French artillery observers benefited from good weather but on the night of 24/25 September, heavy rain began and fell until noon.

[2] The German front position was overrun in four places and two of the penetrations reached as far as the R-Stellung, where uncut barbed wire prevented the French from advancing further.

[5][6] On 3 October, Joffre abandoned the attempt at a breakthrough in Champagne, ordering the local commanders to fight a battle of attrition, then terminated the offensive on 6 November.

On the Champagne front, the Fourth, Second and Third armies had fired 2,842,400 field artillery and 577,700 heavy shells, which, with the consumption during the Third Battle of Artois in the north, exhausted the French stock of ammunition.

The document contained instructions on infiltration tactics, rolling barrages and poison gas, which were to be used systematically in continuous battles to create rupture.

Communications had failed and commanders had been in ignorance of the situation, artillery co-ordination with the infantry had been poor and rain grounded French artillery-observation aircraft.

Many of the French commanders concluded that a breakthrough could not be forced in one attack and that it would take several set-piece battles to make the defenders collapse and be unable to prevent a return to mobile operations.

[12] The German report, Experiences of the 3rd Army in the Autumn Battles in the Champagne, 1915, noted that unyielding defence of the most forward positions had failed several times.

The French had severely damaged German field fortifications and cut the barbed wire obstacles in front of them by long artillery bombardments.

The second position had not been broken into and the 3rd Army reported that the decision to construct it had been vindicated, since the French had to suspend their attacks until artillery had been moved forward, which took until 4 October.

The momentum of the initial breakthrough had not been maintained, because the French troops crowding forward had become disorganised, which made co-ordinated attacks impossible to arrange.

A wide field of fire was unnecessary and to be dispensed with, to make each part of the position defensible by placing it on reverse slopes, concealed from ground observation.