'Neath Verdun, August-October, 1914

_'Neath Verdun_

Prefatory Note

The following work has been scrutinized by the French Military Authorities, and the word (Censored) will be found in the text to indicate the eliminations they have deemed it expedient to make.

_'Neath Verdun_

_August--October, 1914_

_By Maurice Genevoix._

_With a Preface by Ernest Lavisse_

_Translated By_

_H. Grahame Richards_

_Translator of_:

"_Hunters and Hunting in the Arctic_" (_Duc d'Orleans_)

"_Expansion of Modern Germany_" _etc., etc._

"_Geographical Distribution of Capital_" (_Prof. A. Vergogni_)

_London: Hutchinson & Co._ _Paternoster Row_ :: :: _1916_

Dedication

To The Memory Of My Friend

Robert Porchon

Mentioned in Army Orders for "admirable bravery"

Killed At Les Eparges

THE 20th OF FEBRUARY, 1915

Contents

I.--Contact Is Established 1

II.--The Crossing Of The Meuse 19

III.--The Retreat 31

IV.--The Days Of The Marne 44

V.--Behind The Crown Prince'S Army 118

VI.--In The Woods 160

VII.--The Armies Go To Earth 205

Preface

The author of this work, Mr. Maurice Genevoix, is a second-year student at the Ecole Normale, Paris. Having finished the second year of his course and, incidentally, completed a study "on Maupassant," he was in a position to regard with pleasant anticipation the vacation due to fall in July, 1914--a month later he received his baptism of fire, and of what a fire!

He supplies us with an invaluable picture of the war.

In the first place, the writer is endowed with astonishing powers of observation; he sees all in a glance, he hears everything. The intense power of concentration he possesses enables him instantly to seize upon all essentials of a particular incident or scene, and so to harmonize them as to produce a picture true to life.

Nothing escapes him--the song or hiss of bullets, the diverse notes of hurtling shells, the explosions, the shatterings--every tone of the infernal uproar; the breezes that pass, those that follow the explosions, those that have caressed the bodies of the dead "Whose frightful odour poisons the air;" the faces of men in moments of great crisis, their words, their dialogues; and, finally, the changing appearances of inanimate things, for are not actions for ever associated in the mind with the changing aspects of nature?

The pre-eminent, outstanding merit of the work, however, consists in the never failing sincerity of its author.

Many of those accounts already published--joyous greetings from the trenches, or light-hearted letters most carefully selected from among many thousands--due to many reasons, such as the precautions taken by the Censor; the reluctance among non-combatants to emphasize their own inaction and well-being by contrast with the suffering of others; a natural and universal desire to make the best of things; the very human habit of seeking to explain numerous and diverse manifestations by one simple idea, for example, to attribute every great event to the heroism of every man involved--a heroism without an end; and finally, the tone of the Press, the banality of its optimism--all these things contribute to present a picture of war softened and sweetened, abounding in "good times." Such travesty of the truth at once revolts and fills with indignation those who fight. A war such as this has proved to be merits at least that we should hear and face unflinchingly the truth of it in all its entirety.

The regiment is on the march; towards the close of day it passes through a village:

"The entrance to the village, which is indeed little more than a hamlet, was choked with carriages, with ploughs and horse-rakes, which had been drawn to one side. In silence we pass before the shattered houses. Nothing remains but the mere shells of walls and distorted chimneys still standing above the wrecked hearths. Some charred beams have rolled almost into the middle of the roadway; a large mechanical mowing-machine raises its broken shaft like a stump.

"The regiment defiles through the gloomy evening; our steps resound lugubriously and violate the surrounding desolation. In a short while, when the last section will have disappeared over the summit of the hill, the cold and silent night will descend again on the village, and peace shroud the poor, dead houses."

The regiment is on the march, and it is raining:

"Resignation indeed is difficult of attainment when one knows, as we do, the increase of our sufferings the rain involves: the heavy clothes; the coldness which penetrates with the water; the hardened leather of our boots; trousers flapping against the legs and hindering each stride; the linen at the bottom of the knapsack--that precious linen, to feel which against one's skin is a sheer delight--hopelessly stained, transformed little by little into a sodden mass on which papers and bottles of pickles have left their stain; the mud that spurts into one's face and covers one's hands; the confused arrival; the night all too short for sleep passed beneath a coat that freezes instead of warming; the whole body stiff, joints without suppleness, painful; and the departure with boots of wood which crush the feet like the torture-shoe. Hard, indeed, is resignation!"

But something turns up which makes the regiment forget the rain and its own sufferings. It passes between lines of strangely still bodies--and those are the bodies of Frenchmen, their brothers.

"They seem attired all in new clothes, those still figures, so continuously has the unceasing rain poured down upon them. Their flesh is decomposed. Seeing them so darkened, with lips so swollen, some of the men exclaimed:

"'Hullo! These are Turks!'"

Their bodies had been "sloped backwards," facing the road, as though "to watch us pass." The Germans, retreating after the days of the Marne, indulged freely in the folly of arranging the bodies of their victims after this fashion. The officer himself was for a moment overcome by this horrifying spectacle, but:

"Come! Head erect and fists clenched! No more of that weakness that a moment ago assailed me. We must look unmoved on these poor dead and seek from them the inspiration of hate. It was the Boche in his flight who dragged these sorry things to the side of the road, who arranged this horrid spectacle for our express benefit, and we must never rest until the brute has drunk our cup of vengeance to the dregs."

The regiment has come to War; night falls, a night towards the end of September:

"The cold became intense ... those wounded who had not yet been recovered moan and cry aloud in their sufferings and distress.... 'Are you going to let me die here?... Drink!... Ah!... Stretcher-bearers!...'

"And the soldiers, hearing those agonized cries, but chained to their posts by the word of duty, groan in anguish: 'What are they fooling about, those stretcher-bearers?...

(Censored)

"'They are like fleas--never to be found when one most wants them!' And the cries continue--voices soft and strained and weary from having called so often and long:

(Censored)

"'...?' 'Mother! Oh! Mother!--Jeanne!... P'tite 'Jeanne!... Oh! say that you can hear me, 'Jeanne!... I am thirsty ... so thirsty!...' The cries of others make one shudder. 'Still, 'I say I won't ... I won't die here, my God!... 'Stretcher-bearers!... Stretcher-bearers!... 'You joint-shearers, carve me up!... 'Ah!...'"

The advance of the regiment is checked. The enemy, following his early retreat, which at times assumed the appearance of a veritable rout, turned at bay. The section in command of our lieutenant dig a trench and pass forty hours in it. It has rained and it is still raining. A furious downpour is succeeded by a trickling stream which drips ceaselessly above their heads:

"Motionless, and packed tight together in cramped and painful attitudes, we shiver in silence. Our sodden clothes freeze our skin; our saturated caps bear down on our temples with slow and painful pressure. We raise our feet as high as we can before us, but often it occurs that our frozen fingers give way, letting our feet slip down into the muddy torrent rushing along the bottom of the trench. Already our knapsacks have slipped into the water, while the tails of our greatcoats trail in it."

So one night was passed--and then a second. The relief was due to arrive at any moment; but would it ever appear, that relief?

"As for myself, I no longer hoped for it. I had gone past caring. We had been there a long time.... No one will come. No one could possibly relieve us placed as we were, at the edge of this forest, in this trench, beneath this rain! Never again would we see houses with the lights glowing in the windows, never again see barns in which the well-packed hay never got wet. Nor ever again would we undress ourselves to rest our bodies and free them of this terrible iciness...."

Then comes the end of endurance and patience:

"It is no longer worth while even to trouble oneself by hoping!"

Heart-rending scenes these, are they not? Is it imperative that they should be discounted? It is conceivable they may upset, even disgust, the reader; but because they cause us pain we must not shrink from them, for it is precisely through the medium of that pain that we enter into intimate contact and communion with our soldiers; in compelling ourselves to contemplate these realities, however unpalatable they may be, we learn to accord our soldiers that recognition, that admiration, that pity which is their due!

Equally candid are his observations on the morale of the combatants. There are moments when they are demoralized, when they are afraid, yes, afraid! During a bombardment, for example:

"With bodies hunched together, heads hidden beneath knapsacks, muscles strained and contorted, agonizedly awaiting the nerve-shattering shock of the explosions."

One day the regiment just about to enter the firing-line encounters a column of wounded making for the clearing stations--a long column which seems unending, and:

"It is as if, in merely showing themselves, with their wounds and their bloodstains, with their appearance of exhaustion and their masques of suffering, they had said to our men: See! It is a battle that is being waged! See what it has brought us.... Don't go on! And the men who were going forward looked upon them with faces anxious and troubled with dread, with eyes wide and fevered, in the grip of a moral tempest."

Is it necessary to record these weaknesses? It is, because they represent nothing but the truth, and it is natural that the "living flesh should shrink," willing not to die. When Henry IV. was on the point of charging in battle his emotions so overcame him that he was compelled to dismount from his horse. But for a moment only. And then he charged! The enemy found it incredible that this man who hurled himself into the fight as recklessly as any mere carabineer could conceivably be the king of France himself. And Turenne, trembling in the face of peril, reprimanded his body, saying: "Thou tremblest, carcass!" After which he forced himself to go where he least wished to go. And so is it with our soldiers:

"They are marching; each step they take brings them nearer that zone where Death reigns to-day, and still they march onwards. They go to enter that region of death, each with his living body; that body which, in the clutch of terror, performs involuntarily the motions of men fighting, eyes straight levelled, finger resting on rifle trigger; and that must continue as long as may be necessary notwithstanding the whistling bullets flying by unceasingly, bullets which often times embed themselves with a horrible, dread little noise, which makes one swiftly turn one's head as though to say: 'Hallo! Look!' And looking, they see a comrade crumple up and say to themselves: 'Soon perhaps it will be I; maybe in an hour or in a minute or even in this passing second, it will be my turn.' Then fear makes its kingdom of the living flesh. They are afraid; unquestionably they fear. But being afraid, they remain at their posts. And they fight the flesh, compel their bodies to obedience, because that is as it should be, and because, indeed, they are men!"

Such is the truth, the reality, which truth and reality, far from depressing me, gives me strength. I see the soldier as he is, I know him as he is, I love and admire him with complete confidence!

This work of Genevoix glorifies our poilu: reveals him as a man, highly strung and impressionable, capable of panic--the work quotes instances of such panic--but, at the same time, patient despite his temperament, enduring well-nigh beyond the powers of human endurance; a grumbler against heaven and earth, desiring always to be able precisely to account for all things--in particular he wishes to know where he is going and why he is going!--A jester full of strange quips and cranks; but docile on the whole, loving those officers who show they care for him; familiar with those who permit it, with a familiarity purely deferential; in fine, possessed of attributes and virtues which defy precise definition, wholly admirable without the slightest consciousness of it.

On the 12th September, 1914, when Genevoix was perusing a notice attached to a wall, "printed in letters two hands high," announcing the victory of the Marne, he watched some soldiers approach to read the placard in their turn.

"The faces of all of them were mud-stained and hairy to the very lips ... for the most part they were infinitely wearied and miserable. Nevertheless, these were the men who had just fought with a courage and energy more than human; these were the men who had proved themselves stronger far than German shells and steel; these men were the conquerors. I should have liked to have told each one of them of the glow of affection which suddenly surged through me; affection for these men who have now won for themselves the admiration and respect of the whole world, who have sacrificed themselves without ever uttering the word 'sacrifice,' without seeming conscious of the sublimity of their own heroism!"

The work is not altogether devoid of moments of gaiety; the conversation of the soldiers to which each contributes his particular patois; the distribution of rations to the various sections; the claims which rain down upon the corporal: "What--that sugar! Not a very fat lump, is it? Why, the pile you just handed the 3rd is almost double as much!" To which the corporal: "If you are not satisfied go and make your complaint to the Ministry!"; the cutting up of a quarter of beef by one, Martin, a miner from the North, armed with a knife "which had been given to him by a prisoner--a good enough piece of goods, too, which knife indeed has not its equal among the whole company for carving up a piece of tough meat"--and the task ended, a sufficiently difficult one, achieved as it were by the inch, Martin triumphant, proclaiming himself to be "Some Butcher." Then there is that lunch which our lieutenant orders on pay-day: an omelette, never to be forgotten; a slice of juicy ham; most wonderful of jams; hunches large and thick from a loaf of fresh bread; afterwards a pipe, the blue, fragrant smoke of which drifts slowly up to the rafters above us. And following these wonders, the night passed in a bed, with real sheets and blankets upon it! The memories of other nights are evoked--rough nights spent on heaps of stones in the fields, or on the débris of splintered trees which litter the woods, or amid the humidity and mud of the trenches, or the discomforting dryness of the stubble-fields--and now, to be covered from head to foot with bedclothes in a soft, real bed!

"Not yet was our amazement exhausted ... in vain we sought with every inch of our bodies for some hard spot, for some lurking corner which would hurt; but no spot or corner was there which was not soft and warm!... And we lapsed into bursts of laughter; we expressed our delight and enthusiasm in burlesque, in jokes, each one of which provoked fresh outbursts of laughter...."

(Censored)

"We, that is to say Porchon and myself: Lieutenant Porchon and Lieutenant Genevoix."

There could be nothing more delightful than the comradeship existing between Genevoix of the Ecole Normale and the St. Cyrien, Porchon. They had been trained for widely different destinies, these two young men; the Ecole Normale on the one hand, Saint Cyr on the other! And if they both turned out to be excellent officers, with nothing to choose between them, that does not merely prove the value of the education obtained at the Ecole Normale. It proves something better and greater than that: the deep accord, the healthy unanimity which exists between French minds. So these two companions count the days gaily; they are young and they are French.... But Porchon is the gayer of the two; Genevoix envies him a little for his ready laughter, for the never failing and welcome good humour, to enter into the spirit of which, he says, "I compelled myself as though seeking the conquest of a virtue...."

I like, too, the melancholy underlying this work. This war, foreseen and predicted, but whose horrors completely transcend the imagination, this retrograde movement towards the almost forgotten barbarity of a humanity we thought was marching towards new horizons, was there ever equal cause for human sadness? And there where the Germans, hailing from all parts of Germany, of all professions and creeds, steep themselves to satiation in joys purely cannibalistic, how shall a soldier of France control his tears, or rather how shall he find heart to weep?...

I am pleased, too, that those superb sentiments which sustain courage in moments of superhuman fatigue, which exalt amid perils and horrors, should be touched upon, however lightly, in the following pages. They dwell in the inmost heart of us all, hidden by that timidity, that exaggerated sense of shame, which prohibits us from revealing what is best and most sacred in ourselves. A few words alone suffice, like those written after a reunion of officers when a Captain found himself in command of a Corps, because:

"The Colonel had been wounded, the commander of the 1st Battalion also had been wounded, while the commanders of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions had been killed.

"From the expression of the faces about me, from the serenity reflected in each man's eyes, I gathered we were all ready to face the future whatsoever it might contain.... It almost seemed we leaned on one another for support, brothers by the common faith within us. A grace exalted and fortified us!..."

And how many times does the word "Patrie" occur in these pages? Once only, as far as I can remember. Genevoix, idling about the trenches one day, heard the chime of distant bells drifting over the woodlands. The Germans in their trenches heard the bells, as did our men in theirs, but they bore not the same message for us as for them. To our soldiers they said:

"Hope, sons of France! I am quite near you, I, the voice of all those firesides you have left behind you. To each of you I bring a vision of that corner of the earth in which his heart is embowered. I am the heart of your homeland beating against your heart. Let confidence be always with you, sons of France, confidence and might always. I rhyme the immortal life of the Patrie!"

But to the Germans they said:

"Madmen, who believe that France could die! Listen to me: above the little church, the fragments of whose stained-glass windows strew the flagstones, the steeple still stands erect. It is from there I come to you, gaily, mockingly. Through me the whole village defies you. I can see!... I can see!... Whatsoever you have done I can see. Whatsoever you may yet do, I also will see. And I fear you not at all. For I know the day will come when the weather-cock on the steeple, who stares unceasingly towards the far horizon, will look down upon your mad, despairing flight, while the bodies of your numberless dead lie thick over all the land."

Ernest Lavisse.

'Neath Verdun

I

Contact Is Established

_Tuesday, August 25th._

The order for departure descended upon us like a thunderbolt: instantly, driven by the apprehension that something or other might ultimately be forgotten, there ensued a precipitate scurrying here, there, and everywhere throughout the town. Only with difficulty did I find the time even to warn those who are dear to me. The last inspection on the barrack-square was over. Out of the canteen, where I had gone to snatch a mouthful of food, I rushed, crossed the yard in a stride, and here you behold me, as erect and stiff as a ramrod, before files of men in blue coats and red trousers.

I was just in time: the General himself had already reached the right of my section. I stood with sword at the salute, my right hand grasping its hilt, my left kneading the greasy paper containing my recent purchase--a penny-worth of bread and a nameless pork confection, which perspired.

The General halts before me; young, well set-up in his tunic, with a face refined and full of energy.

"Good luck to you, Lieutenant."

"Thanks, General."

"Here's my hand, Lieutenant."

Did I not know it? I felt the sandwich being reduced to pulp in my own hand.

"Don't you feel excited, Lieutenant?"

A touch of legerdemain and my sword has passed into my left hand. I grip firmly the hand extended to me and answer loudly, distinctly, fairly meeting his eyes:

"No, General."

And that is a lie: I am highly excited. I should have been ashamed not to be. There were so many impressions, so many fleeting reflections to shake me from head to foot! But I well understood that "Don't you feel excited?" of the General. I said "No:" I spoke the truth.

We were going to Troyes. So at least we were told. From Troyes, we were evidently to proceed straight to Mulhouse, to occupy and defend that captured town. This also we were told.

The prospect delighted me. To go to Alsace and remain there was certainly not so glorious as to have won our way there; but, at the same time, the prospect was not one to be despised.

We defiled through the town: roadways echoing, handkerchiefs waving, some laughter, some tears.

A mistake in the route cost us a few additional miles of measured tramping. Gradually the pace grew easier, for the oldest reservists, still plump, perspired freely, making no complaint, however.

We saw some of our wounded before the doorway of a large grey building. They held out at arm's length for our inspection spiked helmets and little round forage caps with red bands on a khaki ground.

"We also!" we cried. "We are going there, my friends!"

A young workgirl, fair and buxom, smiles upon me, displaying all her teeth. She has a small, well-poised head and inviting, ruddy cheeks. Her smile does me a world of good; for I am going to war; the morrow perhaps will see me in the thick of it!

The train, at last. A mere black line of gaping trucks with a few first-class carriages. Entraining is a big affair; the young major, a dark and energetic man, urges his horse from group to group, shouting directions and commands. A constant murmur arises from the onlookers. Why in the name of everything has he given the order for the little tricoloured flags, which a moment since were waving above the marching battalion, to be removed?...

Slowly we draw out of the station as the eventide descends. The sunset is sombre, dominated by monstrous clouds of purple and virgin gold.

Through the night rolls on the convoy. Our old Captain of the 27th draws off his iron-plated boots and displays his socks, brilliantly yellow and quite new. We stretch ourselves, we groan, we snore. A pointsman, busy with his levers, cries out to us to ask whither we are bound:

"Troyes? What a joke! You are on your way to Verdun!..."

To believe everything one is told is the first illusion.

O sullen silence of night travelling! Our faces grow dull and lifeless in the indistinct light which filters doubtfully through the blue shade. From time to time, perched high up on the embankment, we flash past vague figures silhouetted against the darkened heavens; they are sentries guarding the line. Suddenly long white pencils of light evolve majestically out of the night's blackness, chasing away the shadows.

Walls and station lamps announce Verdun. For a further three or four miles we run on. At one o'clock in the morning we find ourselves at Charny. Amid much confusion the sections fall in opposite the doors of the wagons, from which a heavy mist now slowly drifts. And heavy-footed and slowly we set out on the march.

_Wednesday, August 26th._

At daybreak we pass through Bras. Before the country cottages are huge piles of manure from which a light steam rises. Cocks are a-crow; but man is still sleeping. We march and still march. Little by little, I become conscious that a rather fevered curiosity is spreading through the ranks.

We overtake a regiment of field artillery, drawn out in an interminable file, resting by the wayside. Gunners and drivers are alike asleep, overcome by fatigue, the former sprawled on the gun carriages, mouths wide open; the latter with their noses buried in the manes of their horses. They too sleep, poor beasts, with muzzles drooping and knees bent.

We pass by, the heavy, nailed boots of the men echoing loudly on the roadway. But the artillerymen do not hear us; they sleep too soundly for that. We even find it necessary to prod the horses before they will move aside to let us pass.

Crossing the Meuse, we encountered immense herds of cattle. They were divided into hundreds corralled at the water's edge in a smooth meadow. The brutes were lying on the brown earth, with their muzzles upraised in an ever-changing chorus of lowing. Cattlemen in red trousers kept placid watch over them.

_Vachérauville._ It is broad daylight. We have called a halt on a piece of uncultivated land on the side of a hill. I am still feeling dull and knocked up after the long night passed in the box-like carriage.

There are about a thousand of us altogether. The men, having piled arms and thrown themselves down on the ground, are sleeping, too tired even to ask questions. Indeed, the detachment commander himself appears to be ignorant as to our final destination. He is a dear old fellow in spectacles. I can just imagine him by his own fireside, his feet in slippers, poking away and smoking a big pipe. I shall never get used to seeing him on horseback!

That nuisance, L ... promoted medical officer, fusses about here and there, his tongue wagging ceaselessly:

"What is this water? It's bad! Typhoid! Typhoid!--And where do _you_ come from, young man? Have you any cartridges?--Give that horse something to drink!--This chasseur is ill.--You are ill, my friend!--Yes, yes. You _are_ ill!--Just show me your tongue!--Ah, we must dose you. Yes!--Yes! What, not ill? No? Not ill? More's the pity! They should have taken away his spurs!..."

A lamenting voice rings out:

"Where's the officer! Where's the officer!"

An old woman hastens up, her cap all awry, her hands raised to the skies.

"What shall I do? They have taken away the canopy of my well to make a fire. Who is going to indemnify me for it?..."

Loss, damage, indemnity; words, alas, we are to hear often enough!

_Midday._ Conveyances are passing along the road at the foot of the hill: huge four-wheeled wains, each drawn by a thin, mangy horse. Wickerwork baskets, bales of household goods, rabbit hutches, have hastily been flung into them. On the top, mattresses, pillows, eiderdowns of a faded red have been piled. And on these are sitting women with backs hunched and bent, their clasped hands drooping over their knees, their eyes dull and blank. One cannot tell from their expressionless faces whether or not they are suffering. They seem to be immersed in reflections purely animal and without end. Here and there from amid this lamentable medley of goods protrude the heads of dirty-nosed urchins, with light hair tangled and matted. A few bellowing cows follow the wagon, dragging at the ropes by which they are tied, and lowing. An awkward youth with large hands and immense feet, whip in hand, drives them forward by kicking them lustily in the haunches.

Suddenly, cries and the rattle of triggers ring out. I turn swiftly to find thirty of our men deploying as skirmishers, facing the crest. Our old captain, red as a beetroot, his small scared eyes darting wildly round, shouts at the top of his voice:

"Look out! Look out! Rapid fire! ... upon the enemy approaching ... at 800 yards...."

What can all this mean? Have we been taken by surprise? I look about, but can perceive nothing, absolutely nothing to cause an alarm. Then I see J---- hurriedly whispering in the captain's ear. Over the latter's face there instantly spreads an expression of complete astonishment:

"Cease fire! At once! At once, I say!"

J---- turns away convulsed, slyly indicating with his forefinger rows of corn-stacks aligning the crest of the hill!

On the road leading to the village, we pass people in detached groups, each of which becomes a hotbed of gossip. The latest arrivals are questioned avidly and insatiably:

"So there was a machine-gun in the church tower, was there?... How long did they continue firing on you?... Is it true that almost all the wounded were hit in the feet or legs?"

I approach one such gathering. In the centre are two stragglers: one is silent and sad-faced; the other orates with much gesticulation. There is a slight scar on his face, where the blood has dried and coagulated. And he displays a bullet embedded in the padding of his great coat, like a needle in a piece of cloth.

One encounters these stragglers constantly.

(Censored)

They form an endless procession, dragging one leg after the other, their faces feverish, their hair long and their beards dirty.

And here are still more wagons packed with women and children, or with wounded men, some of whom sit gripping the sides with both hands, while others lie stretched full length on blood-stained straw. Ammunition wagons go by at a gallop, creating a terrible rattle; groups of dusty infantry tramp over the withered grass by the roadside.

And so the torrent, descending from the top of the hill over which the road vanishes into the distance, streams on towards the bottom of the valley where the village lies. Does it mean a panic, this? I ask myself. Certainly not! But if not, then why this feeling of depression, of which, do what I will, I cannot rid myself?

A Staff-officer has arrived. Our detachment commander turns pale with emotion merely at the sight of his badges. It quickly transpires that we are to turn back across the Meuse the way we came. I learn the news without surprise; I was certain that that stream of stragglers boded ill for us.

A long march lies before us, over a monotonous road destitute of trees. The sky is gloomy, obscured by rain clouds. Moreover the atmosphere is oppressive. We revisit Bras and Charny, then Marre and Chattancourt: which villages all resemble each other, with their low-built houses--presenting a colour-scheme of washed-out blue and dirty yellow. And always, at the very thresholds of the cottages, is the inevitable pile of manure, spreading every now and again right into the middle of the roadway.

Esnes is like Marre and Chattancourt. We are billeted there with a young woman who has the face of a toothless doll and legs without calves. In a dark corner of the room, I catch a glimpse of some strange person, fondling a child still in swaddling clothes. Like a shadow he vanishes as we enter.

From the open door I watch a soldier in shirt-sleeves, forearms bare, slaughtering a sheep lying with its legs tied to a gate. Each agonized convulsion of the poor beast makes me feel ill; it brings back to my mind the time when, in a slaughter-house, I plunged my leg into a bucket filled with warm blood, streaming in a flood from the severed neck of a slaughtered cow!...

The evening set in grey and depressing. Fine rain began to fall, saturating everything. I thought of my men trying to rest out in the fields, lying round their piled arms, and set out to see if I could find shelter for them.

It did not prove difficult, for there was scarcely a soldier in the whole village. I found a barn full of hay, and returned to the meadow well pleased with myself:

"Up, boys! Bring your arms, packs, and the whole bag of tricks! There is a roof with good hay beneath it for you over there!"

Through the night and a rain increasing in violence I lead a cortège of mute shades. Alas! we do not get far. For in the village I encounter my commander, striding up and down before the houses, making himself quite ill from anxiety.

"About turn! Quick march!"

The shades return to the marsh, still mute. I listen to the slush-slush of their heavy boots as they tramp through the puddles. Poor devils!

Returning I meet a few soldiers moving towards the cemetery with its congregation of tombs clustering round the little church. They are carrying a body wrapped in a flag on a stretcher. Then I recollect someone mentioned that a cavalryman had been killed earlier in the day by a stray bullet.

Sleeping quarters I found to consist of a shabby garret. Sleep was fitful at the best. All through the night the door slammed. Every time I opened my eyes, I saw by the dim rays of a smoky lamp other eyes hidden in the shadow of caps. On one side of me, in an alcove similar to mine, a sick man, tortured by a sharp attack of rheumatism, kept constantly moaning and crying.

Dawn at last! I dress myself hastily, only too thankful to escape the oppressive atmosphere of this hovel. I long to breathe the fresh air, to open my lungs, to escape as far as possible from that bed, from those greasy bedclothes which have communicated their dampness to my skin, from the musty smell of cheese, skim milk and pig's-wash....

It is still raining. In the distant meadow I can see stacked rifles and sodden knapsacks; but not a man is afoot. So much the worse.... Bravo!

_Thursday, August 27th._

Another long march, protracted and dawdling. Indeed it could not justly be described as a march at all; rather was it the wandering of men who had lost their way. Haucourt, then Malancourt, then Béthincourt. The road is a mere river of mud. At each step a jet of yellow water spurts upwards. Heavier and heavier becomes my great coat. It is useless for me to bury my neck between my shoulders: large drops of cold rain contrive to work themselves inside my collar and trickle down my back. My knapsack bumps to and fro against my hips. Whenever a halt is called, I remain standing, not daring even to raise an arm lest the penalty be still more water down my back.

We find that we have arrived at Gercourt, which proves to be our immediate destination. A splash of blue breaks through the rain clouds. Our uniforms begin to recover their original colours, brass buttons to gleam.

The day's march is ended! I turn my back to the increasing warmth while trying to masticate a stringy piece of meat and some elastic-like bread. Above the men, standing easy, a mist of evaporating water rises and drifts away.

"All officers stand forward!"

Something apparently is about to occur. It turns out to be the Adjutant coming to give instructions from the Colonel. He is a big, dark, active man. He steps forward, drums beating: twelve files, one per company. Things move quickly for us too; a shower of questions descends upon us like an avalanche; there is no time to reply before it is all over. I am to join up with the 7th Company as the regiment passes.

My regiment arrives! Our reservists run as fast as they can towards the embanked roadway. And a fine medley ensues! Greetings shouted from afar; exclamations of pleasure exchanged between the marching files and the men gathered on the banks. There is anxiety in the eyes of almost everyone looking upon those who have already fought. Some of the men return to the stacked rifles with faces lowered and arms listlessly swinging.

I slip into my place as the 7th passes. And as the march proceeds the same questions are heard on every hand: "What about Robert?--He is wounded. A bullet in the shoulder. Not serious.--And Jean?--He is dead...."

It is the brother of those two soldiers, the one wounded, the other killed, who replies. He lets fall these words in a breathless voice as he runs to resume his place in the ranks.

We halt in column in a parched meadow. I take advantage of this opportunity to present myself to my Captain. He is a big, finely-built man, with powerful body supported by rather slender legs. The quick and penetrating glance he gives me tends to weaken my first impression, which led me to regard him as being rather slow-witted.

"Ah, young man, so you are entering on your apprenticeship! You have come to a good school, as you will learn. A good school!"

A smile wrinkles the corners of his blue eyes. It would seem that my superior has a pronounced taste for irony!

There is also a second-lieutenant attached to my company, a Saint-Maixentian, young and solid, and something of a dandy. He has a flaming moustache rather too heavy for his ruddy, chubby face, possesses massive shoulders, thick wrists and calves. He puts out his hand and at once offers me a sip of gin as an appropriate prelude to further acquaintanceship.

"Wait a little, old man, and you shall see how we'll mop them up!"

He flings out an arm and with a sweep indicates the horizon and the village of Cuisy, which is close at hand.

Five minutes afterwards, the whole regiment descends a steep road between two high banks covered with bushes. The stones slip beneath our feet; we clutch one another; we snatch at branches for support; my sword becomes an alpenstock.

As soon as we get out into the country, we find ourselves once more in the mud and slush. We pass many barns but few houses. A village containing perhaps a hundred inhabitants is our resting-place. And there room must be found for three thousand of us. Let it be understood, we never would have occupied such a hole had there been no War!

It is night. I know that we are supposed to be messing with the officers of the 8th. But where? No one has mentioned a rendezvous. I remind myself that a campaigning soldier's first principle should be: "Rely upon thyself alone." And so, through the darkness and mud and inevitable manure, I set out to discover the mess.

The place of assembly is a dimly-lit kitchen. At one end, the yellow flame of a candle set the shadows dancing on the walls. A cook, bare of arms and grimy of paws, fingers and handles some meat as if he were kneading dough. A second, with a pipe between his teeth, skims the _pot-au-feu_ whilst expectorating into the cinders. He raises towards me a face like that of a thick-lipped faun; his eyes are very clear, but unintelligent and slow-moving. The beginnings of a beard decorate his chin with a few odd hairs as stiff as bristles. It is he who receives me in a voice drawling and muffled--his mouth, it seems, is chock-full of macaroni.

One after the other the officers enter. There is the Captain and the Saint-Maixentian, as well as a newly-commissioned cadet from Saint Cyr, bony of face, nose powerful, and altogether a good sort, I find, who, like myself, has just come from the depot. The Captain of the 8th is a short, well-built, fair man, refined, meticulously well-groomed, with a smile that reveals his teeth, and a soft voice which he modulates beautifully. A lieutenant, powerfully built ... (Censored) ... whose nose descends into his spoon ... (Censored) ... regales us on vapid obscenities. Finally, there is a second-lieutenant, slender and delicate, dark, with a very boyish face, intelligent yet artless.

Dinner proceeds rather gloomily. The two captains exchange anecdotes concerning Morocco, or ready-made stories gleaned in the camps regarding fair women.

Once more I plunge through the mud. And I reflect that it would be foolish in the extreme not to profit by this stay in a village by trying to find a bed in which to pass the night. As a result, I ultimately slip between two crumpled sheets beside a farmer of fifty or so, who breathes heavily and smells strongly.

Nevertheless I sleep, and soundly too!

II

The Crossing Of The Meuse

_Friday, August 28th._

Four o'clock in the morning. We ascend to the top of a stony road. The night mists are still drifting. The whole regiment falls in near the village, in an orchard bounded by hedges. And there a monocled major in a sing-song voice reads aloud a stirring proclamation: it is the Colonel's funeral oration, filled with vehement exhortations, and a poem of Déroulède's to finish up with. Much simpler and more touching is the sight of the soldiers presenting arms, and all the officers with their swords at the salute.

On the summit of a wind-swept crest, we dig trenches deep enough to accommodate men standing erect. I inhale the fresh air greedily, delighted to be out in the sunshine and happy, while my men dig away with their picks and throw shovelfuls of earth over the parapet.

An immense valley lies extended below us. At the foot of the hill are deeply shadowed woods interspersed with luminous lakes of well-mellowed crops. To the right, a road takes an abrupt turn and leads through an avenue of trees; in the foreground, a second road at right angles to the first, cuts an ugly gash through the dappled richness of the fields. At the bottom of the valley, the white walls of the village of Dannevoux peeps forth between the green leaves. And still further away, over towards the Meuse, invisible from this spot, is a chain of blue hills.

Until evening, the men dig with zest. From afar off sounds the muffled rumble of a violent cannonade. We take our lunch by the roadside, attacking a charred fowl with teeth and fingers, and drinking muddy wine to the last dregs. To-night, as yesterday, I gratefully retire with my farmer; but on this occasion his snores haunt me, and he wakes me every time he moves.

_Saturday, August 29th._

The men, with shirts opened and their skins wet with perspiration, complete their trenches beneath a searching and pitiless sun. Above the rumbling of distant artillery, we hear the detonations, still muffled and deadened, of nearer batteries. By holding my hand to my ear, I can distinguish soft whistlings which terminate in wailing explosions. Shrapnel evidently, the smoke of which is slowly dissipated in the calm air.

We retain our billets that night also, but not many of us sleep; for the German shells are bursting now hardly a mile away from the village; the windows shake and tremble under the stress of the formidable explosions.

_Sunday, August 30th._

_Bois de Septsarges._ Hardy undergrowth thrusting forth roots shoots amid the shadows of the great forest. Great splashes of light are on the moss; living, quivering sun-rays pierce the warm gloom; the acrid odour of fermentation, increased by the sun, is oppressive. It strikes one forcibly, that sun! I recline in the shelter of a tree, moving only as the shade moves.

P----, a second-lieutenant of the 8th, lies weltering beside me. He is writing in pencil a long letter to his wife; he chats about her and his little girl, who is five months old. I pay him all the attention I possibly can, but I fear I do not understand much of what he says: his voice comes to me like a monotonous purring--which is, as it were, punctuated by the throbbing of the blood in my temples and fingers. And so I fall asleep.

A terrific explosion wakes me with a start. Three more successive detonations shatter the air, and above my head I hear the flight of shells--a light rustling, a rapid rushing, which one can with some difficulty follow with the ear, growing more and more distant until it terminates finally in the explosion.

"Those are 120 mm. guns," P---- remarks to me.

Scarcely have the words crossed his lips before a succession of harsher and more violent explosions causes me to look away to the left. There is no hanging back for each other with these! They come altogether in a rush, yet each detonation is separately distinguishable, despite the deep murmur following the resounding, vibrating echo which steals through the undergrowth. I think a battery of our 75's must have urgent work on hand.

By the evening, the cannonade has become far heavier. The whistling shells pass and cross each other's course; the smaller ones furiously maintaining a flat trajectory; the bigger ones sailing past almost slowly, winging through the air with well-nigh dulcet tones. Quite mechanically I raise my eyes to watch them. Every man hearing that noise for the first time, does the same thing.

When we leave the wood these "marmites" are bursting away to our left, near enough for us to hear, after the explosion, the hail of splinters striking the trees.

We remain in our billets as wakeful as on the preceding night, and this is to be my last night with my fat old man. Alas!

_Monday, August 31st._

We set out for the Septsarges Wood again. The day is passed as was the preceding one. Grillon, a regimental barber, shaves me: a sensation which has already become strange to me. Two knapsacks for a stool, a tree for a backrest. I pay him with superfine tobacco, and he would have kissed me! I settle down again for a siesta, chasing the shade.

Towards two o'clock we make a fresh move. We push forward in a north-easterly direction, traversing the whole length of the wood until we reach trenches constructed by the engineers with a breastwork of tree-trunks in front. We take possession of them. A shelter made of branches is reserved for my occupation a little behind the line.

It would hardly have been natural had we not, in the course of our day's wanderings, received a few big Berthas--ten or so exploded in succession not thirty yards from us.

I passed the night in my bower. The branches of which it was constructed had become sun-dried and reminded me of the fact by affectionately digging me in the sides. My improvised mattress would not shake down properly, while the knapsack beneath my head acquired a sudden and spiteful hardness. I was not yet used to it.

_Tuesday, September 1st._

We remain in the trenches. Some belated food is eagerly expected from the kitchen. Very shortly, however, the inevitable complete confusion descends upon us. For the fight is moving along to our front. The Captain has sent word to say that the first line must have been broken through and that we must redouble our vigilance. Porchon, my Saint Cyrien, acting on orders, sends out a patrol away to the left. Hardly have they got clear when rifle shots ring out--we know well Lebels are speaking!--and the patrol tumbles back, scared. It appears they sighted the Boches and fired! My men become restless and anxious; there is a premonition of evil in the air.

Suddenly a shrill whistling bursts out and increases, increases ... until two shrapnel shells explode almost above my trench. I am down on the ground in a moment; and even in the act my attention is attracted and held by the terrified expression of one of the men. The memory of that man's face haunts me now!

Once again a messenger comes up at a run:

"The Captain sends me to warn you that there is nothing now between you and the Germans!"

Is it true? We have seen the wounded coming down ... (Censored) ... A corporal of the 27th, stained and perspiring, his face expressive of his agitation, calls out to inform me that Dalle-Leblane has a bullet through his stomach. Then a great tall fellow, shot through the thighs, goes by groaning. He raises both feet, resting the whole weight of his body on those supporting him. Good comrades those, and true heroes! They carefully set down the wounded man about ten yards from my trench and, having ridded themselves of their burden, make off. So it remains for me to have the man transported, still bellowing, to the battalion first-aid post.

The news reaches me, I know not by what means, that the --th are retiring, mainly on their left. It turns out to be true, for they come to relieve us, and we move back to new positions, five hundred yards to the rear.

Line in sections of fours, in a clearing. The shells begin to burst around us. At the very first explosion, a reservist, a big man, fair and ruddy, turns round sharply to tell me he is wounded. He is pale and trembling violently. I discover that he has been pricked by a thorn as he was bending down!

A second shell, and a street hawker from Ferral is grasping a bleeding wrist. A third: Corporal Tremoult receives the end of someone else's rifle full in the mouth. For a moment he is dismayed; then, his spirit returning, he commences to swear to the point of extinction. This peppering continues.

Night. From afar sound the moans of the wounded. A mutilated horse whinnies in pain. Also there comes to my ears a strange and poignant lamentation--perhaps it is only the cry of a nightbird!

I make the round at eleven o'clock, crippled by the cold. Half an hour has passed since I called Porchon, but I am not yet asleep when the order for our withdrawal arrives. We return to the trenches at Cuisy.

_Wednesday, September 2nd._

We have been here since two o'clock, and settle ourselves down with a curious sense of security and protection. Have they, the Boches, crossed the Meuse in number? Maybe! But, perched on the top of this elevation, we can await them tranquilly. Four days ago a machine-gunner came down to us with a range-finder and supplied me with exact ranges. Should they come, I shall be able to regulate our fire and we shall drive them down before they reach us.

Meanwhile we sleep. The stars are limpid and steady; the air freshens with the approach of day. Crouching right at the bottom of the trench on a bed of dry lucerne, I wrap myself tightly in my greatcoat and doze a little, a doze constantly broken by chill awakings. At last my men, moving about me, succeed in rousing me. I rub my eyes, stretch my arms, and jump to my feet. The sun is rising and already floods the fields with a sea of soft light. I recognize my valley, with the range-points marked to the extreme limits of effective fire.

Many aeroplanes are up--ours bright and light, those of the Boches dark and sinister, but all of them dainty and with the calm unswerving flight of birds of prey.

One or two patrols of grey dragoons are scouting in a field of rye. A few shots coming from the right of us stop them. Before us at the edge of a wood is a vedette of Uhlans, horses and men quite motionless, except when, every now and again, one of the horses, fly-pestered, flicks its flanks with its tail.

Through my glasses, I distinguish two wounded men dragging themselves along a road--two Frenchmen. One of the Uhlans has also seen them. He has dismounted and is moving towards them. I follow the scene with concentrated attention. Now he is close to them and addresses them; then all three commence to move towards a thicket bordering the roadway, the German between the two Frenchmen, supporting them, without doubt encouraging them with words. And there, taking many precautions, the big, grey horseman helps our men to stretch themselves at ease. He leans over them and it is long before he rises; I am sure he is dressing their wounds!...

At two o'clock the shells come whistling over us again. A battery on the crest behind us has opened fire. The firing has endured for perhaps ten minutes or so, when suddenly a German shell bursts not ten yards in front of our trench. Quite automatically I raised my head the second following the explosion--and an invisible something passed growling beneath my very nose. A man near me says laughingly:

"Mind the hornets!..."

I have learnt a lesson. Good! The next time I won't get up before the swarm has passed.

I have not long to wait. Four shells arrive at the same moment, then three more, then ten. This continues for almost an hour. We are all prone at the bottom of the trench, our bodies in the mud, our heads beneath our knapsacks. Between each outbreak of the tempest, the two men to the right of me labour feverishly to dig a niche for themselves in the trench side. They scratch away like a fox in the earth; I can see no more of them than the nails in their boots.

A dark, fantastically shaped, copper-coloured cloud of smoke, irritating throat and lungs, steals down upon us. It has not had time to clear before a fresh storm bursts. One can hear it approaching, irresistible; I feel the terrible shock as the first shell strikes the ground, before being deafened by the succeeding salvo.

During an interval of comparative calm, a noise of someone scrambling and sliding makes me quickly turn my head. One of my men has jumped out of the trench to the left and is running along the front of it towards the right, knapsack on back and rifle in hand, bayonet clinking, mess-tin rattling, cartridges shaking! The water-bottle on his hip beats a violent tattoo. He glares at me with eyes wild and dilated, and then hurls himself bodily back into the trench. Like a thunderbolt he falls right on top of his comrades before they can find time to jump aside. Much shouting and swearing ensues, punctuated by blows. A sudden squall of half a dozen high explosives serves, however, to restore peace among them. The shells fall uncomfortably near us, one indeed not more than five yards from me. For a moment it seemed as if the walls of earth had closed in upon me; a stone, several pounds in weight, catches me fair and square in the knapsack, driving my nose deeply into the clay and leaving me dazed for quite ten minutes.

The sunset is beautiful and soothing. Night falls clear and still. I walk up and down before the trench in a field of lucerne, stopping at the edges of the enormous craters dug by the shells, picking up here and there steel splinters, still warm, or copper fuses almost intact on which are inscribed numbers and abbreviated words. And then I return "home" and stretch myself out on the earth to sleep.

III

The Retreat

_Thursday, September 3rd._

A messenger arouses me. The darkness of night is still with us. I consult my watch in the light of a match: it is only two o'clock! I feel convinced at once that we are going to attack. On a projecting stone the cook has placed my coffee. I drink it in one gulp; it is stone-cold, certainly, but that does not matter very much.

Where are we going? To Septsarges? I believe that must be our destination, until suddenly we branch off the road to the right and head directly for Montfaucon. Already the village appears before us, lining the side of a hill the summit of which is crowned with a church. I can now distinguish with the naked eye the red cross on the white flag floating above the hospital. At the foot of the hill we swing away to the left in a south-easterly direction. It is not to be Montfaucon after all!

For good reason too! Several regiments, the whole division in fact, is under orders to assemble in a ravine situated a few hundred yards from the village. The concentration, however, does not proceed rapidly.

(Censored)

My company, as rearguard, is drawn up at the roadside. It is broad daylight now. How long are we destined to remain here? It was only yesterday we were bombarded at Cuisy!

I identify a distant explosion as emanating from the heavy German artillery. Is the compliment directed to us? The hiss teaches me that the shell is coming directly for us. Instinctively I look towards Montfaucon and see flames and dense smoke spurt out quite close to the church: two seconds elapse before the noise of the explosion reaches us.

That was the signal for pandemonium; shells shrieking, hissing, bursting; tiles falling in showers, walls smashing and crashing to the ground. The earth beneath my feet heaves and trembles; my very skin seems to ripple with the force of the outburst. I no longer know where I am. With a heavy heart I watch the plumes of smoke, black, red and yellow, arising on every side to mingle and form an enormous cloud, ominous, outrageous, drifting above the stricken village.

Ambulance cars with their sad burdens pass; burdens many of whom are very near the portals of death.

Wounded men follow on foot, some of whom are half lying on their crutches, others supporting the whole of their weight on two sticks. A chaplain is with them: he jests and smiles in an attempt to renew their confidence and courage.

An old man and his wife pass by, a piteous sight. The man carries on his back a huge basket full to overflowing; the old woman is bearing other napkin-covered baskets, one on each arm. They walk quickly, their eyes full of distress and fear; and they look back again and again towards their house from which they have been driven forth--their house which by this time, maybe, is no more than a smoking pile of ruins!

Across the meadows strides a farm labourer whose legs are obviously far too long for his body. He is shouting aloud and driving before him ten or more black and white cows. His enormous feet assist him in the task; beneath his cap one detects the malformed head of a crétin.

The column is far enough ahead by this time to permit us in our turn to take up the march. I can still distinguish, far away down the road, the old couple of a short while since--the woman appearing thin and diminutive between her two big baskets, while the old man's basket seems to be trotting along on two ridiculously small and inadequate legs. Behind us, the shells thunder down unceasingly upon Montfaucon.

We march, urged onwards by an indescribable cloud of dust. We are full of high spirits and completely confident that when the time comes we shall give a good account of ourselves; nevertheless, we cannot refrain from wonderingly asking ourselves where are our guns which should be able to silence those of the enemy? Apparently we are being out-manoeuvred; most obviously we are falling back. A certain thought hammers away at my brain until it dominates everything else; it is that we are but straws in the pathway of an overwhelming force!

Only yesterday in the trenches at Cuisy I was watching the German motor-cars rushing on the roads in the plain which had just been a battlefield. The stretcher-bearers, too, were busy collecting the dead and wounded, and over towards Dannevoux the smoke of a fire mounted above the trees--the fire in which they were already cremating their dead. Their aeroplanes floated over our positions, signalling ranges and directions to their gunners. A vedette of cavalrymen acted as observers, defying fatigue, while patrol after patrol came through the fields of wheat and rye.

I pondered these things on this morning, and began to understand how tremendous was the organization which went to create this seemingly irresistible power.

I recalled also how only yesterday I had seen a battalion of Germans assemble between two woods scarcely two miles from our lines. The men had flung aside their coats and commenced, quite unperturbed, to dig trenches, while beside them the smoke of their camp kitchens rose in the air. And I had asked myself then with ever increasing amazement why our so greatly vaunted 75's did not drop a handful of shells in the middle of this group of Boches?

The road is dusty, our throats parched, our feet painful. Passing through Malancourt, which we have already visited once, then Avocourt, we reach the forest of Hesse. At the edge of a ditch lie some mutilated horses, their large eyes filmed and staring, their legs stiff. A white horse, just at the point of death, heavily raises its head and watches us pass. A charitable sergeant sends a bullet through its skull to put a term to its misery; the head sinks, the sides quiver with the last fluttering sigh.

The heat increases steadily. Stragglers line the road, sprawled full length in the strip of shade which edges the woods. Some fall out of the ranks, seat themselves phlegmatically, draw out some bread and corned beef, and placidly commence to eat.

Parois. The slaughter-houses of the Army Corps are here. The blood which has formed miniature lakes in front of the barns dries in the sun, filling the atmosphere with a sickening smell with which mingles the more powerful fumes of iodoform.

A long halt near Brabant, at the bottom of an airless declivity in which one perspires as in a bath. My mouth is burningly dry, I am fevered. I find it impossible to swallow a single mouthful; worse still I find sleep equally impossible.

By the time we reach Bracourt, lights are dancing before my eyes, a strange buzzing is in my ears. I let myself fall on to some straw, my limbs helpless, my head empty as a bell, yet as heavy as lead. I decide to see the doctor!

The doctor's visit. He is a jolly, big man, with black hair and pronounced jaw, whose fine eyes seem always to be witnessing the birth of some new and original thought. He is inspecting the sick and wounded in the porch of the church, distributing white powders, compounds of all colours, opium pills, painting chests with tincture of iodine, lancing blisters full of blood or pus. Two men carry up some poor being who writhes in their grasp, foaming at the corners of the mouth, and uttering savage cries: an epileptic in a fit!

I feel that above all things in heaven and earth I want to sleep. I obtain just as do the others some of the white compounds and a few morphia pills. At the same time I solicit permission to sleep in a barn, rather than in the open outside the village.

By chance I happened to encounter B---- that night. We spoke of comrades of pre-war days, canvassed events still recent, and yet how far off already! The meeting did me good, allaying the fever a little. A few hours' sleep and I woke up as fit as a lark and ready for anything, temporarily at least!

_Friday, September 4th._

Another day's march under a sun which seems to have increased in intensity even since yesterday. Jubécourt, Ville-sur-Cousances. These are full of gendarmes and "forestiers"; staff cars and supply lorries. All that spells retreat.... (Censored) ... Nevertheless, this has not the appearance of being a rout and I seek in vain to understand the meaning of these forced marches, of this breathless rush to Bar-le-Duc.

The most amazing and absurd rumours are flying round. Perhaps the pick of the bunch is the news that we are marching to Paris to maintain order!

Julvécourt, Ippécourt. We halt after leaving Fleury-sur-Aire, and here we eat. Batches of men arrive with huge portions of cheese which looks like Brie. Others are carrying bottles and cans fastened to their belts. The tins begin to rattle.

The grass in the meadow where we are resting is thick and wet. Many of the men take off their boots and walk bare-footed to refresh their feet in the cool greenness. Almost all of us have spread our coats and tunics saturated with perspiration to dry in the sun. Clean shirts and the coloured linings of over-garments are everywhere. The colours dance in the bright sunshine, tiring the eyes.

In the cold and transparent waters of the Aire I wash myself to the waist. Two or three of the men have stripped themselves for a swim. Among them I notice a muscular, brown-skinned swimmer who disports himself vigorously, moving with a stroke which carries him from one side of the river to the other in a few seconds. All along the bank men are dabbling, bending over the water to wash socks and handkerchiefs. Little by little a blue film spreads over the surface and becomes iridescent in the sunshine. We dine gaily in the shade of some trees whose lower branches droop almost into the water. Near us a lieutenant with waxed moustache, arms bare, the open front of his shirt displaying a chest as hairy as that of a wild boar, is standing in the midst of a group of other men and holding forth. The loudness of his voice deafens and overcomes his listeners. At times, selections from his harangue reach me:

"There are two ways to settle them; break through the centre or outflank them on the wings."

Nubécourt. To-day's march has not exhausted me as much as yesterday's. I venture to remind B----, the Maixenter, of a certain night I permitted him to pass in my bed. Poor me! The beast appeals to my good heart, to what he calls my knowledge of the world. He is weary, oh, so weary! and the bed is so narrow! Are there no others to be found in the village? Surely there are many others! I depart without any attempt to dissimulate my annoyance and disgust.

We mess in a kitchen similar to the others I have described--the yellow lights of candles casting weird shadows over everything. A thick-lipped cook serves us with a spoilt and unsatisfying concoction which leaves a flavour like ink in one's mouth.

Long and wearily I seek a bed. But all my efforts as well as those of a flat-figured but good-hearted girl, succeed in gaining me only one hour's sleep. And that hour I passed on some straw in a barn.

_Saturday, September 5th._

Porchon laughingly tells me that the wine-merchant has disposed of the wine we ordered and at a much better price than we offered.

Beauzée-sur-Aire; Sommaisne. It is at this latter place that during a short halt I see the first of the _Bulletins des Armées_.

A family of ducks is swimming about in the Aisne, a mere stream passing through the centre of the village.

Rembercourt-aux-Pots. There is a beautiful church here of the sixteenth century, a trifle flat, maybe, and its lines rather spoilt by excessive richness of ornamentation. Trees line the road; each time we pass through the shade of them I carry my cap in my hand and experience an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and rest. More gendarmes and foresters, still more beflagged motor-cars. This evidently is not the battle front! We pass a hamlet with a tiny station. That is the line doubtless on which to-night we will find ourselves en route to Paris (nothing else but Paris is talked about now).

Condé-en-Barrois. A long string of ammunition vans coming from the village blind us with an opaque dust. The midday halt takes place in a field in which everything is adance in the blinding heat. Some poor devil is brought before the Captain. He is waisted with water-bottles and mess-tins from which peep forth bottles of wine and beer. In either hand he carries a pair of fowls flapping and croaking violently. Moreover, as he is holding a string of a package in his teeth, he finds it rather difficult to render an explanation. The package covers the lower part of his face; one can see only two distressed and tearful eyes. In due course he explains to us in a whining tone that he was arrested in the village at a moment when he was collecting provisions, but that he has paid for everything, that he is an honest man, that he would not for a second dream of stealing so much as a pin, that it is not fair to him. The words "looting" and "court-martial" descend upon his head with the stunning force of a mallet. He is commanded to take his provisions to the cook's quarters. And he departs ruefully, almost hidden beneath his collection of bottles, birds, packages and mess-tins.

I slept for two hours with P---- at the house of a bicycle merchant. The room was upside down, goods all piled up in one corner, yawning cupboards bare. Are the people doing this from motives of prudence, or have they received an order to evacuate?

It is the same in the house where we dine. The prevailing confusion is even more eloquent, for the house in question is more spacious and well built. Nothing in the sideboards; walls bare; the table itself seems lost in the cold solitude of the beeswaxed floor.

It is a feast we find in this village, which is larger than the others we have visited. Up to the present we have only passed through poor hamlets, cleaned out from top to bottom. The men make hay while the sun shines; mutton has been bought for them and they settle down to an orgy. It is long since they have touched wine. They have it now and they abuse it, also cider and beer.

Night has descended when we take up the march again. It is about ten o'clock. The column moves on its sinuous way with many alarms and unexpected halts. I hear behind me the steps of a horse in the saddle of which the Captain of the 8th sleeps fitfully. He rouses himself from time to time to give a piece of his mind to certain men whose copious libations of the afternoon now impel to stop abruptly and frequently. One of these men replies to him impertinently, protesting that it is inhuman to drive men onwards in the way he is doing, and then discreetly vanishes into the ranks before he can be identified.

We are returning the way we came, and we do not stop at the tiny station in the village I had noticed earlier in the day. Are we not then going to entrain at Bar-le-Duc? Do they then intend to let the disorder at Paris continue?

Here we are at Rembercourt, silently marching past darkened houses. We pass the road to Sommaisne on the left and cut across fields towards some woods vaguely outlined against the sky.

IV

The Days Of The Marne

_Sunday, September 6th._

Half-past one in the morning! Kit bags on the ground, rifles piled, lines in sections of four, at the edge of a little wood of birch trees struggling for life on a stony soil. The night is cold. I place a listening post well forward and return and seat myself near my men. The stillness is palpitating; the passage of time interminably long-drawn. The dawn begins to lighten the sky. I look around me and see the pale and tired faces of my men.

Four o'clock. A dozen rifle shots to the right cause me to leap to my feet just as I am making myself comfortable. Out of a small neighbouring wood a dozen Uhlans are flying at a gallop--they must have passed the night in the covert.

The day breaks clear and fresh. My Nubécourt bedfellow produces his inexhaustible flask, and we sip a drop of brandy which possesses no bouquet at all and seems like raw alcohol. The Captain joins us at last and explains the situation in a few words:

"A German army corps," he says, "is marching towards the south-east, having for flank-guard a brigade which follows the valley of the Aire. The --th Corps is going to engage the said German corps, while it remains for us to deal with the flanking brigade."

For the first time I am going to experience war in all its reality!

Facing the Aire, with Sommaisne behind us, the men commence to dig trenches with their handy entrenching tools. They know it is intended that we should fight, and they need no urging to put forth their best efforts. Before us and to the left towards Pretz-en-Argonne a battalion covers us. Through my glasses I see two watchful observers on the roof of a house.

The trenches are finished. They are only deep enough to shelter us kneeling, but that is sufficient.

Towards nine o'clock the bombardment commences. High explosives hurtle by without pause, bursting over Pretz, shattering roofs and bringing down whole walls. My men remain quite calm although they know that a violent and furious fight is immediately before them.

Eleven o'clock and our turn is come. The men deploy instantly. There is no time for reflection on my part; I feel nothing, unless it be that the fevered fatigue of the past hours has now left me. Rifles are speaking close at hand, shells are still bursting in the distance. With a strange detachment I watch the lines of our men blue and red against the earth, advancing and advancing apparently without movement. About me the wheat bows down beneath a heavy, languid breeze, and with a certain feverishness I repeat to myself again and again: "I am in it now! This is war and I am in it!" and I am astonished to see that all the things about me retain their ordinary appearance, to hear the snapping of rifles which is no more than the snapping of rifles. For, on the other hand, it almost seems as if my body had undergone some change, that it is no longer the same, that I experience different sensations with different organs.

"Lie down!"

The bullets are whistling above us now. The rattle of the fusilade drowns their sharp notes; but I know that behind us the song of the bullets dies away to diminuendo and silence.

We commence to advance. The movement is admirably executed, with the same regularity and deliberation as if we were at manoeuvres. Little by little there arises in me an exhilaration which raises me above myself. I feel that all these men are part of myself--these men who, at a gesture from me push forward despite the bullets shrilling towards us seeking chests, faces; the living flesh for billets.

We lie down for cover, we rise with a jump; we run as fast as our legs will carry us straight for the hidden Boches--we long to see those Boches so that we can get at them more surely and chase them far from these fields ruined and trampled by their hordes.

We are completely exposed and under fire. The bullets sing no longer; they pass invisible with a nasty spiteful hiss. They are no longer at play but in deadly earnest.

Clac! Clac! Two bullets have struck immediately to my left. The noise at once surprises and slightly amazes me; these bullets seem less dangerous when they sing and whistle. Clac! Clac! Stones, pieces of dried earth, spurts of dust fly into the air; we have been seen and they have got the range of us. Forward! I am leading, seeking a ditch, a slope, a fold in the earth wherein to shelter my men after the first rush--even the hedge of a field, or anything which will render them less visible to the Boches will do. A movement of my right arm shortens the line by half. I hear the tramp of feet, the rustle of the stubble lying in our course. And while we are running forward the detachment in support fires rapidly but steadily. Then when I raise my cap, that detachment in its turn charges at the double, whilst all around me my men's rifles come into play and speak unceasingly.

A strangled cry to the left. I have scarcely time to see the man sprawl flat on his back, his two legs still moving as though to carry him forward. A second, and all his body stiffens and then relaxes and the man is no more than an inert thing, dead flesh which to-morrow the sun will commence to decompose.

Forward! To remain still would cost us more dearly now than the most furious assault. Forward! The men are falling rapidly, stopped dead in full course, some crashing prone without a word, others halting and staring stupidly, while feeling with their hand for their wound. And they say: "I have got it," or, "Mine has arrived!" Often it is no more than a single expressive word. Almost all of them, even those whose wounds are slight, turn pale at the shock. The impression is borne in upon me that one thought alone is in all their minds; to get away very quickly, never mind where, so long as it be somewhere free from this eternal hissing of the bullets. They seem to me like little children, children whom one would wish to console, to protect. An almost insane desire seizes me to cry out to those waiting ahead of us:

"Do not harm them! You have no right to do so! They are no longer soldiers--they will do you no harm!"

Instead I say to one of the passing men:

"Come along, old man, cheer up! Thirty yards ahead of you, behind that little crest, you will be out of danger ... ah, yes, I know your foot is bad, that it swells. But we will take good care of you in a minute. Do not be afraid."

The man, a corporal, dragging himself along on all fours, stops to look back at me with the eyes of a caged beast. Then he resumes his clumsy, tormented, crablike crawl.

At last I catch a glimpse of the Boches. They are hiding themselves behind sheaves which they push before them; but at least I know now where they are and my men's bullets will therefore stand a better chance of finding an objective.

The advance is resumed and continues without wavering. A great confidence possesses me. I feel that all is going well;--and at this moment a corporal arrives breathless and covered with perspiration:

"Lieutenant."

"What is it?"

"The Major sends me to tell you you are too far advanced. The movement has been executed too quickly. You must halt and await orders."

I lead my section to the shelter of a slight undulation which is no more than a vaguely-defined fold in the earth, but where at least some shelter from the bullets will be obtained. And so we remain there lying flat, awaiting the orders which appear as if they will never arrive. Everywhere, above us, before us, to the right and the left, the shots whistle and hiss and shrill. A few steps from me the bullets of a deafening machine-gun strike the earth in a regular, steady stream. Dust and stones are flung high in the air, and for a moment I feel an almost irresistible temptation to approach that death-dealing squall, and touch that invisible stream of innumerable and minute splinters of metal, each of which can kill.

The minutes drag past long and wearying. I raise myself a little and attempt to see what is occurring. To the left the thin line of riflemen extend as far as eye can reach; all the men are lying behind their knapsacks firing. Behind a wheatfield, twenty men or so are standing to aim better and fire. I can see distinctly the recoil of their rifles and the corresponding jerk of their right shoulders. As the smoke clears for a second, I am able to distinguish Porchon's platoon, and Porchon himself smoking a cigarette. There also is the Saint Maixenter's platoon, somewhat disorganized. Further away again are the men of the 8th. Behind them a little man is walking up and down, erect, nonchalant and quite at home. Who can this reckless individual be? Through my glasses I make out an over-waxed moustache and the blue smoke of a pipe; it is the Captain! Someone had already told me of his attitude when under fire!

The orders, merciful Heavens, where are our orders? What can be the matter? Why are they leaving us here? I make up my mind and suddenly get up. It is imperative I should know what the Boches are doing and where they are at present. Keeping under cover of the sheaves, I mount the gentle slope until I reach the top of it. There before me, four or five hundred yards distant, are men in greyish green uniforms, almost indistinguishable from the greenness of the fields. It is only with the greatest difficulty I can make them out at all.

Quite near their line, but far to my right, is a machine-gun surrounded by men in French uniform firing at triple speed. I determine to bring my men to the top of the slope where at least they will be able to fire.

While I am making my way back to them a shell passes overhead. It explodes among the detachment of the 8th, and a gap of twenty yards is made in their line. The next second other men have filled the gap. A second explosion, another and still another; the bombardment has recommenced. All my men fling themselves flat.

"Oh!..." The cry escaped a dozen of us at once. A high explosive burst clean among the Saint Maixenter's platoon. And he, I saw it distinctly with my own eyes, received the shell full in his body. His cap vanished into space, a part of his coat, an arm. And there he is lying on the earth a shapeless mass, white and red pulp, a body stripped well-nigh naked, shattered. His men, finding themselves leaderless, give way and scatter.

What is this?... Can it be that the confusion is spreading to all the men on the left there? It travels rapidly towards us. Some soldiers are running towards Sommaisne beneath the shells. When each shell explodes it makes a gap among them, blowing away men as you blow away dust with a puff. The confusion has spread to the 8th now. If the Captain were only there, he would be able to hold his men. But a few moments ago I saw him press a hand swiftly to his face. Our covering section away to the left comes next; the bullets have left none to preserve discipline. Now it is the neighbouring platoon. Then suddenly, brutally, we are swept up by the wave: there are the unknown faces of men of other companies round about us mixing with the men and destroying their nerve. A tall thin man, the Captain of the 5th, cries out to me that the commander has ordered us to fight in retreat, that we haven't been supported in time, that we are alone and lost if we remain. And thus is the position abandoned.

With all my power I strive to preserve order and calm, to allay the panic among my men. I march deliberately with arms wide extended, exclaiming:

"Do not run, do not run! Follow me."

All my attention is concentrated on the task of getting my men away to safety with as little loss as possible. One of them near me receives a bullet through his skull while engaged in cutting an opening through some wire; he falls on to the wire and remains hanging there, broken in two, his feet touching the earth on the one side, head and arms hanging down over the other.

Shells follow us, high explosive and shrapnel. Three times I find myself within the deadly cone of bursting shrapnel: the bullets hiss into the earth about me, smashing heads and shattering feet.

We march through an inferno of smoke, from time to time obtaining a glimpse, through momentary clearings, of the village and the river running beneath the trees. But there is no truce to the shells which follow us in hundreds.

I recollect passing one of my sergeants being carried by two of the men on crossed rifles; he pointed out to me speechlessly, his torn and bloodstained shirt and his side terribly lacerated by an explosion. I could see the raw edges of the flesh....

I march onwards and onwards exhausted and stumbling. I take a long gulp of the water that remains in my flask. Since yesterday evening I have eaten nothing.

When we reach the edge of the stream, the men halt and throw themselves down and commence to lap the muddied waters like dogs.

It must be seven o'clock now; the sun is sinking into a bed of virgin gold. The sky above us is a pale and transparent emerald. The earth darkens, colours vanish. It is quite dark by the time we leave Sommaisne. We become mere shadows trailing along the road.

We halt for the first time at Rembercourt. Nothing but sleep seems to matter now, and I fling myself down on the bare earth, calling upon it. Before it descends upon me I hear the rolling over all the roads of the wagons and ambulance vans filled with the wounded; and further away, back in Sommaisne, the smashing of rifle butts against closed doors and the harsh savage cries of the looting Teutons.

_Monday, September 7th._

The morning mist awakens me. My clothes are drenched and drops of water glisten on the mica of my map case. Before us and a little to the left is Rembercourt, whose large church dominates the village in its shadow. From where we are, we can see one side of it in all its length. Towards the left there is a little road which disappears between two slopes.

It is along that road that the Captain and Porchon appear towards ten o'clock accompanied by a handful of men. It appears that they found themselves cut off from the rest of the regiment and passed the night in a wood in advance of the French line. I was able to identify the Captain while he was still some distance off by means of a lance which he carried; it was an Uhlan's lance, captured at Gibercy, and with which nothing could induce him to part. I made my report to him.

As at Cuisy, we dig trenches. Are we going to wait here for the Germans this time? We no longer have the advantage of a valley before us as at Dannevoux, but in the course of the five hundred yards or so which intervene between our new position and Rembercourt, I estimate that should the Germans elect to advance along this road many of them will fall before they reach us.

Towards Beauzée the fight is still in progress. Unendingly little groups of wounded men appear over the last crest and march slowly towards us. Those with arms in slings move more quickly; others drag along, helping themselves with sticks cut in some small wood or other; many halt, then drag themselves a few yards further, then pause again.

During the afternoon I went down into the village. It was full of soldiers ... (Censored) ...

(Censored)

Soon after three o'clock the German heavy artillery commences to shell Rembercourt. At five o'clock the church takes fire. The crimson glow of the conflagration is emphasized as the shadows increase. The blackness of the night makes the church an immense brazier. The wooden framework of the roof is traced out in flames and incandescence. The steeple has become a living fire in the heart of which the dead bells hang black and grim.

The framework of the roof falls piecemeal. One can see the rafters sagging and sagging and then remaining suspended for a few moments above the furnace before falling with a deafening crash. And each time a portion falls in this way, a volcano of clear sparks rises high into the sky to remain drifting and floating like some echo.

For hours and hours I stood watching the fire, my heart sad and heavy. My men are asleep on the ground, lining the trench with their bodies. Try as I will I cannot lie down to sleep like them.

_Tuesday, September 8th._

The Captain roused me I don't know how many times to give me instructions; as a matter of fact I believe it was because he himself found sleep impossible and was lonely with that loneliness which visits men on such nights. Together with his liaison officers he had taken up sleeping quarters in a dense thicket by the roadside. At each awakening I beheld the church still in flames.

This morning the ruins were still smoking. The mass of fire-blackened stone stood clearly defined against a limpid sky.

The men are sleeping heavily ... (Censored) ...

(Censored)

From some woods away to the left a fusillade growing more and more violent each instant rings out. Behind us a battery of 120 mm.'s speak without pausing. And above Rembercourt at long intervals shells burst, half a dozen at a time.

(Censored)

..., lying on a slope when the shriek of the shells announce the arrival of the Germans, then, quite placidly resume their task again.

(Censored)

This morning someone offered me some brandy plums, huge greengages preserved in a narrow bottle, cherries in a thick syrup, green haricots and peas in bottles, as well as some pink sweet-meats arranged artistically beneath laced paper in a pale blue box on the cover of which, inscribed in letters of gold, was the name "Pamphile."

(Censored)

At noon we leave the trenches. Marching in loose columns we move towards the road which runs from Rembercourt to Vauxmarie. All along the road from Erize-la-Petite we encounter the craters the shells have dug in the fields. The countryside is bare and depressing, despite the brilliant sunshine. In a ditch lie some horses, disembowelled, legs shattered, huddled at the bottom of the sloping sides. There were six of them all in a heap, making an enormous pile of carrion, the horrible stagnant smell of which saturated the air. Everywhere there are shattered ammunition carts, wheels in splinters, ironwork twisted.

_Vauxmarie Road._ We take up a position, availing ourselves of the ditch as a trench, ready to support those fighting ahead. There is a great desolate plain before us, ploughed by shells, sown with still bodies and fragments of the uniforms of men with faces turned either towards the sky or buried in the earth, rifles lying beside them just as they had fallen from their hands. To the right the road mounts towards the top of the valley; it is of a dazzling whiteness that tires the eyes. Far before us a number of platoons are lying on the ground in extended order, only to be distinguished with difficulty. They are receiving the full force of the German artillery. Abruptly the shells cease ravaging the uncultivated and shattered fields and come towards us. They arrive shrieking and all together. Nearer and nearer they come, until we are certain they are going to descend upon us. And the men hunch their bodies together, round their backs, thrust their heads beneath their knapsacks, all their muscles contracting in agonized suspense while waiting the explosion of those enormous messengers of death. The bombardment increases in intensity, and now plumes of black smoke are drifting along the hilltop and the noise becomes ear-splitting. Each time a shell falls in the ranks there ensues, in the real sense of the term, a scattering of the men; and when the smoke has dispersed there remain lying on the yellow earth of the stubble field dark sombre patches, forms vague and unmoving. A commander of the gendarmerie mounts the hillside on his bicycle, pedalling with all his strength. He is making directly for the point where the line of the valley touches the sky crowned with its sinister black plumes. Smaller and smaller he becomes, is silhouetted for a moment clear and distinct, and finally vanishes. A quarter of an hour passes before he reappears, a streak, now pedalling back into the valley. He has a message for our commander; it seems that something is required of us.

We are conducted back to the heights of Rembercourt, passing to the right of the village. Here we take cover on a steep slope covered with wild vegetation, extending alongside the orchard which I had seen that morning. The bursting shells almost deafen us. They explode in hundreds, shattering the plain, obliterating the road along which we marched a short time since, causing tiles to fall and rattling the wood-work of roofs. Nor are we forgotten. A few compliments in the form of half a dozen high explosives are generously sent our way. The last of these burst so close to our commander, who was sitting on the slope, that it seemed as if someone had punched him violently and rudely in the back. Under the tremendous force of the explosions the trees of the orchard bend and sway, causing a shower of plums and apples to fall upon us.

We have not been sighted, but the enemy knows the lie of the land so well that he guesses without difficulty the probable location of our reserves, and punishes them by way of precaution. Up to the present, however, all my men have escaped without serious injury, except one who, descending the slope, suddenly mounted into the air to come to the earth behind us. At least ten men received scratches.

Happily we leave before the enemy devotes serious attention to us. At a certain moment, immediately following the arrival of a shell, a messenger rushed out of the village where the Captain had taken up his station. He came running towards us, gesticulating violently. While he was still several yards away he cried in a loud voice:

"Advance!"

Raising my sword I repeat the order.

"Forward! Follow me!"

And I jump down on to the road. Hardly have I taken three steps forward, however, before I hear the shells come shrieking towards us. There is just time for the men to rush back up the slope they had already quitted; in the very act of throwing myself flat the shells explode six at once. A portion of the road rises towards Heaven to descend again in a hail of stones and earth. The smell almost suffocates me as I lie clinging to the earth there, shrouded in dense black smoke. I think that was a narrow escape! A few moments of calm succeed. Now is the time to run: the men come down the slope at their best speed; then, finding ourselves outside the zone of immediate danger and sheltered a little by the village, we mount a rising behind which I know we may hope to find a certain amount of safety.

More shells fall on the spot we occupied a few moments since. My men look at each other, look at me, and congratulate themselves. The narrowness of their escape loosens their tongues. "Ah, the filthy dogs!" I hear. That also is what the messenger calls them when I see him again. On the road he had not sufficient breath left to express his feelings. He had been so near the explosion area that the buckles of his knapsack were shattered, and when afterwards he looked around it was to find himself occupying a post of honour in the middle of a field, innocent of a scratch, while the said knapsack hung gracefully among the branches of a plumtree.

The day declines; we go back once more to our trenches. I met, sitting in a ditch, two cavalry subalterns, one a Hussar, the other a Chasseur, belonging to some detachment or other. I had made their acquaintance at the depot.

(Censored)

Night has fallen and once again we have forgotten to eat. A mouthful of iron rations, a drop of tepid water from my flask, which water has a pronounced taste of tin.--"Still, that is something else the Prussians won't have," as my grandmother used to say.

_Wednesday, September 9th._

Not a wink of sleep. The noise of the shells hurtling through the air is constantly in my ears, while the acrid and suffocating fumes of explosives haunt my nostrils. Scarcely yet is it midnight before I receive orders to depart. I emerge from the trusses of wheat and rye among which I had ensconced myself. Bits of stalk have slipped down my collar and up my sleeves, and tickle me all over. The night is so dark that we stumble over the stones and irregularities of the ground. We pass very close to some 120's drawn up behind us; I hear the voices of the artillerymen, but only with difficulty can I distinguish the heavy, sleeping guns.

Rations are distributed en route with no other light than that of a camp lantern which gives forth but a faint glow. The feeble yellow light stains with brown patches the portions of raw meat cut up in the dusty grass of the roadside.

A march across fields, a march of somnambulists, mechanical, legs light as down, heads heavy as lead. It seems to last for hours and hours. And we are always bearing to the left; at day-break, I assure myself, we shall have returned to our point of departure. Little by little the shadows rise, enabling me to recognize the Vauxmarie Road, the wrecked ammunition carts, the dead horses.

Hallo! The German guns are speaking early this morning! Before us shrapnel is bursting noisily and spitefully. Over the plain they have thrown a barrage. Nevertheless we have to go through it. Our first section detaches itself; in a line, long-drawn and thin, it moves across the fields towards a small wood which the captain has indicated as the objective. Rifles crackle away to the left. Bullets sing and throw up the dust about the marching section. Then shrapnel bursts right over the men. The undulating line becomes still, taking cover behind a ridge of earth shaped like a gigantic caterpillar. I have been given to understand that we are to occupy the advance post, and I await my turn to move forward. The major and the captain are before us, taking cover of some trees, watching. And the captain, seeing his men out there under the shower of shells, finds it difficult to make up his mind to throw us others forward. After a time the commander of the gendarmerie whom I had seen cycling along the road, comes up. He is crimson to the lips and his eyes are savagely glaring. Cursing and swearing violently, he utters a few breathless words.

(Censored)

The captain, turning towards me, said:

"Go!"

So the time is come!

I experience a feeling only of pleasure. I am in the same strange mental condition as when under fire for the first time at Sommaisne. My legs move without volition; I march unthinkingly, conscious only of an all-pervading joy which elevates me above myself and permits me as it were to look upon myself as another being. In five minutes we reach the pine-wood which is our destination. We deploy before it, indeed almost within it. Without waiting a minute, the men set to work with their trenching tools. At the end of a couple of hours we possess a deep and narrow trench. Behind us to the left is Rembercourt; to the right front the tiny station of Vauxmarie.

The heat is enervating and unhealthy. A few clouds drift slowly past, increasing in size little by little and growing darker and more ominous, while the edges yet remain fringed with silver. From time to time puffs of wind bring to us a stench, sickly, penetrating, intolerable. It is as though we were in a charnel house.

All around us are bodies. One there is that is most horrible to look upon. Yet look upon it I must, despite my will. It is the body of a man lying near a shell hole; the head is detached from the trunk, and the blackened entrails protrude from a terrible wound in the abdomen. Near him lies a sergeant, the stock of his rifle still in his hands--the barrel and mechanism must have been blown far away. Another man lies with both legs parallel, yet the foot of one crosses the other; that leg must be shattered. And there are so many others! Our position compels us to look upon them, to breathe that foetid air until nightfall.

And until nightfall I smoke and smoke in an attempt to stifle the soul-sickening miasma, that smell of the poor dead, lost on the field of battle, abandoned by their own who had not the time to throw even a few lumps of earth over them to hide them from the eyes of the living.

Throughout the day aeroplanes hovered over us. Shells fell also. But our captain had had a keen eye for a good place, and while a few explosions came perilously near, we suffered no casualties. At the worst it was a few shrapnel or other shells which burst far too high overhead to cause us concern.

For what reason are the aeroplanes remaining so long aloft up there? For more than two hours they have floated above us, describing great circles, drawing away only when our artillery became too pressing in its attentions, then returning until the black crosses on their wings were easily and plainly discernible. Towards evening they headed directly for the heavy black clouds accumulating on the horizon.

Into those sombre masses the sun sinks, dyeing them crimson at first, leaden as the light slowly fades. The finish of the day is ominous and depressing. The darkness of night settles down almost tangibly, while the stench of the dead bodies rises and spreads.

Sitting at the bottom of the trench, my hands crossed over my raised knees, I hear before and behind me, over the whole plain, the sharp thud of pickaxes against stones, the scraping of spades throwing up the earth, the careful murmur of lowered voices. Occasionally, some man whom one cannot see, coughs and expectorates. The night envelops and hides us from the enemy's eyes, permitting us at last to bury our dead.

The voice of my sergeant calls to me through the darkness:

"Are you there, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, I am here!"

Groping about until he finds my hand, he places something into it.

"Here, sir. This is all we found on them."

Crouching at the bottom of the trench, I strike a match. In the light it sheds for a brief spell, I see a much-worn pocket book, a leather purse, and an identification disc attached to a piece of black cord. A second match! The pocket book contains the photograph of a young woman nursing a baby in her lap; also I am enabled to make out a name inscribed in straggling letters on the disc. The sergeant comments:

"There was nothing on the other--I searched him from his heels to his--his neck--I mean the one whose head was blown off. And there was nothing except the purse which belonged to him."

A third match. The purse contains a little money, a few coppers only, and a piece of dirty, crumpled paper, on which is written: "Gronin Charles, Railway employee. Class, 1904. Soissons." Then the match goes out.

I shake the sergeant's hand; it is damp and feverish, and the fingers are not steady.

"Good-night! Go and sleep! Go on!"

He departs, leaving me solitary and alone in the midst of fast sleeping men. To sleep like them!... To be able to stifle all thought, to forget! In my hand the little possessions of the dead men grow heavier and heavier.... "Gronin Charles, railway employee...." The smiling faces of the photograph dance beneath my closed eyelids, grow bigger and bigger until they become almost a hallucination. The poor, poor people!

_Thursday, September 10th._

Something splashes gently on my face: raindrops large and tepid. Have I indeed been asleep, then? And what time can it be? The wind is rising, but the night is still black. A little to the right front of the trench a dark mass is outlined against the still darker sky. That must be the heaped-up bundles of straw in which the major, the captain and his messengers have ensconced themselves for the night.

I have just settled to sleep again when a few bullets whistle overhead. It seems to me that they come from close at hand. Yet we, being the advance posts, can have no other detachments before us. What does it mean then?

I am not permitted much time for speculation; abruptly, a concentrated fusillade breaks out, every second approaching nearer and nearer and extending the whole length of the line. Without doubt, those are Germans firing, directing a night attack against us.

"On your feet, every man of you. On your feet. Quick. Get up!"

I shake a corporal sleeping near me. From one end of the line to the other a shiver passes, followed by the quick rustling of straw; then bayonets clatter, and magazines click.

All this has passed in an instant, yet I have still had time to see the major and the captain jump back down into the trench away to the right, and scarcely have they done so before black figures are silhouetted, barely discernible against the lightless sky, over the top of the nearest rising. They were not thirty yards away when I distinguished the pointed spikes of their helmets. That sight was more than sufficient. At the top of my lungs I issue an order for rapid fire.

Hardly has the command left my lips when the dense masses of men rapidly approaching us burst into shrill, savage shouts.

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Vorwärts!"

How many thousands of soldiers are surging down upon us then? The moist earth quivers beneath the tramp of their heavy feet. Most surely must we be smashed to pieces, trampled down, broken. For there are not more than sixty of us all told, and how may sixty men extended in single file hope to resist the tremendous pressure of these ranks upon ranks of men rushing down upon us like a herd of maddened buffaloes?

"Rapid fire! Nom de Dieu! Fire!"

The crackling of the rifles rends the air; spurts of flame shatter the darkness. The rifles of my platoon have spoken simultaneously!

And now there is a gap in the very heart of the charging mass. I hear shrill screams of agony as of beasts mortally stricken. The dark figures divide to flow right and left, just as if, before the trench, and extending its whole length, a tempest had raged and laid men to the earth, as the breath of the gale bends down the growing wheat.

Some of the men about me say:

"Look, Lieutenant! See, they are lying down!"

"No, my friend! It is not so. They have fallen down!"

And ... (Censored)

Once more I repeat:

"Fire! Fire! Let them have it! Put it into them! Fire!"

The men reload their magazines swiftly, resting their cheeks ... (Censored) ... and fire a volley at point blank range. Out there, men fall in swathes! The gap widens and widens until no one remains standing before us, not a living soul! But the shadows nevertheless are still moving onwards to the right and left; they intend to outflank, to envelop us. And to the right and left there is not a man to stem for a moment that rushing torrent, which, at the best, we have only been able to check for an instant, and divert to either side. The wave will reform behind us--all will be lost!

"Hurrah! Vorwärts!"

They excite themselves with their own cries, like savages. Their raucous voices rise loud above the crackling rifle fire, toned and modulated in the flux of the wind-driven rain and the louder detonations close at hand. Suddenly the wind has increased; the rain descends literally in torrents: one gains the impression that the fury of the fighters has moved the very heavens.

All at once a flame leaps up, glistening on brass buckles and helmet spikes, turning bayonets to silver. The Germans have set fire to the pile of straw beneath which the major and captain were snugly sleeping a short while since. The flames writhe and waver this way and that at the wind's caprice; drops of rain flying before the glow become like the spray of a rushing fountain. The faces of my men are pale and streaming with water; their eyes, under frowning brows, are dark-ringed and like sparks of steel, expressing at once their eagerness to strike and kill as well as to live.

"First section, right face!..."

Can they hear me?...

"Right face!..."

They do not hear me. The unceasing spatter of rifle fire, the moaning wind, the rain beating a tattoo on mess-tins, and above all, the shouting of human voices drown my command.

"Let me pass, you!"

I thrust a man against the parapet of the trench.

"Let me pass!"

From man to man I progress, calling aloud for the sergeant. One, two, three soldiers I pass, and then before me the trench is empty, abandoned; a little trampled straw, a rifle, a few knapsacks and nothing more. But I am just in time to catch one dark figure of a man hauling himself out of the trench by the overhanging brambles.

"Hey, you!" I cry. "The major? The captain?..."

The wind hurls a few disconnected words into my face.

"Have left ... orders!"

At that moment two helmeted figures appear above the parapet someway further along to the right, two figures silhouetted against the light of the fire. The next instant something falls heavily on to the straw at the bottom of the trench.

Meanwhile behind me the shrieking Germans are right on the top of my men. Obviously there is nothing to do but try and win through to the trenches of a battalion of chasseurs located to the rear and right of our line.

I give the order with all the strength of my lungs.

"Pass through the wood! Not alongside it! Retreat into the wood!"

I thrust forward the men who instinctively hesitate before the dense entanglement of branches bristling with thorns, and I in my turn bodily fling myself into the undergrowth. To the left of my trench ring out oaths and strangled cries. Apparently, some fools afraid of the thorns have hesitated too long and now perhaps have German bayonets in back or chest!

I start to run towards the chasseurs' line. Before me and all around me dark shadows move; and always the same cry rings out:

"Hurrah! Vorwärts!"

I am surrounded by Boches; it seems impossible that I can escape, separated as I am from all my men. Nevertheless I grasp my revolver in my hand and pray only I may be permitted to give a good account of myself.

Suddenly I am sprawling face downwards, nose to the earth, having stumbled over something hard and metallic. Lying in the mud is the body of a dead German whose helmet has rolled a little away from him. Instantly an idea seizes me. I pick up the helmet and place it on my own head, passing the strap beneath my chin to secure it.

There follows a mad flight for the safety the chasseurs will afford. Without hesitating a second, I rush by groups of Boches who are wandering about doubtfully, their original plans having been rather upset by our fusillade. As I pass them I cry:

"Hurrah! Vorwärts!"

Like them, too, I keep repeating the word to which they seem to attach great importance, which is:

"Heiligtum!"

The rain stings my face: the mud adheres to my soles until only with difficulty can I raise boots which have become enormously big and heavy. Twice I fall on my hands and knees, only to rise again and instantly resume my flight, notwithstanding my aching legs. Singing and whistling bullets pass over me into the darkness beyond.

Out of the blackness at my feet a man rises and the words on his lips are French.

"Is it you, Letty?"

"Yes, Lieutenant; I've got one in the thigh."

"That's all right, old man; we'll get there yet!"

Already there are no more harsh voiced brawlers around us. Manifestly they must reform before continuing the assault. So I throw away the helmet and replace my cap of which I have taken good care.

Before reaching the chasseurs I overtake four Boches, in each of whom, either in the back or in the head, I put a revolver bullet. Each one drops in his tracks with a long, strangled cry.

(Censored)

In the chasseurs' trenches I discover twenty or so of my men. They are kneeling in the mud at the bottom, unable to find a place in the firing line.

"Follow me, my boys," I cried.

The Vauxmarie Road is only a few steps away and I place my twenty poilus along the sloping side of a ditch. One and all we feel that all we want to do is to remain there until we die.

Still another outburst of rifles. Flat on my stomach on the water-sodden grass I look upon a second fire the reflection of whose ruddy glow seems to be carved out of the night's opacity--that must be the Vauxmarie farm burning.

Behind us a voice unexpectedly rings out:

"Ohé! Trenches there? Is there anyone of the --th here."

I reply: "Present."

"An officer?"

"I am Lieutenant. Who is asking?"

"It is I, Lieutenant."

A man presents himself to me and tells me he has been sent by Captain C----.

"Come quickly ... quickly, with every man you can find. The flag is near here among the trees and the Captain is afraid that unless he has assistance he will not be able to save it."

We set out instantly following the orderly.

Our trousers cling to our knees and thighs; the long grass pours water into our boots.

We pass a machine-gun section. The men have attached the belt; but they have only one gun and that won't work.

Hoarse cries rise again, increased to the point of frenzy, then weaken and finally die away. The chasseurs are holding fast! One of my men exclaim:

"And _that's_ their stopping place."

Easily I follow the sounds of the fight. All my senses appear to have become abnormally sharp. And so I am able to perceive some vaguely defined dark figures who move silently not twenty yards away to the right of us. I strive with all my force to pierce the darkness, but my eyes are filled with water and fail me. So, motioning with my hand, I say in a low voice to one of my men:

"Look there, Chabeau. Can you see anything?"

"Yes, Lieutenant."

"What is it?"

"Some Boches. They are flanking us."

"Are there many of them?"

"No, not a pile of them."

"Can you count them?"

Two or three seconds and then:

"I believe there are seven of them."

His words confirm my own conclusions. A few stragglers, undoubtedly, who have lost their way in this infernal mêlée of the night. At my order ten of my men face towards the right, and in each one's ear I whisper:

"Wait until I give the word to fire. Do not hurry and aim well."

The Boches have halted, hesitating, undecided; they form a dark group framed in a stillness which seems almost palpitating.

"Fire!"

A spurt of flame, followed instantly by cries of agony and terror:

"Kamerad! Kamerad!"

Only two remain standing and they rush towards me. The younger of them snatches at my hands covering them with tears and saliva. He utters a few incoherent words which reveal the tempest of fear obsessing him:

"I am not a Prussian; I am a Swabian. The Swabians have never done you any harm ... the Swabians did not want this war...."

And his eyes glare into mine in a very frenzy of revolting supplication.

"I have given the French wounded, water. My comrades also: that is what we Swabians are!"

He talks and talks, and always the same monotonous refrain is repeated:

"_Das machen die Schwaben._ That is what the Swabians do."

Then, with ever mounting incoherence, he tells me other things; that he is an electrician, that he can walk fifty yards on his hands ... he would have done it instantly too if I had but given the signal, possessed as he was by terrible fear, tortured by the thirst for life.

The other was passed from one man to another, palpitating and terror-stricken: we had not so far made any other prisoners! My men jeered at him like curious children. They listened with an air of wisdom to the conversation between myself and the German. Not ill-naturedly they amused themselves by causing him involuntarily to hunch his neck down between his shoulders when they placed a hand upon him. And each time, they laughed heartily and boyishly.

All this time the crackling of rifles disturbs the night's stillness; the short snappy reports emanating close at hand, the swift whistling of German bullets from the distance. Nor did the rain cease to fall, plastering our great-coats on to our backs, streaming in rivulets from the peaks of our caps. The wind, however, had ceased to moan. It blew gently now as though appeased, but cold and foxy. The day was approaching and never was the light of day so longed for. I saw once more the battlefield of Sommaisne, bathed in sunlight, clear in outline, rich in colour. And all that night we had been as blind men, fighting gropingly. I shrank from the thought of death in that icy mud, or in those puddles of water into which one stumbled....

How strange everything is. During a brief calm, music, strange, sharp, but rhythmic rings out. That must be the German bugles taking up their message and approaching nearer and nearer all along their lines. I turned to my Boche and asked:

"What is that?"

He bends his head, places his hand behind his ear to listen and replies:

"Halt!"

Truly enough the firing begins to die away little by little. A few more violent outbursts succeed, and then there is silence, except for stray shots here and there, which echo with curious loudness in the motionless, cold air. The stillness that follows seems almost menacing. It falls over the scene of battle like an immense mantle--it is a portentous silence, as though willed by some mysterious powers of evil: pregnant has the night been with human anguish and suffering.

The advent of the wan day does not lighten our spirits; a faint luminance, whitened and cloud-flecked, appears above the horizon, moving slowly towards the zenith. Storm battalions move languidly across the pale sky. The day is false to its season, presaging as it does, and so long in advance, the coming of winter. It is like one of those cold days which invariably arrive inopportunely to shatter the illusion of spring, just when one has commenced to delight in the new year's rush of life.

Not for a moment does the rain cease; steadily and stubbornly it falls now, swamping us and penetrating our clothing. One of the Germans remarks to me in a tone of familiarity:

"I am freezing!"

With hands in his pockets, elbows pressed close to his sides and shoulders hunched up, he is shivering while lounging at ease.

The minutes drag slowly by. At daybreak the Colonel appears, his cavalry cloak stiff and heavy with mud. About a dozen prisoners are brought before him. I bring mine up also. The electrician will not leave my side, but clings to me desperately in a renewed access of terror, haunted probably by a vision of himself back to a wall facing a dozen levelled rifles, ready at word of command to place a dozen bullets through him.

There is a junior officer among the prisoners, whose lips and chin are hidden by a curly beard. He understands a few words of French, and, as the Colonel questions him, he stares directly back at him through slitted eyes and answers:

"Yes, monsieur."

"Not monsieur, but Colonel!"

The words, uttered in a sharp voice, are accompanied by a meaning glance. The Boche flinches as though he had received a cut from a stirrup leather. He draws himself up, arms to the body, shoulders squared, stiffly at attention.

Captain C----, who is present, turns to me:

"I do not think I shall need you any longer. Do not wait, but try and find your captain and the rest of your company."

(Censored)

Hardly have we set out on the march, when a few shots sing over us. Quick volleying succeeds, until the crackling of rifles again covers the whole plain.

"They are starting again, Lieutenant," says Chabeau.

It is true; they are starting again, and, what is more, as hard as they are able to. "Fire on and always, my Boches," I murmur, "that is what you are best fitted for. You dared attack us hand to hand and man to man, only under the cover of night, and even for that you paid dearly, as you well know!"

I catch sight of a line of men, some thirty or so, away to the left. They represent, apparently, all that survive of a section. They are moving swiftly forward, stooping instinctively beneath the hail of lead. At the head of them marches an officer, slim built, bearded, yet of boyish appearance. Is it not Porchon?

I strike across towards him with all speed. I am certain now it is no other than Porchon. And he also has seen me and is approaching me. He is the first to utter the very question on my own tongue:

"Do you know where the Captain is?"

"No! Are you also looking for him?"

"And you! Then let us march together, old fellow."

We range our men in skirmishing formation and set off. All the while the bullets are whistling and spattering about us. Chancing to turn my head to one side, I suddenly detect an officer, sitting, the sodden ground notwithstanding, in the middle of a field. As he catches my eye, he waves his arm. I have an idea that he is shouting to us, but the infernal noise prevents me hearing what he says. I take a few steps in his direction, unexpectedly to find it is the Colonel. Turning to Porchon I shout the news aloud:

"It is the Colo! I am going to see what he wants ... look after my men, will you? ... you understand?... Take my men.... Can you hear me?..."

He nods swiftly, turns and continues steadily on his way towards the rising, beyond which one can hear the noise of hard fighting.

Saluting, I present myself to the Colonel.

"Second-Lieutenant of Reserve."

He nods, smiling, and glances towards a puddle metamorphosed temporarily into a muddy fountain by a bullet.

"Reserve--or the Line! Ah, well, I fear bullets take no heed of such distinctions!"

He stares at me long and fixedly, as if engaged in weighing my invisible merit in the scales, and then explains clearly and rapidly exactly what he expects of me.

"All my orderlies are busy on some mission or the other. I wish you to find, without loss of an instant, Colonel G----, commanding the brigade, and ask him, in my name, to send to me here as many men as he can possibly spare of the --th. Tell him we are in contact with enormous effectives, that our losses up to the present have been very heavy, so heavy, in fact, that I am afraid my regiment is no longer capable of holding on.

"He must be near Hill 281, a mile to the north of Marats-la-Petite. Do everything in your power to find him, not losing a second, and impress upon him how urgent is my necessity for immediate reinforcements."

"Very well, mon Colonel!"

With the bullets humming in my ears, I set out at a speed which sends the mud splashing all over me, from head to foot. The old sense of elation is upon me, impelling me forward, forgetful of the night's happenings, impervious to fatigue--I must find the commander of the brigade and obtain the assistance so desperately needed, from him. There is no room for other thought than that in my brain. Happily, I do not dwell on the weight of the responsibility thrust upon me in this unlooked-for fashion; my burning desire is to succeed in my mission, nothing more.

I have already started away at a run when the Colonel receives a bullet in the forearm. With his other arm, he imperatively motions to me to keep on my way.

Skirting the base of a steep slope, I pass through a fire zone where the bullets in hundreds, whining and shrilling, tear up the soil all about me. Then I encounter a group of men, standing at the foot of a tree. There is a dying officer in the centre, supported against the tree-bole. A glimpse I have of a dark blue tunic wide opened, of a shirt stained with bright blood. The wounded man's head sags heavily down to his shoulder, and in the whitened, tortured face, moist from fearful agony, I recognize my own major.

But I must not stay!

My heart is thundering within me; there is a sharp pain between my shoulders; there is a rending pain at the small of my back. And my legs! Every other minute violent cramp paralyses thighs or calves, sending me sprawling to the earth, where I lie gasping and panting for what seem eternities, striving to fight it back. My sodden clothes become almost fantastically heavy, and the weight is for ever increasing. To the very tips of my fingers I feel the irregular, violent pulsing of my arteries; my cloth-covered sword scabbard pricks my hand.

On the top of a rising alongside the road is a road-mender's hut. Behind it, a section of dismounted chasseurs is drawn up. It opens out into skirmishing order and sets off briskly and confidently for the scene of the fighting.

I take a steep declivity at full speed. Once or twice I fall full length in the mud. Another slope is negotiated in a sitting attitude. At the bottom of it I stumble, bruised from head to foot, into a little wood, where some soldiers stand, waiting orders, leaning on their rifles. Still more dismounted chasseurs! They too deploy, ascend the slope, and march unflinchingly into the inferno. The fight rages continuously behind me, as well as away to the left.

For the third time I encounter dismounted chasseurs, formed up in sections. And one after another these sections breast the rising ground, reach the summit, where for a moment they remain clean-cut and distinct against the sky, and then plunge downwards into the heart of the fight.

Another steep descent! I take it lying flat on my back, creating a veritable avalanche of stones and rubble. This deposits me in a well-sheltered, luxuriant little ravine. Almost irresistible is the desire that springs up in me to stretch myself full length among the fresh, fragrant grasses, to bathe my fevered face in the moisture, to lie still there and forget.... In a panic I force myself to my feet, afraid of losing grip!

A 77 drops neatly into the hollow and explodes at the bottom of it. I receive a tremendous and disconcerting shock, while about me fragments of steel and lead plough and tear up the earth.

In response to a command, some chasseurs suddenly appear at the edge of the ravine, and roll down exactly at the point where a few moments earlier I had descended. One of them jumps down, his legs quite stiff, blood trickling out of one of his boots from a smashed leg.

"How pale you are," says a second-lieutenant who comes up. "Are you wounded?"

"I don't think there is anything much the matter with me," I reply. "A bunch of shrapnel caught me in the knapsack fortunately."

The wounds of the injured soldier are dressed. A second man lies prone and still, a bullet through his brain.

Shells are hurrying over us now, carrying their shrill messages; a good number burst a little before us, and the echo of their harsh, metallic explosions is flung from one side of the ravine to the other. At each explosion huge, torn fragments of steel fly high above us across the sky. Columns of yellow smoke, dense and heavy, drift slowly through the still air, until they encounter the pines whose branches part and disperse them.

"Do you know where I can find Colonel G----?" I ask the chasseur lieutenant.

"Not exactly! Somewhere close at hand, I think. But the major will be able to inform you of his whereabouts."

I find the major to be quite a young man, tall, with an expression at once frank and resolute. He listens to my mission and says:

"That is quite all right. You will find the Colonel behind that wood there--at least he was there less than an hour ago. Some of the --th are entrenched on that slope.

(Censored)

... "Go along, and good fortune go with you!"

I am pretty well exhausted by this time. Only some internal exaltation sustains me. This hollow is endless ... this hill steep beyond imagination! Up at the top some men are moving about and talking. I tell myself to run onwards ... but all I can do for the moment is to rest on my sword and slowly drag one swollen foot after the other. The pain in my back has become intense. Nevertheless I must go on. One final effort and I shall have reached my destination. Onwards!...

(Censored)

The men I totteringly approach have assumed the dimensions of giants. They possess enormous, unbalanced bodies; they are monstrosities who dance before my burning eyes. With a gentle, sustained power, the mud itself seems to draw me towards them.

Forward!... But I can no longer move forward.... The light is failing.... Ah, what an unfortunate devil I am!

Someone raises and carries me with strong, careful arms. The sensation is good. Then some burning liquid scorches my mouth and throat, and instantly causes me to open my eyes. Close to my face, a voice asks:

"How do you feel now?"

"It is nothing at all," I say weakly. "Fatigue! no sleep ... nothing to eat. Been fighting all night. It is all right!"

I am lying in a trench covered with muddy straw. Near me is a lieutenant and several men. It is the former who just spoke to me and who presses whiskey upon me from his flask.

I look at the collar of his coat and see the number of the regiment I have been seeking.

"Ah! So I have found you," I cried. "Is the whole regiment here?"

The abruptness of my question takes him back for a moment.

"Yes, that is so! Didn't you know?"

"I should say I didn't, seeing that I have zig-zagged all over the countryside for you and Colonel G----. We hadn't the slightest idea where to find you at the advance post and for hours we, unsupported, have been at grips with more Germans than you could count in a week.

"You are wanted very badly indeed over there. Do you know where he is--Colonel G----?"

"In this wood, I believe. He has taken up his position somewhere before those batteries you can hear firing. It should be possible to see him from here."

He raises himself and looks about.

"I can see him no longer, but he has been here for a long time past. They will certainly be able to tell you over there where he is gone."

I thank him and ask before leaving: "Just one more drop of '_Gniole_,' if you can spare it. I am very badly in want of a stiffener."

I take a long gulp of neat spirit and set off towards the 75's which are growling together in the wood.

When I reach them I find the artillerymen absolutely overjoyed. They are working their guns at a speed and with a precision and enthusiasm which greatly impresses an infantryman such as I am. One has scarcely time to perceive the small copper shells which are gallantly waging their part in this long distance duel. They pass before the eyes in a thin line, red and yellow, instantly to vanish into the breech, still smoking from the last shot. And the next second the gun hurls its shrapnel message with a report imperious and gay as though delighting in the glory of the spurting flame and the heavy smoke drifting away in a column. The artillery-men run, jump and gesticulate about their gun. Most of them have flung aside their coats and rolled their sleeves to their elbows. They are one and all in high spirits, joking and laughing boyishly. With my mud-stained clothes, with my pale and lugubrious face, my advent has an effect similar to that of an owl suddenly alighting in the midst of a flock of sparrows. But their happiness is contagious, and little by little I feel my own spirits rising. They give me the impression that something happy has occurred. I question a lieutenant who is marking the fall of the shells through his glasses, shaking from head to foot the while from excitement.

"Things going well? Eh?"

He turns towards me. The joy which fills him is plainly legible in his face. He laughs exuberantly:

"I should say they are going well. The Germans are giving way--deserting their positions like rats a sinking ship."

He laughs once more. "Listen to our 75's! They are making them dance like madmen! That is the way to carry on, what? They are being kicked in the sterns now, the swine!"

A staff captain on foot is watching the delighted gunners. He laughs also and repeats several times in a loud voice: "Good! Very good!"

I approach him and in a few words inform him of what was befalling half an hour ago over towards Vauxmarie on the Erize road. I repeat to him my wounded colonel's words, indicate the course I have followed, express my joy at having finally reached my destination, and add:

"I should, however, like to see Colonel G----, as I have been sent to him."

The Captain pauses before he replies kindly:

"You go and get some rest now. The --th are no longer needed. Nor will you be wanted for a little while. You have done well."

Then he informs me that my regiment has been withdrawn from the firing line and is being re-established a little to the rear. On his map he indicates the point of assembly and afterwards shakes me warmly by the hand.

"_Au revoir_, young man," he says. "Sleep well, eat well, keep yourself fit. You will want all your strength to keep fast on the heels of the Boches."

My heart leaps within me.

"Then, Captain, we have won a great victory?"

"I do not know ... not yet. But truly it will be so if all our rascals have progressed since Sunday as these have."

A surge of joy sweeps through me--a curious warmth, sweet, fervent and strong. Oh, that this may be true, that it may be true! The nervous tension under which I have laboured for hours past breaks suddenly. I feel strangely small and weak, and am obsessed by an insane desire to cry without constraint.

In the background, the 75's aligned along the edge of the wood continue joyously their triumphant salvoes. But the rattle they make now sounds queerly afar off, as though my head had been enveloped in a thick hood of wadding. Beneath my feet the soil, strewn with wet pine-needles, becomes elastic, enabling me to walk without effort. And so I leave the Captain, walking slowly, already forgetful of my recent travails, blind to the things about me.

Visions of those who are dear to me dance before my eyes. I can see them as though in life smiling tenderly upon me. They give me a sense of being protected, watched over, soothed. I can even hear their familiar voices speaking rather solemnly but caressingly, nevertheless.

"Be of good heart. It is only the passage of the cruel moments such as those of yesterday, of to-day, and maybe those of to-morrow which, bringing victory, shall reunite us."

(Censored)

Before rejoining my regiment I have to pass along a road leading from one of the Marats to the other. Near Marats-la-Petite I discover a first-aid post, and show the surgeon my back, which has become still more painful. The post consists of a dimly-lit barn, containing several seriously wounded men lying on straw. One could scarcely distinguish the outlines of their bodies and could only hear their groans emanating from the gloom. The floor was littered with pieces of cotton wool stained with blood, dried and brown, or freshly crimson.

"You must rest," the surgeon told me. "The shrapnel has not penetrated, but you have some really famous bruises."

I discovered my regiment bivouacked in a meadow near a stone culvert bestriding a large ditch full of water.

Porchon is there, also the Captain.

(Censored)

Of the 5th Company there survive about 50 men only. And only a few more of the 6th. Not a single officer remains. They were stationed further ahead than we were that night, and the darkness, the confusion, the rain, enabled the Boches to enfilade their trenches, marked during the day by those large aeroplanes with the black crosses. It was a white-handed massacre, the disgusting exploit of assassins who stab in the back.

The Germans in question belonged to the 13th Army Corps, and were for the most part Würtembergers. They had been made drunk with alcohol and ether--such at least the prisoners had avowed. In the knapsacks of some of them were found incendiary pastilles, and many of my men assured me that they had seen a number of Germans burst into flame from head to foot when struck by a bullet, and continue to burn like torches.

A march across inundated fields or over roads whose puddles reflect the wan sky. I walk in the rear of the company with the Captain, who moves onwards with long, slow steps, his inevitable lance marking time against the pebbles. Two prisoners march alongside us. The Captain, a man of Lorraine, from the neighbourhood of Sarrebourg, gossips with one of them, I with the other. He is a gardener from Esslingen, near Stuttgart. I chat with him about these towns which I know well. A certain confidence having been established between us, he offers me his tin of meat. I accept it without exhibition of much pride; it is certain he will be given something to eat to-morrow, and as for us, maybe we shall get nothing. I divide the booty with my orderly and two of my men. It was excellent, that meat, surrounded with a transparent jelly. ... (Censored) ... Bread is lacking, but that does not matter. The meat suffices to fill a void.

Halt at the edge of a wood on a slope. Dead leaves from last autumn still lie about, and here and there are some quite freshly yellow which the convulsion of the night has stripped from the branches.

As company after company comes up the men hail one another, laughing and congratulating themselves on having escaped. Sitting amid the undergrowth, they eat what they have got. Those who have been wise enough to preserve at the bottom of their knapsacks a tin of meat have become kings. The others roam about in their vicinity, tortured by a covetousness which is plain in their eyes, burning with a desire to commandeer, yet not daring so far. Fortunate, too, beyond their fellows are those who have found in the knapsacks of captured Germans small sweetened biscuits. Many men raid the fields, returning with carrots and terrific turnips which they cut up with their pocket-knives and swallow voraciously.

A night dull and cold. Lying on the bare earth of the slope, I am constantly freezing. The stones which form my bed penetrate my flesh and make me as uncomfortable as if I had as many wounds. A nightmare haunts me. It concerns the loss of my flask by one of my men who should have brought it to me filled with water, but whom I cannot find anywhere. Deeply do I regret having teased Porchon because he left his sword among the straw of his trench, while I contrived to save mine! I have my sword, I have my cap, I have my knapsack, but no longer have I my flask. And that is a loss that renders the future dark and gloomy. Still sleeping, I recall the exquisite taste of the few drops of tepid water I swallowed that night at Sommaisne, which were as balm to my arid, burning throat; I recall the spirit I gulped that very morning, and which built up anew my declining strength ... no longer a flask! What a misfortune!

_Friday, September 11th._

"Attention! Fall in!"

We depart. Ten or so "marmites" burst behind us over a wood not very far away. The Boches must have smelt us hidden beneath the trees. There is just as much water in the fields as yesterday--puddles, pools forming miniature lakes, and microscopical rivers running between upstanding ridges.

We encounter more woods and lose our way among the dense growth, vividly green by reason of the recent rain. We stumble through ditches, grass-choked, and thrust a way through interlacing brambles which push their shoots into the middle of the path. From the heart of the wood ring out monotonously the sharp trilling and twittering of many birds at song. Occasionally, a blackbird rises and flies before us, but so low that it is almost able to touch the earth with its claws; in the breeze its wings create the leaves rise and flutter. Above our heads a break in the clouds forms a lake, blue, limpid and deep. All is stillness and peace.

But when we leave the wood the world has become grey and depressing. We splash across a marshy field in which guns and ammunition wagons are drawn up, plastered with mud to the axles, and tarnished with splashes. There are the entrails and soft skins of sheep lying in little round piles in the puddles. Bones are scattered about, to which fragments of rain-washed meat are still attached, and they serve to give the bare field the semblance of a charnel-house. A road crosses it, shining with stagnant water and bordered until lost to sight by dejected-looking trees. And over this unelevating prospect, leaden rain-laden clouds hang low and drift one into the other, until the little lake of blueness is completely veiled from view.

We are at Rosnes. It is a village alongside the road. It serves to make me think rather pathetically of all those houses which have not yet suffered bombardment, of those barns even, which contain hay, hay soft and fragrant, in which one can find warmth and comfort.

We leave Rosnes behind us and, marching easy, slowly ascend a steep rising, finally to arrive on a plateau covered far and near with thick growth. The breeze passing over it gives it the appearance of a mysterious and noisome pond whose icy surface is ruffled by autumn winds.

At Captain C----'s invitation, a meeting of officers takes place. It is he who, at Gercourt, distributed the men of our detachment into companies. And now here he commands the regiment, since the colonel and the chief of the first battalion are wounded, and those of the second and third are killed. It is only then I learn that for several days past the 3rd Battalion has been commanded by the officer of gendarmerie whom I saw on the morning of the 9th, when he ran up shouting at us and at our major because he hesitated to throw us out over a bare plain swept by machine-gun fire. He had died magnificently.

Captain C---- addressed us in his unimpassioned voice. He congratulated us and told us he relied on each one of us. We were worn out, but it was necessary to keep going and preserve appearances before the men, in order to maintain their courage so long as the present hard times continued; to prevent them, by the exhibition of our own energy and enthusiasm, from succumbing to the temptation of grumbling and complaining.

From the expression of the faces about me, from the serenity legible in each man's eyes, I gathered we were all ready to face the future, whatsoever it might contain. It almost seemed we leaned on each other for support, true brothers by the common faith within us. A grace exalted and fortified us.

Thus my captain became my battalion chief and Porchon my company commander. I was well content, because the passage of each day had brought Porchon and myself nearer each other. I know him to-day to be a man open and frank to the last word, ambitious to show himself just, but indulgent in all things, and brave with that simplicity which exalts courage. Moreover, I love his good humour, his never failing laugh, the ardent life in him. To be gay and light-hearted, to remain so under the sharpest physical sufferings, even when devastation and cruel death break or snatch away the men or human things about you; to remain constant before these assaults which strike more at the heart than at the intellect, is for a leader a hard but sacred duty. Porchon had perhaps taught me this. No longer did I wish to deaden my senses in order to render my task the easier. I was eager to confront all the demands of this prodigious and unnatural world into which I had been suddenly cast; I no longer even sought to escape those duties which seem to lead one to certain death. And these things would be easy to achieve if only I could attain something of that good humour which I sedulously sought to possess as one sets out to conquer a virtue. Porchon would assist me.

We set off together to settle the location of the trenches which our company must construct. Our men set to work with tools obtained from a park. The picks quickly break up the brown, heavy soil. It is raining, but the task is not difficult. The men sing and jokes fly about--probably because the first section has already been called up for the distribution of rations!

They have descended towards Seigneulles, a village close at hand at the bottom of the valley. From our position we can see the regimental carts pointing their shafts towards us, tilted and supported on garden fences. Further away, emerging from a lake of greenness, is a small group of houses, and the cock on a church steeple.

Soon now along the roadside the fires begin to smoke. This evening we are going to eat cooked meat and hot potatoes. We shall have straw for our beds and a roof to shelter us from the wind and rain. Who cares for to-morrow since life to-day is so good!

_Saturday, September 12th._

Heavily and dreamlessly I sleep, and awake to find myself in precisely the same attitude as that in which I flung myself down the preceding night. The straw wraps me in grateful warmth, rather moist, perhaps, because the water in my saturated clothes has evaporated during the night. Above me I can see the rafters of the roof from which dusty spider-webs hang; for the moment I am amazed to find myself thus snugly ensconced beneath a roof, instead of the usual branches or the bare sky to which I have become accustomed. The rain trickles softly and gently over the tiles. The sound intensifies my sense of comfort, and it pleases me to think that I have slept in warmth and comfort, despite the never-ceasing downpour.

But the rain exacts its revenge in the course of the day. For duty compels us once more to climb up to the plateau to complete the trenches commenced the day before. We find that in the night the torrent has well-nigh filled them with liquid mud. Some sappers, however, come to our assistance, and, thanks to them, we are able to shelter ourselves from the worst of the downpour; they hastily construct a thick roof of baulks of timber covered with earth.

The men work easily, flinging jests one to the other. The incidents of the night attack are revived and acquire a totally new force by reason of the simple words in which they are related.

"I was all right at the beginning," says Martigny, one of my men. "But all at once, while I was still firing, down toppled a Boche right on top of me, without so much as a "by your leave!" I was on my knees and he lay across my calves. It's not easy to fire in such a position as that! Little by little the weight forced my knees down into the mud; the water rose almost up to my hands: how was I to refill my magazine? I could not see the animal, but you can take my word for it, he was heavy."

And a second:

"A good job for me that I was once fencing-sergeant in the regulars! Otherwise I should not be here now. Not even time to fix my bayonet before I found one of the ugly pigs on top of me with his skewer. I thought to myself: 'What's all this about? But you are going to find you can joke once too often, my Boche!' And there we were all in and at it. I parried a thrust with the stock of my rifle, but what sort of defence could I put up, seeing that my weapon was much shorter than his? Only he didn't manage to get his bayonet into me!... There wasn't even a cartridge! I tell you that Boche kept me jumping from side to side until I felt like dying from weariness. You know what a job it is to parry, when you can no longer feel your own fingers? Still jumping, I said to myself: 'What in the name of glory are those asses right and left footling about? Are they going to stand by and see me knocked out?' Oh! but they were there all right, and it was Gillet to the right who put a bullet into him while he was pausing to take a breath. Then I stuck on my bayonet and filled my magazine. There were others still coming up, you understand!"

"Sons of pigs, these Boches!" rasps a miner from the North. "And what mugs they are too, _Mon Dieu!_ When I saw them swarming over towards me, 'Martin,' said I to myself, 'you're done for this time!' And then: 'Hurrah!' they're off! Bang, bang, bang! And I knew no more."

"Martin, you are babbling," grunts a huge Champenois, who is smoking his pipe and listening with eyes atwinkle. "Hammer away at the earth, seeing that is what you were born for; but don't mix yourself up in conversations, because you can't talk."

He spits on his hands, rubs them against each other, and taking up his pick starts digging again with long, steady, powerful strokes.

Eight o'clock in the morning and nothing before us but a day of rest. We do not go down to the village, however, until four o'clock in the afternoon. Then we hastily erect temporary shelters against the weather, building them of pointed stakes, branches and bundles of straw. The rain sweeps down obliquely, driven by a westerly wind. Men lie face down in the straw through which course streams of rain. Many of them fall asleep, and when they wake after their short siesta, the straw has left on their cheeks crimson furrows which look like scars.

The plateau, covered as it now is with little huts of straw erected in less than an hour, has all the appearance of a gipsy encampment. The Captain's stick thrust in the ground before one of the larger of these shelters indicates Headquarters. He's pretty certain to be there himself, although there are no signs either of him or of his messengers. Through the rain-mist, indistinct figures occasionally drift across the deserted plain without giving it life. The rain makes them vague, colourless, almost formless. Gradually they draw away into indistinctness, finally to disappear so abruptly as to leave one puzzled and mystified. A second before they were visible; they are no longer so now; and there remains only the drenched plain on which our straw huts appear like strange unhealthy excrescences.

Between two showers, Porchon appears before me. He carries in his hand a can in which there is something smoking and steaming. He offers it to me with a plainly self-satisfied grin.

"A fine company, mine, what? Everything in stock you can possibly want. Smell that, old man, and fill your nostrils well before drinking it."

To my amazement the contents of the can prove to be cocoa, which duly disappears. I can recall nothing since leaving the depot which has tended to create such a sense of comfort within me, such a sense of well-being, security and peace. Can we indeed be at war? Can one reconcile the thought of war with steaming, boiling cocoa? My astonishment lasts longer than the fragrant liquid.

"Where did you find that?..." I asked.

Without replying he draws from his large pockets a brandy flask, a sausage and two pots of jam from Bar-le-Duc. These jams gave the show away.

"I know!" I exclaimed. "You've run across a peddling grocer from Bar?"

And while speaking, a vision I had often seen on the roads at home comes to me, and I add with a tone of deep conviction:

"He had a little wagon with oilcloth curtains, and there were bells on the horse's collar."

Porchon's eyes opening wide told me I had guessed correctly ... (Censored)...: "...."

In the evening we go into the village. I stroll slowly towards the barn where my section is billeted. In the square, a group of noisy soldiers is gathered before a house which has nothing in particular to distinguish it from its neighbours. With much pushing and stretching of necks they are contriving to scan a big placard stuck on the wall. Of course, I can't be left out when there's something to be seen, though actuated by nothing but sordid curiosity.

The first word that encounters my eyes, however, gives me a violent shock. I can see nothing else but that word, which instantly seizes upon my excited imagination and seems to presage things marvellous, superhuman, incredible. The word is:

"Victory!"

It sings in my ears, that word. It echoes through all the streets, it bursts on me like a triumphant fanfare.

"Victory!" Thrills pass through me, enthusiasm seizes upon me and stirs me so violently as to make me feel almost sick. I feel that I am too small to contain the emotion to which the sacred word gives rise.

"_The retreat of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd German Armies is becoming pronounced before our left and centre. In its turn, the enemy's 4th Army is beginning to fall back to the north of Vitry and Sermaize._"

So that is it, then! We have been progressing everywhere. We have grappled with them, badly torn them, wounded them! Oh! that it may run and run, that German blood, until every particle of strength shall have streamed out of them!...

In the light of this news other things become simple and clear to me. That endless retreat of the first days of September, those forced march