FIGHT FOR BOURLON

A FIERCE STRUGGLE

FROM PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, SUNDAY.

For two days there has been a great battle for the possession of Bourlon Wood, the high forest which commands north and northeast of Inchy and Moeuevres, to the west of it, and for Fontainenotre-dame and La Folie Wood, to the east of it. In all this fighting, English battalions on the left, across the first and second trenches of the Hindenburg Line up by the Louverval-inchy road; Yorkshire troops and other English battalions in the centre of the direct attack on the forest of Bourlon; and Highlanders on the right, working eastwards of Bourlon Wood and up to Fontaine-notredame, which they gained and lost in fierce attacks and counterattacks; have shown a most dauntless determination to make good the triumph of the first day, when they broke the German line. Some of these men have been fighting now for nearly a week. They have had no rest or sleep, except what they snatched in odd half-hours, lying out in the open beyond trench lines, or in the ruins of villages. They have gone on short rations, as they are out in the blue, far from supply dumps, and after the first surprise on Tuesday, when they caught in their net of steel a great mass of dazed and frightened men, they have had to force their way forward or hold their positions against great numbers of counter-attacks from German troops hurled up to Cambrai from all available sources, and against small garrisons and bodies of storm troopers, patrols and snipers, whose spirit has been rallied, and who have fought with desperate courage to stop the gap in their lines.