Once the half-regiment was reconstituted after a fashion, though many
were missing (a detachment of fifty men without horses having returned
to the depot), we were attached to the 3rd Cavalry Division, which
happened to be in our neighbourhood, ours having left the area for some
unknown destination. Until the 1st of October our lot was bound up
with that of the 4th Cuirassiers, who marched with us.
On the 23rd of September, as supports for the artillery, we were
present at violent infantry actions between Nesle and Billancourt. The
4th Corps attacked, and the furious struggle extended over the whole
country. My troop was detached as flank guard and, in the thick morning
fog, we knocked up against a handful of German cavalry, whom, in the
distance, we had taken for our own men.
We charged them at a gallop, and we noticed that they were tiring and
that we were gaining on them. One of them drew his sabre and cut his
horse's flanks with it, whilst a non-commissioned officer turned and
fired his revolver without hitting us; but, thanks to the fog, they got
away. We did not tempt providence by following them too far for fear of
bringing up in their lines.
At night we were sent to reconnoitre some fires which were reddening
the horizon and which, from a distance, seemed vast conflagrations. We
came upon a bivouac of Algerian troops, who were squatting on their
heels, warming themselves, singing strange African melodies and giving
to this corner of French soil an appearance of Algeria.
On hearing the sound of our horses they sprang to arms with guttural
cries, but when they had recognised that we were French they insisted
on embracing our officer and danced round us like children.
We billeted at Parvillers in a half-destroyed farm, and there at
daybreak a sight that suggested an hallucination met our eyes. Some ten
German soldiers were there in the courtyard dead, mowed down by the
"75," but in such natural attitudes that but for their waxen colour
one could have believed them alive. One was standing holding on to a
bush, his hand grasping the branches. His face bespoke his terror, his
mute mouth seemed as if in the act of yelling and his eyes were dilated
with fear. A fragment of shell had pierced his chest. Another was on
his knees, propped against a wall, under cover of which he had sought
shelter from the murderous fire. I approached to see where his wound
was and it took me a moment to discover it, so intact was the corpse.
I saw at last that he had had the whole of the inside of his cranium
carried away and hollowed out, as if by some surgical instrument. His
tongue and his eyes were kept in place by a filament of flesh, and his
spiked helmet had rolled off by his side. An officer was seated on some
hay, with his legs apart and his head thrown back, looking at the farm.
All these eyes fixed us with a terrifying immobility, with a look of
such acute terror that our men turned away, as if afraid of sharing it;
and not one of them dared to touch the magnificent new equipment of
the Germans, which would have tempted them in any other circumstances.
There were aluminum water-bottles and mess tins, helmet plates of
shining copper and sculptured regimental badges dear to the hearts of
soldiers, and which they have the habit of collecting as trophies.