He had brought his regiment in the middle of the night—it was in the first month of the war, on the 22nd of August, 1914—to the junction of those three roads one of which ran from Belgian Luxemburg. The Germans had taken possession of the lines of the frontier, seven or eight miles away, on the day before. The general commanding the division had expressly ordered that they were to hold the enemy in check until mid-day, that is to say, until the whole division was able to come up with them. The regiment was supported by a battery of seventy-fives.
The colonel had drawn up his men in a dip in the ground. The battery was likewise hidden. And yet, at the first gleams of dawn, both regiment and battery were located by the enemy and lustily shelled.
They moved a mile or more to the right. Five minutes later the shells fell and killed half a dozen men and two officers.
A fresh move was effected, followed in ten minutes by a fresh attack. The colonel pursued his tactics. In an hour there were thirty men killed or wounded. One of the guns was destroyed. And it was only nine o'clock.
"Damn it all!" cried the colonel. "How can they spot us like this? There's witchcraft in it."
He was hiding, with his majors, the captain of artillery and a few dispatch-riders, behind a bank from above which the eye took in a rather large stretch of undulating upland. At no great distance, on the left, was an abandoned village, with some scattered farms in front of it, and there was not an enemy to be seen in all that deserted extent of country. There was nothing to show where the hail of shells was coming from. The seventy-fives had "searched" one or two points with no result. The firing continued.
"Three more hours to hold out," growled the colonel. "We shall do it; but we shall lose a quarter of the regiment."
At that moment a shell whistled between the officers and the dispatch-riders and plumped down into the ground. All sprang back, awaiting the explosion. But one man, a corporal, ran forward, lifted the shell and examined it.
"You're mad, corporal!" roared the colonel. "Drop that shell and be quick about it."
The corporal replaced the projectile quietly in the hole which it had made; and then without hurrying, went up to the colonel, brought his heels together and saluted: