On Wednesday morning another messenger got through with orders to
advance. From that corpse-strewn wood there emerged a band of men that
might have been taken for theatrical desperadoes. Uniforms in shreds,
coats gone, shoes gone, knees sticking through trousers legs, and
elbows through sleeves, all plastered with mud to a uniform gray, like
khaki; wild-eyed with hunger and reckless now, everyone’s nerves on
edge, cursing, weeping, mad, ready for anything except more inaction!
_Forward!_ The men, famished as they were, yelled at the sound of that
welcome word. Anywhere, out of that infernal wood—anywhere, through any
hell, to get at the enemy! Forward they went on the run like hounds
after hare, and the run warmed them up. The sun came out and they
raced on, steaming. “We didn’t mind the shells at all, then,” said
Coco. “Lying on the ground waiting for them at Bertrix we had nothing
to do but be afraid—but now we had no time. All we thought of was to
get at those cursed ‘Bosches’ as fast as we could.” And so through the
bursting shells, across the wide field to rising ground.
It was there, on that hillside, they got a sight of what had happened
during those deadly days along the Marne. First, rows and rows of
twisted, limp-lying Frenchmen, dead for long, thrown by the shells
into horribly fantastic groups; and sickening heads and limbs lying
scattered alone. Bodies everywhere, mostly resting face up to the sky,
eyes open, staring. In places they were stretched regularly in long
straight lines; on other fields the corpses were dotted all about
singly. “One had to jump over them every minute,” said Georges. Further
on, the French dead were mingled with Germans, piled sometimes four
high like a football scrimmage.
Then, in a sparsely wooded tract they passed the relics of a bayonet
fight—fearful! Apparently, the French African troops had chased a
battalion of retreating Germans up against a wall, and the bodies were,
well—the “Turcos” do not stab merely in the breast—they do not stab
merely to kill—they stab anywhere, they stab joyfully, like demons.
More and more German dead were passed, leaped over, even trod on where
the way was narrow, and still the thundering of cannon came from every
side. It seemed as if the whole world were fighting—as if all the old
quiet ways of life had ceased to exist, even in memory. Still they
pushed forward, marched to the west of Vitry-le-François, crossed
the Marne on a pontoon bridge at Blacy under a rain of rifle fire,
and hurried through a beet field for a crest above the long, white,
poplar-lined national road at Couvrol.
The “Bosches” were in retreat! A motorcyclist, racing from Vitry to
Châlons with dispatches, had stopped to yell out the news.
As Georges struggled desperately up through the soft loam, his view was
extended over the country about the Marne. Here, on those same wide
rolling plains, Attila and all his Huns had fought his ancestors when
France was but a nucleus of scattered Roman settlements; and here that
horde had been defeated and driven back to their wildernesses. Now, no
matter in which direction he gazed, he could see the modern barbarians
strewing destruction. Puffs of smoke were in the air everywhere, but
thickest about Vitry-le-François.
The shells from the French “75’s” burst beautifully with a cloud of jet
black and white. The fleecy snowy-white puffs, gray red in the center,
showed where the shrapnel sent its shower of leaden balls. But, oftener
than all the rest, came the droning “_marmites_” of the German big
guns, bursting with heavy thunder in a sudden reddish flash, changing
into a spume of drab smoke, edged with white.
To the westward, village after village was smoking. Machine guns were
spitting, crackling along the roads, volleys of rifle fire snapped from
every wood. Up and up went the Twentieth Regiment, till it came to the
top of the little hill.
Smack-bang in their faces, a salvo of bullets greeted the men. Another
volley, another! Georges, staggering back, taken by surprise with the
others, as men dropped all about him, caught sight on a low hillside
beyond of a deep gray mass of men extended in battle front only a
hundred meters away. There, waiting to hold back the advance, was at
least a full regiment of infantry—one of those hundreds of little rear
guards that were left absolutely unsupported, to cover the German
retreat, and to fight to the death without hope of success.
The Twentieth, rallying instantly, shouted a defiant answer to the
German “Hurrahs,” and sent its volley into the enemy. Beside Georges,
a man named Charles Griffe, one of the few of his friends left from
Toulouse, suddenly fell, clasping his hands over his head as he
crumpled down. The sudden excitement seemed to hypnotize Georges. “The
blood seemed to boil in my head,” he expressed it. He didn’t hear the
command to fix bayonets at all; the first thing he knew he was running
like a machine, yelling with the others, down into the ravine and up
the other side, and always with the horror of those points of gleaming
steel ahead, climbing zig-zag up the slope toward—what? It seemed
impossible to go against that row of sharp bayonets and live.