The camp of Mailly was a busy place. At the aeroplane sheds the biplanes and Blériots were constantly going and coming, circling in the air, or making ready in long rows upon the level field. The vast plain was filled with troops of all sorts in seemingly inextricable confusion: chasseurs, on horseback, in pale blue tunics, the Alpine chasseurs, with drooping blue berets on their heads, and leggings; cuirassiers with their breastplates and long horsehair plumes, and zouaves with embroidered jackets and baggy red trousers. The Twentieth Regiment, tattered and tired, with many heads bandaged and many with69 feet through their shoes, dusty, hollow-eyed, marched past, not yet too despairing, as fresh troops greeted them, to cry in answer “Vive la France!” They were not boys now, they were soldiers tempered in the crucible of war. And among them marched Georges Cucurou, with a Prussian helmet tied to his knapsack with a shoestring—a Prussian helmet with a hole through its brass front!

Already rumors were flying fast from column to column. Why this concentration of troops? Why this wide circle swung around the camp of Mailly? Mon Dieu! could it be that they were to retreat no longer? That, at last, they were to make a stand? A hope like a gaining fire sprang up and swept from man to man.

It was early in the morning of Sunday, September 6, that on the heights south of Mailly the regiment was assembled for re70view. To the accompaniment of an incessant, raging bombardment from the German cannon, the colonel read aloud this message from General Joffre, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces:

Children of France, the hour of the great battle has arrived! Lift up your hearts! If you wish your Country everlasting honor, let every man die at his post, if necessary, rather than surrender another inch of ground, and the victory will be ours.

It was not Gallic sentimentality now. It was the voice of a le............