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.
XVIII
So much Georges told me; more he would not tell, at first, except that he thought the Germans stopped firing at about thirty meters distance, and began to sing the “Wacht am Rhein.”