AEROS CONSTANTLY ABOVE
"The German aeroplane service was perfect. An aircraft was always hovering over us out of range. We were certain within an hour after we sighted an aeroplane to get the howitzers among us. Whenever we fired, however, we did terrific execution with our seventy-five pieces of artillery. I counted in one trench 185 dead. Many of them were killed as they were in the act of firing or loading.
"The ground occupied by the Germans was so thick with dead that I believe I saw one soldier to every two yards. You might have walked for a mile on bodies without ever putting foot to the ground. They buried their dead when they had time, piling fifteen or twenty in a shallow pit."
THE FRENCH IN ALSACE-LORRAINE
On August 9 the advance guard brigade of the French right wing, under General Pau, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, invaded Alsace, fought a victorious action with an intrenched German force of equal numbers and occupied Muelhausen and Kolmar. The news of the French entry into the province lost in 1871 was received all over France with wild enthusiasm. The mourning emblems on the Strasburg monument in Paris were removed by the excited populace and replaced by the tricolor flag and flowers in token of their joy. Muelhausen was soon after retaken by the German forces, only to be recaptured later by the French and then evacuated once more.
On the day of the first French occupation of Muelhausen France declared war against Austria in consequence of the arrival of two Austrian army corps on the Rhine to assist the main German army.
After the French occupation of Muelhausen a large German army was sent to the front in Alsace-Lorraine and succeeded in dislodging the French from that city, but not without severe fighting.
Two weeks after the war began the French defeated a Bavarian corps in Alsace and for awhile General Pau more than held his own in that former province of France. On August 21 the Germans drove back the French who had invaded Lorraine, and occupied Lunéville, ten miles inside the French border.
About the same time the French reoccupied Muelhausen, after three days' fighting around the city. Another French army was reported to be within nineteen miles of Metz, But before the end of the month the French had been compelled to evacuate both their former provinces. They continued during September, however, to make frequent assaults on the German frontier positions, but without regaining a sure foothold on German soil, the bulk of their efforts being devoted to the defense of their own frontier strongholds.
FIGHTING AROUND NANCY