"'Arise, ye dead!'
"He got on his knees, and began to fling his bombs into the crowd of Germans. At his call, the other wounded men struggled up. Two with broken legs grasped their rifles and opened fire. The hero with his left arm hanging limp, grabbed a bayonet. When I stood up, with all my senses about me now, some of the Germans were wounded and others were scrambling out of the trench in a panic. But with his back to the sand-bags stayed a German Unteroffizier, enormous, sweating, apoplectic with rage, who fired two revolver shots in our direction. The man who had first organized the defense of the trench—the hero of that 'Arise, ye dead!'—received a shot full in the throat and fell. But the man who held the bayonet and who had dragged himself from corpse to corpse, staggered up at four feet from the sand-bags, missed death from two shots, and plunged his weapon into the German's throat. The position was saved, and it was as though the dead had really risen."
IX—STORY OF THE FRENCH DRAGOONS
A young Russian officer in the French dragoons told me that he had been fighting since the beginning of the war with never more than three hours' sleep a night and often no sleep at all. On many nights those brief hours of rest were in beetroot fields in which the German shrapnel had been searching for victims, and he awakened now and then to listen to the well-known sound of that singing death before dozing off again.
It was "Boot and saddle" at four o'clock in the morning, before the dawn. It was cold then—a cold which made men tremble as with an ague. A cup of black coffee was served, and a piece of bread.
The Russian officer of French dragoons, who has lived in British colonies, saw a vision then—a false mirage—of a British breakfast. It was the thought of grilled bloaters, followed by ham and eggs, which unmanned him for a moment. Ten minutes later the cavalry was moving away. A detachment was sent forward on a mission of peril, to guard a bridge. There was a bridge near Béthune one night guarded by a little patrol. It was only when the last man had been killed that the Germans made their way across.
Through the darkness these mounted men leaned forward over their saddles, peering for the enemy, listening for any jangle of stirrup or clink of bit. On that night there came a whisper from the cavalry leader.
"They are coming!... Quiet there!"
A file of dark shadows moved forward. The dragoons swung their carbines forward. There was a volley of shots before the cry rang out.
"Cessez feu! Cessez feu!"