For two hours the Twentieth Regiment endured the storm of shell. To
advance a regiment of infantry like that without artillery support
was surely an incredible piece of criminal stupidity. Some one had
blundered. But there were many blunders in those early days of the
campaign, and the truth hasn’t all come out even yet.
One interesting fact, however, did come out; although Coco didn’t
hear of it for several days. It was a piece of sublime sentimentality
impossible in any other than a French army; quite consistent with the
character of the romantic, high-spirited colonel who had orated so
grandiloquently at the Toulouse railway station. The night before the
battle of Bertrix, the colonel had done a strange thing; he had, in
the presence of his staff, burned the regimental colors. The enemy was
in countless force against him. His Gallic sense of honor, when he was
ordered to attack an impregnable position, told him that there was only
one thing to do. He must go forward with his men, and die—but the flag
must not be captured.
And so, go forward and die he did, that gallant old man. As Coco lay,
under that August sun, in the rain of bursting shells, he heard a
bugle ring out on the left flank. Four companies rose to their feet
and charged that murderous wood. At their head the colonel ran, waving
his sword—yes, just like the battle pictures, Coco swears—ran for
a few hundred yards toward his inevitable death, and dropped—with
his honor unsullied. Behind him his men dropped, too, in appalling
numbers—dropped singly and in bunches till they faltered, stopped, then
fell back.
At this, the whistles blew at last for the general retreat.
It was high time; for, at the sight of this destruction all over the
field, men had already begun to jump up and run toward the rear. Now
they all ran—everybody ran—with the shells and shrapnel chasing them.
They threw away their knapsacks, they threw away their guns, they ran
screaming and crying like children.
Coco threw away his knapsack and musette, too, but kept his rifle as
he ran, making for a shelter in the woods on the other side of the
road. “You’ve no idea how much worse they were, those shells; when I
had turned my back I expected to be hit every moment. My spine fairly
cringed.” The remnants of the colonels four companies were pulled
together and attempted to cover the retreat. But the regiment had
stampeded. The officers shouted and swore, they struck men with their
swords, some were even shot, but nothing could stop the rout.
X
It was more than a rout, it was a panic. Into the wood the shells
followed them—there seemed to be no escape. Every moment they expected
to see the uhlans charging them down. Dodging this way, that way,
deafened, shouting over here—over there—the shells dropping to right,
to left, as if from the clouds, the men, breathless, exhausted, poured
out upon a road, to stagger back almost run over by a clattering
battery of guns galloping, too late, galloping toward the firing line.
They stopped to pant, and rest; and then ran on.
In half an hour they were out of the range of the German artillery, and
they halted exhausted, shamefaced, sick with terror and despair. The
officers, too heartbroken even to swear at them, reformed their men
with difficulty, and, herding them like frightened sheep, fell back in
something like order till they came upon a line of trenches that had
been occupied by the Germans.
The pits were filled instantly, and the men were beginning to regain
their calmness and courage, when from a near-by hill the terrifying
cannonade recommenced. The butchery recommenced—the explosions, and the
screams.
Out of the trenches came all that were left alive, and there was no
stopping the army now, till, hurrying all night long without food
and rest, demoralized, it found its way back to Mouzon. Here the
Seventeenth Corps was pulled together for a hasty review. The roll
call showed that in Coco’s regiment there were 1,443 dead, wounded, or
missing—fully one-third of its strength gone.
The men were in a fury of disappointment and rage against the generals
who had been responsible for the massacre. Where was the artillery?
Where were the stretcher bearers? Where were the ambulances and
surgeons? Not one did Coco see during the battle, after the battle—nor
even during that whole terrible retreat.
And it wasn’t at Mouzon alone that there was wondering, complaining,
raging at the failure of the campaign. On the left wing the British
expeditionary force, hot with rage at not being supported by General
Percin, was falling back from defeat at Mons to pursuit at Bavay—and
it was not yet out of danger. On the right, the Fifteenth Corps (fat
cowards of the Midi) had turned tail and run in Lorraine. Oh, there
was something rotten somewhere. Paris was wild. The Government was
shuffled, and the President dealt out a new hand—his high trump was
Millerand, new Minister of War, but his right bower was Joffre,
commander in chief, of whom all the world was soon to hear. To Coco
at Mouzon, the news came that the Fourth Army was to be commanded by
General de Langle de Carry. Little did Coco care who commanded it. Much
more important than that was that he would get one night’s good sleep
on a sack of straw.
By this time the boy had begun to realize what war meant. That night
he wrote to his aunt: “I have received my baptism of fire, but I am
unhurt. It was terrible. Don’t be frightened, and be sure and write to
my mother that you have had good news from me.” He signed the post card
for the first time “Georges.” Coco had begun to be a man.
If it has ever been your lot to go without having your clothes off for
two weeks—to march through dust and mud in them, sleep in them, fight
in them, run in them—then you’ll understand how Georges Cucurou longed
for a swim in the river Meuse—to bathe his poor, aching blistered
feet. But no—up and out again at six o’clock next morning! Off on the
road toward Belgium again. A counter-attack. All day and all night they
marched.