There was heavy fighting during the morning of November 22, 1917, near Bourlon Wood, Fontaine Wood, and the village of Fontaine Notre Dame east of it, less than three miles from Cambrai. When the British captured the last place named, they were able to release more than a hundred civilian prisoners, who hailed their rescuers with cheers and many wept for joy. At Masnières the same scene was enacted, where some hundreds of civilians were freed from the odious rule of their German oppressors. They had been kept from starving almost entirely by the American Relief Committee, and after America entered the war by the Spanish-Dutch Committee. The men had been forced by the Germans to work long hours in the fields and workshops, and the women had to sweep the roads, wash the soldiers' dirty linen, and scrub their quarters. "For three years we lived in a nightmare," said the Mayor of Masnières, "and now we seem to be in a dream too good to be true!" One man had been living for three years in the cellar of his own house, where German officers were billeted, being fed by his wife out of the extra ration given to the baby born since the war began. Every week the house was searched and husband and wife would have been punished with death if the man had been found. In the morning of November 23, 1917, the British drove back the Germans from an elevation known as Tadpole Copse west of Moeuvres, commanding a large section of the Canal du Nord, which runs east of that place and the village itself, still in German hands. At Fontaine Notre Dame, west of Cambrai, where the British had been pushed back, the fighting was renewed. In the eastern part of Crevecoeur village the Germans had concentrated an intense machine-gun fire against the British in the western outskirts. Heavy fighting continued throughout the day of November 23, 1917, at Bourlon Wood, and around Fontaine. The British held a line on the low ground about the southern edge of the wood, and from these positions had to charge up the slopes under the fire of many machine guns.