Next day the 3rd Division brilliantly avenged the loss of its leader. Sir John French tells us that they "fought splendidly," crossing with planks the dykes with which this country is intersected, and driving the enemy from one entrenched position to another in loopholed villages, till at night they pushed the Germans off the road leading from Estaires,[42] on the Lys, to La Bassée. On the 16th the division advanced its left flank in front of the village of Aubers,[43] which lies behind a ridge of high ground and a stream which joins the Lys at Armentières. Aubers was captured by the 19th Brigade on the following day, and late that evening the village of Herlies,[44] about a mile and a half to the south-east, was carried at the point of the bayonet by the 1st Lincolns and the 4th Royal Fusiliers. The Second Corps was now within four miles of La Bassée. So far it had been opposed by German cavalry; now it found itself up against the main wall of German defence. "This position of La Bassée," records Sir John French, "has throughout the battle defied all attempts at capture." Powerful counter-attacks began the next day, and continued right up to the end of the month. Against the masses of Germans now concentrated against them the Second Corps could do nothing but stand on the defence. Most resolutely they held their lines until the end of the month, and again and again repulsed very heavy attacks, in which the Germans lost heavily and left large numbers of dead and prisoners behind them. All this heavy work was now telling on the Second Corps, and their losses had been so heavy that Smith-Dorrien on the evening of the 22nd was obliged to withdraw his forces to lines of entrenchments which had been prepared on a line running from the eastern side of Givenchy to a village on the Béthune-Armentières road, some seven miles south-west of the latter town. There they settled down into their new trenches; but their lines were very thin, and had not every soldier in them done the work of ten men, they could never have held the position against the swarming masses of the enemy. One day, it is said, General French visited these lines, and talked with a colonel who was hard pressed. "We can't hold out much longer, sir," said the colonel; "it is impossible." "I want only men who can do the impossible," said French. "Carry on."