opened fire with 18 artillery pieces on French forces massed on the plateau surrounding Villers-Bretonneux, and fighting began to intensify steadily in the area between Villers-Bretonneux and Cachy. At first the French seemed to waver, but then French reinforcements — mostly artillery — arrived from Amiens and stiffened the defense, and at around 1300, the French prepared a counterattack against the Prussian 3rd Brigade. The counterattack pushed the Prussian 4th Infantry Regiment out of the Hangard Wood and back against the heights of Démuin. Running out of ammunition, the Prussians also had to pull out of Gentelles and fall back to Domart-sur-la-Luce. The commander of the Prussian 30th Brigade, General Otto von Strubberg, intervened by driving four battalions of his 28th and 68th Infantry Regiments to the Luce, bringing the temporary Prussian crisis at Gentelles to an end. Around 1430, two Prussian columns emerging from Marcelcave broke into the far left of the French line and captured the French entrenchments there. The French mounted a counterattack organized by Colonel du Bessol which retook the entrenchments and pushed the Prussians back some . The Prussians having withdrawn, the French assumed they had won the day and began to congratulate themselves and focus on reestablishing their positions rather than on continuing the battle at hand. When the Prussians renewed their attack, opening fire on the French from an unexpected direction, they took the French completely by surprise and broke the French line again. Du Bessol launched yet another counterattack, which this time failed, and Du Bessol was wounded. The French troops began to flee, falling back several miles by nightfall. Thirteen batteries of Prussian artillery silenced the French artillery near Villers-Bretonneux. In a determined advance, the Prussians pushed straight into Villers-Bretonneux, which fell to them at 1600. Their arrival caused a panic among the civilian population; tragically, a number of women and children were killed in the crossfire when they ran in between Prussian and French troops, and other women and children drowned in the surrounding marshes while trying to flee the town. The fall of Villers-Bretonneux and disintegration of the French left allowed the Prussians to outflank the French center and right, At 16:30, with the Army of the North almost out of ammunition and losing ground along its entire line, Farre ordered a general retreat. He ordered his artillery batteries to fall back to Corbie in order to protect the