Onto a comparatively small area the French on one day threw a hundred thousand shells! We found a French document in which the commanding officer calculated that eighteen bombs must be the allowance per metre of German trench, these eighteen bombs to be used not in a day, but within one or two hours! The rapidity of the artillery fire was therefore as great as that of an ordinary machine gun, but the shells hurled against us were not infantry shells, but grenades of every calibre. "Drum-fire" is the name for this sort of artillery fire, and its effects were simply dreadful--unspeakable. The barbed wire was completely annihilated, was clean wiped out of existence; the trenches were flattened into mounds, their foundations crumbled away. No known sort of earthworks were able to withstand such fire for even a short time. But German discipline, loyalty and heroism held out. When such "drum-fire" began, a huge wall of smoke and chalk particles rose over our trenches, cutting off the men from the rest of the world. The horror of the scene was augmented by the ceaseless rumbling, thundering and crashing which filled the air, and which, even miles away, sounded like a heavy thunderstorm. It seemed impossible that any living creature should survive such a hellish turmoil. When the firing ceased abruptly, or when its direction was changed to give the French infantry a chance to attack us, then our brave fusiliers, musketeers, grenadiers crawled out of the funnels and pockets into which the enemy's grenades had ploughed the earth, made their way from among broken foundations, crumbling cement, trickling sand bags, and, grabbing their guns and wiping the dirt from their eyes, they repulsed the French attack. And this was done not once, but dozens of times. Occasionally our men were ordered to abandon a trench which was suffering particularly from "drum-fire" in order to avoid unnecessary loss of life, and the crew from such an abandoned trench was then placed in our second line of intrenchments. It sometimes happened that French infantrymen, under protection of their artillery fire, reached and took such an empty trench, succeeding the more readily because they encountered no obstacles. Our soldiers then sprang forth from their cover and attacked the French with hand grenades and bayonets. Invariably we were successful in repulsing the enemy, causing them heavy loss of life. If for some reason or other this counter-attack was not made at once, but was postponed for an hour or two, we were not so sure of success, and it was then never secured by us without heavy casualties, for the few hours that had elapsed had amply sufficed the French, who are exceedingly clever at every sort of intrenchment work, to change and remodel the trench for their purposes, to install machine guns, to place sandbag barriers along both sides and to make sundry other changes. This done, the "Frenchmen's nest" was complete.