Ten minutes later it becomes insistent:
“Where are you?”
At eight o’clock, having had no reply, or having been unable to decipher it, it confesses the agony of its suspense:
“We do not hear your artillery. The enemy is plying us with gas and liquid fire attacks. Our situation is as bad as can be.”
At last, at nine o’clock, this signal is transmitted to it: “Don’t lose heart. We shall soon attack.”
Roland, as he was dying, heard Charlemagne’s trumpets. They are so distant, but their music is so sweet. He starts up, he listens, he motions to death to wait awhile. But the French must make haste! Already the shades are closing in around him and his speech grows thick.
All day the fort waits. When night falls, it shows signs of impatience. Will not this coming night be the last? will it not be wrapped in its lethal winding-sheet? The opening of the message that it sends is unintelligible, the rest already has the tone of a funeral oration—it speaks of its defenders in the past tense:
“... preceding day. It is essential that I should be delivered this evening and that a fresh supply of water should reach me at once; I am very near the end of my tether. In any case, the troops—officers, N.C.O.’s, and men alike—all did their duty up to the last.”
Is this not a final farewell? Is it not the death-rattle that precedes the end? And now, amid the formidable bombardment which from this side and that overwhelms the hill with iron and flame, one of our searchlight stations gets hold of these fragmentary signals:
“... 53 ... wounded ... aspires ... losses.... You will intervene before we are utterly exhausted. Long live France!”