The shells began to fall thicker and faster; the Germans were
indubitably near at hand. But where the devil was the regiment? There
was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from
those harrying shells. Chilled, the boys ran through the dripping
woods till they came to a clearing. Here, looking down, they saw the
Germans fording the Meuse! But not without trouble; a French battery
had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging
shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel. By dozens they melted away
under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting
downstream.
“We just burst out laughing,” said Georges. “We couldn’t help it. Not
that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but,
after all _we_ had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been
butchered at Bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘Bosches’
suffering themselves at last!”
He didn’t laugh long. With the German reckless sacrifice of life,
column after column was thrown into the river, until more and more got
across. It was time for the boys to be moving now, and they set out
toward the westward, tramped all day, eating nothing but the raw beets
they dug up in the fields, and finally found the Seventeenth Corps at
Raucourt.
They were just in time to join their regiment as it was ordered forward
seven more miles for a new engagement. There, protected by the French
batteries, they bivouacked. Glad enough was Georges of a chance to
sleep. No fear of the coming battle could keep him awake by this time.
At dawn, while the vigilant searchlights were still playing across
the opposite hillside, the French guns started firing, and, without
breakfast, Georges’s battalion was ordered forward. In half an hour the
enemy was discovered half a mile away. In the valley between opposite
hills the shells were screeching now over their heads—from the French
“75’s” the sound of the whizzing projectiles came high and dry like
buzz saws—they burst with the awful battering of near-by thunder.
The German “_marmites_” snorted through the air, and exploded with a
deeper, more terrible crash. The regiment halted, and was deployed in
four ranks—the first two lying on the ground, the third and fourth
kneeling.
The men were mostly quite cool, but Georges confessed that he himself
had hard work controlling his nerves while he waited for that attack.
In ten minutes the enemy appeared from behind rising ground and came
on—a long, gray-black line of thousands and thousands of men, a _thick_
line, swarming, multitudinous, nearer and nearer.
“Load!” coolly commanded the captains; “500 meters. Ready, now—_fire!_”
Their salvo rang out. The heavy rows of Germans seemed to hesitate for
a moment; but no, they were only stopping to fire. There came a sudden
whistling in the air all about and the bullets flew—“for a terribly
long minute,” as Georges described it—then the enemy came on again,
and kept on coming, in a broad, thick wave, company after company.
And only a battalion of four companies to resist them! Georges fired
without aiming. What was the use of aiming at that horde of men? The
boys jumped to their feet, fired again and again, and then, as their
comrades dropped about them everywhere, they began to retreat, some
picking up the wounded as they went. At first they withdrew in order,
turning back to fire another volley; but when the Germans fixed their
bayonets and came at them on the double-quick, the French broke, and
ran for it, helter-skelter, this way and that, in a second rout, even
worse than the first.
Georges ran with the rest, and the shrapnel followed him, killing
men on either hand, in front, behind. Then, over the rise, came the
uhlans, yelling, galloping in to cut them up. Looking back, Georges
saw the cavalry sabering and lancing, and he ran like a deer for his
life, ran up the hillside, ran into the woods. He ran for at least a
mile with the thunder of the cannon still in his ears. When, finally,
he stopped to take breath, it was only a fragment of his company that
he found near him—some ten or eleven men, among them a sergeant. Where
were the others? Nobody knew. The regiment, demoralized, had split
up into numberless terrified detachments, and wandered all over the
countryside. Such was the inglorious battle of Raucourt. Of the week
following Georges could give no consecutive account. He remembers
only that he and the others tramped and tramped for miles inquiring
of peasants, gendarmes, of the stragglers, everyone, everywhere, the
whereabouts of the Twentieth Regiment. They climbed over hills, they
rested in little deserted villages where every house was gutted of
furniture, doors open, rooms littered, and here and there a starved cat
or two, lean and wild. The roads were alive with refugees, French and
Belgian, all plodding mournfully toward the south, dreary processions
of wagons and cattle and weeping women, children, and stony-eyed, sulky
men. No, nobody had seen the Twentieth Regiment.
They tramped from Villers to Malmy, and, apparently (Georges isn’t
quite sure where they _did_ go), from Malmy to Maire. At Le Vivier,
or perhaps it was Mont Dieu, they found an infantry regiment, but it
was not their own. The Twentieth should be down Vouziers way, said the
officers. So they trudged on.
More and more stray men had joined Georges’s party. Few of them
had knapsacks, some didn’t even have guns. Hats of all kinds;
costumes—promiscuous but all disheveled. They were, by this time, a
villainously whiskered lot—ragged, dirty, weary, famished, sullen,
desperate—without discipline, without leaders. Occasionally, in some
ransacked village they found stale bread or vegetables that they cooked
in the woods; whatever else they ate was begged from the few frightened
peasants that still remained on their farms.
There was one village, however, that Georges did remember, and that was
Les Alleux. There he slept in an actual bed. How Les Alleux happened
to be abandoned with all its houses undisturbed—with the clocks still
going and the furniture in place, even the beds made up—Georges doesn’t
know. Some sudden alarm had evidently caused the inhabitants to fly at
a moment’s notice. What mainly interested him was that they had left
their barnyards full of poultry.
Les Alleux was almost gay. There were some hundred soldiers collected
there, now; all tatterdemalion stragglers from the rout, making the
most of their unexpected good luck. There was almost everything to
eat except bread. Georges fairly gorged himself on hot roast chicken
and cheese, made merry with the rabble of soldiery, sang, smoked, and
then slept for twelve solid hours, with his boots off on a delectable
feather bed _and sheets_. And, for once, without the din of cannon in
his ears.
This, however, was hardly the way to save his country. Georges’s
conscience and the booming of German guns awoke him to his duty next
morning. The mob scattered, fleeing south in a hurry. Georges’s party,
he found when they started, had grown smaller. “I don’t know whether or
not I ought to mention this detail,” he told me, “but at least it will
show that I wasn’t quite so bad as the rest. But I think some of the
boys found citizens clothes in the houses there at Les Alleux, and got
away in them. At any rate, they didn’t come along with us.”
His Odyssey ended at a village called Pauvres on the highroad between
Rethel and Vouziers. Here they found what was left of the Twentieth
Regiment, and Georges was welcomed like one from the dead. All received
new rifles and accoutrements, and the regiment was reorganized. Of its
three battalions there remained hardly enough to form two—a third was
made up of waifs and strays from other divisions.