German prisoners captured when Miraumont fell said that they had been three days without food. All seemed happy that they were out of the war, especially the Alsatians who had been placed in German regiments. "If any of us are caught deserting," said an Alsatian prisoner, "his family is punished, and even his female relatives are sent to dig in the front-line and other trenches." In the course of this British drive forty-two German divisions had suffered heavy losses; 40,000 soldiers and several hundred officers in prisoners alone. On August 25, 1918, the troops of the Third French Army, fighting in water up to their waists in the marshes along the Avre, captured two of the strongest defenses of Roye. The first attack was made on the village of Fresnoy, two and a half miles to the north of Roye, where the Germans had restored their old fortifications of 1914-17, and had filled the neighborhood with machine-gun nests. After a brief artillery preparation the French stormed the concrete blockhouses and killed the gunners serving their pieces. Fresnoy was a notable stronghold and one of the centers of German resistance around Roye from which they had launched their counterattacks in attempts to check the advance. The Germans had orders to hold the place at any cost, but the French attacking from the north and south simultaneously bore down all resistance. Four hundred prisoners, including sixteen officers, were captured in the town. Another strong outpost of Roye, the village of St. Mard in the marshes of the Avre, was won by General Debeney's men in the afternoon after a violent struggle. The Germans had surrounded their concrete blockhouses with water let in from the Avre and through the floods in the face of intense machine-gun fire the French had to force their way to capture the position. Roye was now invested from the north, west and south, and the German hold on the place was slowly weakened. North of Soissons, on the far right of the French line, the Germans renewed their efforts against the line from Pont-St. Mard to Juvigny. They were thrown back everywhere, the French making new gains and occupying Domaine Wood. On the same day, while the French were making progress against heavy odds, British troops were in battle on a thirty-mile front, from the river Scarpe at a point east of Arras to Lihons south of the Somme, crossing the Hindenburg line on the northern sector of their attack. Canadians captured the villages of Wancourt and Monchy-le-Preux which formed part of the famous German defense, and they continued to make progress in an easterly direction. Scottish troops, driving forward on the north bank of the Scarpe, reached the outskirts of Roeux, north of Monchy-le-Preux.