Osborn, special correspondent of the "Vossische Zeitung," described how the French artillery swept the hinterland of the German positions in Champagne and then concentrated upon these. "The violence of the fire then reached its zenith. Hitherto it had been a raging, searching fire; now it became a mad drumming, beyond all power of imagination. It is impossible to convey any idea of the savagery of this bombardment. Never has this old planet heard such an uproar. An officer who had witnessed during the summer the horrors of Arras, of Souchez, and of the Lorette Heights, told me that those were not in any way to be compared with the present, beyond all conception, appalling artillery onslaught. Day and night for fifty hours, at some points for seventy hours, the guns vomited destruction and murder against the Germans, the German trenches and against the German batteries. Strongly built trenches were covered in and ground to powder; their edges and platforms were shorn off and converted into dust heaps; men were buried, crushed, and inevitably suffocated--but the survivors stood fast." A German soldier told how, in the fierce hand-to-hand fighting which followed, a Frenchman and a German flew at each other's throat, and how they fell, both pierced by the same bullet, still locked in each other's grip. And so, too, they were buried. Courage is not the monopoly of any race or nation. CHAPTER X THE BATTLE OF LOOS At 5.50 a. m. on September 25, 1915, a dense, heavy cloud arose slowly from the earth--a whitish, yellowish, all-enveloping cloud that rolled slowly toward the German trenches--a little too much to the north. Thousands of German bullets whistled through that cloud, but it passed on, unheeding. The attack began at 6.30. A Scottish division had been ordered to take Loos and Hill 70. It therefore played the first role in the battle, since it was on Loos, of which Hill 70 is the gateway, that the efforts of all converged from the north as well as the south. Brigade "X" of the Scottish division was to execute an enveloping movement to the north around Loos and to carry Hill 70 by storm. Brigade "Y" meanwhile was to attack the Loos front, Brigade "Z" remaining in reserve. By 7.05 a. m. the whole of the first line was captured. The second line, covering Loos, was carried with the same ease. The Germans, taken by surprise, were fleeing toward Loos, where they put up a stern rear-guard fight, and toward Lens, which was strongly fortified.