The following day, January 26, 1915, the action was resumed, and
the attack opened along the Bethune and La Bassee road. This soon
died out, as though by general consent, each side reoccupying their
position of the previous evening.
But on Friday, January 29, 1915, early in the morning, the Germans
again opened with severe artillery fire which directed its attention
particularly to the British line, where the First Army Corps lay
between La Bassee Canal and the Bethune road near Cutchy. After an
hour's shelling the Germans sent one battalion of the Fourteenth
Corps toward the redoubt, and two battalions of the same corps
were sent to the north and south of this redoubt. Now upon this
point and to the north of it stood the Sussex Regiment and to the
south of it the Northamptonshire Regiment. The attack was severe,
but the defense was equal to it and the net results were summed up
in the casualty lists on both sides. An attack upon the French,
south of Bethune, on the same day met with like results. The great
German objective was to open another road to Dunkirk and Calais,
and had they been successful in the engagements of the past few
days it is probable that they would have succeeded.
To the north in the coast district the Belgians had succeeded in
flooding a vast area, which served for the time to separate the
combatants for a considerable distance, obliging the Germans to
resort to rafts, boats and other floating apparatus to carry on a
somewhat haphazard offensive and resulting in nothing more than a
change from gunfire slaughter to drowning.
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