small-pox. Any of these shell-holes was large enough to hold a barrel; many of them would have held a horse; I saw one, caused by the explosion of a mine, which we estimated to be seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter. In the terrific blast that caused it five hundred German soldiers perished." The battlefield was thickly covered with unexploded shells, hand-grenades, and bombs. In a captured trench the correspondent saw one of the steel revolving turrets, some six feet high and eight or nine in diameter, in which the Germans had installed a quick-firing gun. The door of the turret was fastened by a chain and padlock, and when burst open the bodies of three Germans were discovered. They had been locked in by their officers, and left to fight and die with no chance of escape. [Footnote 69: In 451, when Attila, the King of the Huns, was overthrown; in 1430, when the English hold on France was shaken by the victorious progress of Joan of Arc from Orleans to Rheims; and in 1792, at Valmy, where the Prussians were beaten and the young republic of France was saved.] [Footnote 70: Mr. E. A. Powell in _Vive la France_.] [Footnote 71: "Forward! Conquer or die!"]