The Forest of Swords: A Story of Paris and the Marne

by Joseph A. Altsheler

A great crisis may call into being a great impulse, and de Rougemont's words were at once accepted as truth by all the young aides. Words of fire, words vital with life had gone forth, predicting their triumph, and as they rode among the troops carrying orders they communicated their burning zeal to the men who were already eager for closer battle.

The storm of missiles from the cannon was increasing rapidly. John now distinctly saw the huge German masses, not advancing but standing firm to receive the French attack, their front a vast line of belching guns. He knew that they would soon be within the area of rifle fire and he knew with equal truth that it would take the valor of immense numbers, wielded by the supreme skill of leaders to drive back the Germans.

The guns, some drawn by horses and others by motors, were moving forward with them. When the horses were swept away by a shell, men seized the guns and dragged them. Then they stopped again, took new positions and renewed the rain of death on the German army.

They began to hear a whistle and hiss that they knew. It was that of the bullets, and along the vast front they were coming in millions. But the French were using their rifles, too, and at intervals the deep thundering chant of the Marseillaise swept through their ranks. In spite of shell, shrapnel and bullets, in spite of everything, the French army in the center was advancing and John believed that the armies on the other parts of the line were advancing, too.

The bullets struck around them, and then among them. One aide fell from his cycle, and lay dead in the road, two more were wounded, but two hundred thousand men, their artillery blazing death over their heads, went on straight at the mouths of a thousand cannon.

Companies and regiments were swept away, but there was no check. Nor did the other French armies, the huge links in the chain, stop. A feeling of victory had swept along the whole gigantic battle front. They were fighting for Paris, for their country, for the soil which they tended, alive, and in which they slept, dead, and just at the moment when everything seemed to have been lost they were saving all. The heroic age of France had come again, and the Third Republic was justifying the First.

The battle deepened and thickened to an extraordinary degree, as the space between the two fronts narrowed. John for the first time saw the German troops without the aid of glasses. They were mere outlines against a fiery horizon, reddened by the mouths of so many belching cannon, but they seemed to him to stand there like a wall.

Another giant shell burst near them, and two more members of the staff fell from their cycles, dead before they touched the ground. That convulsive shudder seized John again, but the crash of tremendous events was so rapid that fear and horror alike passed in an instant. A piece of the same shell struck General Vaugirard's car and put it out of action at once. But the general leaped lightly to the ground, then swung his immense bulk across one of the riderless motor cycles and advanced with the surviving members of his staff. Imperturbable, he still swept the field with his glasses. Two aides were now sent to the right with messages, and a third, John himself, was despatched to the left on a similar errand.

It was John's duty to tell a regiment to bear in further to the left and close up a vacant spot in the line. He wheeled his cycle into a field, and then passed between rows of grapevines. The regiment, its ranks much thinned, was now about a hundred yards away, but shell and bullets alike were sweeping the distance between.

Nevertheless, he rode on, his wheel bumping over the rough ground, until he heard a rushing sound, and then blank darkness enveloped him. He fell one way, and the motor cycle fell another.