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,74 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, the75 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-Fran?ois, crossed the Marne on a pontoon bridge at76 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.
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