That
night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly from a blizzard in
the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras, where Julius Caesar had his
camp for a year in other days of history. They herded together with
their bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow and
giving a little human warmth. All night through a German commandant
sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every
now and then he said: "It is cold! It is cold!" And our men lay out in
the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under
harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard,
with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.
Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.
"The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the
capital fighting during this year.
"April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach
twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six
thousand yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without
more ado.
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