DEFENCE OF LOCRE.

From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, France, Friday.

I went yesterday among some of the French troops who on April 29 inflicted a severe defeat on Sixt von Armin’s storm troops between Dranoutre and Locre – when our own divisions to the north and south shared the honour of the day with them – and before that for six days, in front of Kemmel Hill, held their lines with most noble courage under a frightful fire that hardly ever slackened when Kemmel had been turned and captured, and these men whom I met were almost surrounded, so that they had to fight with a long-enduring devotion, with great sacrifices to maintain their positions.

It is a moving narrative as I heard it from these French officers who lived through that fearful week. The glory of the soldiers of France was there in those Flemish fields, and when they were ordered to hold on at all costs they obeyed to the death. “We were asked to hold our line,” said the colonel of one of these French regiments. We held it.” His hand trembled for a moment as he touched a packet of papers, his orders during the battle, and told me how each message there had been carried through a frightful fire by his runners, so that many of them were killed, and of his other losses in officers and men. But then this square-built man with grizzled eyebrows and moustache, and blue-grey eyes that had steady light in them said again, “We held our line.”

His regiment came up from Alsace to Flanders. They were hardened follows, who had been through many battles. They are young men, but veterans. War has set its seal upon them as upon all men who have passed through its fire, but has not weakened them. When they came into line between Locre and Dranoutre other French division troops were holding Kemmel Hill. It was during days when we had urgent need of this French help because of the exhaustion of many of our men after long fighting. “Then,” said the commandant of the regiment I met, “the country about us was a smiling landscape, with the fields harrowed for sowing and the little Flemish villages with their red roofs and farmsteads snug between green hedges. A week later all this had been swept into ruin and shell-fire had turned this countryside into a barren and blasted place.” On the morning of April 24 the Germans’ bombardment was intensified and spread over a deep area, destroying villages, tearing up roads, making a black vomit of the harrowed fields. Dranoutre, Locre, Westoutre, and other small towns were violently bombarded.