ILLUSTRATIONS
| PAGE | |
| “He’s Hit,” Sergeant Lace Cries Suddenly. And Indeed He is Hit | [Frontispiece] |
| Remains of Villages near the Lines | [36] |
| A Poilu | [56] |
| A Sinister Grumbling Seemed To Shatter The Fog | [110] |
| The Front Line Trench | [154] |
| A Commandant’s Post | [166] |
| The Least Dangerous Passage is the Unprotected Ground | [186] |
| The Attack | [226] |
Note.—These photographs are all copyrighted by International Film Service, Inc.
COVERED WITH MUD AND GLORY
CHAPTER I
THE SEARCH FOR MY COMPANY
I remember the exact date and I have reason to, for on that Monday, February fifteenth, I joined the second company of machine guns of the ... first Colonials at the front. It was snowing and the fields of Picardy were one vast white carpet on which the auto-trucks traced a multitude of black lines to the accompaniment of pyrotechnics of mud.
Two days before I had left my depot in a small garrison town in the center of Provence, which lay smiling in the sun and already bedecked with the first flowers of spring. At Lyons I found rain, at Saint-Just-en-Chaussee, snow, and I got off the train in a sea of mud.
In the dim light of a February dawn, the station at Villers appeared to be encumbered with the supplies of half-a-dozen regiments. My car was high on its wheels and at the end of the train farthest from the unloading platform. At the other end of the platform near the entrance to the station, I found a rolling bridge for unloading animals, but it was useless to ask those busy people to help me push this weighty contrivance to the car.