They were eighty yards from the British trenches now, and their pace quickened. Suddenly they were caught in a whirlwind of fire; shrapnel hissed among them, machine guns clacked viciously, and French and British rifles spat death at them from front and flank. They went down in hundreds, but the gaps were filled up, and the line moved on unbroken. Battalions melted into companies, companies into platoons, and platoons into files, but still they were unchecked. Again and again they re-formed, only to see their ranks shattered once more; nevertheless their advance was not stayed. So fixed was their resolution and so strong was the force of their assault that the Allied line was broken in three places. Our first-line trenches were swamped with the gray flood, some of which poured into the tangle of woods behind, where a wild, desperate battle raged amidst the trees for two days. Furiously counter-attacked, and enfiladed by machine-gun fire, the Guards were finally driven back to the two short sections of trench which they had won. Even here they were not secure. The "Fighting Fifth"[96] held a salient between them, and took merciless toll of them while fresh attacks were being prepared. On the hundredth day of the war the Prussian Guard came, it saw, it was conquered. At nightfall the larger part of it lay dead in the wood--in some places eight ranks deep. The mighty effort of the Kaiser had failed; the flower of his army had been flung away, yet Ypres was as far off as ever. On the 12th and the following days there were further assaults, during one of which Lieutenant Dimmer of the King's Royal Rifles won the Victoria Cross for heroic fighting, which will be detailed later.[97] All the German efforts were fruitless, and on the 17th, when French reinforcements gave the sorely-tried British a respite, the enemy began to vent his baffled rage on the famous old Cloth Hall of Ypres. So far it had been spared in order that from its ancient walls the Kaiser might announce to the world that Belgium was his. Now that the Guard had failed, and Ypres still defied him, he spitefully ordered his artillery to batter down the historic building which seemed to mock at his discomfiture.