Fouquet struggled up out of the curious apathy. He cleared his throat, made several attempts to speak and finally blurted out.
“You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot! But there are the children—and a first-line trench full of dead Huns—without a mark on them! Barres was flying over us—he saw the Battalion—knew them for old comrades. The women—all of them saw the faces of their dead! I don’t believe it, sir,—but how did we do it? The women never thrust once in the first trench—the children haven’t a wound—that’s got to prove it!”
He stopped abruptly—looking from one to the other with a gesture of hopeless protest. The Americans regarded him with puzzled eyes.
“Was it some new trick of the Huns? God knows they’ve given them to us in plenty! Can you tell us—it might—?”
Fouquet pulled himself forward, his knuckles whitening with his grip of the table edge.
“You know the history of the section of the Front the Avengers retook to-day?”
“No, Major Fouquet. We came in later, with the Canadians.”
“It began with the great retreat of 1914, sir, when the Germans were driving us back toward Paris. They had crowded our army against the river. Between the slow crossing and their terrible artillery fire, new to us then, we faced annihilation!”
There was a rustle at the door of the dugout and a whispered password. Fouquet did not pause.
“To the —nth Battalion was given the honor of acting as rear guard. Ah, sir,—” his voice steadied—guttural with pride and emotion, “our men stood like a barricade of rock against which the waves of German infantry dashed themselves, only to break and be withdrawn for re-formation. Each receding wave showed where it had bit into the red and blue barrier, for we were wearing the old uniform then, but the bits slid together, closing up the gaps to stand against the next flood. When the eroded wall went down, undermined and over-whelmed at last, the main army of France was across the river and safe.