The attack of September 25, 1915, was to overcome all these obstacles. The artillery preparation, which lasted five days, was so skillfully handled that, even before it was finished, many German deserters came into the French lines declaring that they had had enough. The infantry attack was delivered at noon on September 25, 1915, and with one rush the French troops reached the objectives which had been marked out for them--the chateau and grounds of Carleul and the islet south of Souchez. Meanwhile, other detachments carried the cemetery and forced their way to the first slopes of Hill 119. On the left the French troops advanced down the slopes of Notre Dame de Lorette and made a dash at the Hache Wood, the western outskirts of which they reached twenty minutes after the attack began. The capture of the wood has already been described. The French attack on the right, being held up by machine-gun fire, could not be maintained in the cemetery, and it was decided to approach Souchez by the main road so that they might pour in their forces on the east, while, to the north, the French force that had bitten its way into the Hache Wood was to continue its advance. This maneuver decided the day. The Germans, who were in danger of being cut off in Souchez, abandoned their positions, and those who had retaken the cemetery, being in the same perilous circumstances, regained by their communication trenches their second line on the slopes of Hill 119. Thus fell Souchez to the French in two days. The allied offensive was a short and sharp affair, skillfully planned and bravely executed, but disappointing in result. At the great price of 50,000 casualties the British had overthrown the Germans on a front of five miles, and in some places to a depth of 4,000 yards, and had captured many prisoners and guns; but they had not definitely broken the German lines. At a heavy cost the Allies on the western front had captured about 160 German guns and disposed of 150,000 Germans, including some 27,000 prisoners, and the result of their efforts was to shake the Germans in the west very severely and to call back to France many troops from the eastern front. That the blow was regarded by the kaiser as a serious one was shown by an Order of the Day in which he declared that every important success obtained by the Allies on the western front "will be considered as due to the culpable negligence of the German commanders, who will lay themselves open to being punished for incompetence." But if the Allies' successes were due to hard fighting and brilliant dash, the fact that they did not break right through the enemy's lines is an eloquent testimony to the wonderful strength of the German resistance. The marvel was that any were left alive in the first line after the preliminary bombardment to face the bayonets and grenades of the attackers. In a report from German General Headquarters, dated September 29, 1915, Max