the shells began to fall thicker and faster; the germans were indubitably near at hand. but where the devil was the regiment? there was no knowing, except that it was pretty sure to be getting away from those harrying shells. chilled, the boys ran48 through the dripping woods till they came to a clearing. here, looking down, they saw the germans fording the meuse! but not without trouble; a french battery had got their range, and was playing red havoc with them, slinging shell after shell of well-aimed shrapnel. by dozens they melted away under the fire, and the water was full of bobbing corpses drifting downstream.
“we just burst out laughing,” said georges. “we couldn’t help it. not that it was so funny to see men killed like that by the hundreds, but, after all we had gone through—after the ghastly way we had been butchered at bertrix, it really did me good to see those ‘bosches’ suffering themselves at last!”
he didn’t laugh long. with the german reckless sacrifice of life, column after column was thrown into the river, until more and more got across. it was time for the boys49 to be moving now, and they set out toward the westward, tramped all day, eating nothing but the raw beets they dug up in the fields, and finally found the seventeenth corps at raucourt.
they were just in time to join their regiment as it was ordered forward seven more miles for a new engagement. there, protected by the french batteries, they bivouacked. glad enough was georges of a chance to sleep. no fear of the coming battle could keep him awake by this time.
at dawn, while the vigilant searchlights were still playing across the opposite hillside, the french guns started firing, and, without breakfast, georges’s battalion was ordered forward. in half an hour the enemy was discovered half a mile away. in the valley between opposite hills the shells were screeching now over their heads—from the french “75’s” the sound of the whizzing50 projectiles came high and dry like buzz saws—they burst with the awful battering of near-by thunder. the german “marmites” snorted through the air, and exploded with a deeper, more terrible crash. the regiment halted, and was deployed in four ranks—the first two lying on the ground, the third and fourth kneeling.
the men were mostly quite cool, but georges confessed that he himself had hard work controlling his nerves while he waited for that attack. in ten minutes the enemy appeared from behind rising ground and came on—a long, gray-black line of thousands and thousands of men, a thick line, swarming, multitudinous, nearer and nearer.
“load!” coolly commanded the captains; “500 meters. ready, now—fire!” their salvo rang out. the heavy rows of germans seemed to hesitate for a moment; but no, they were only stopping to fire.51 there came a sudden whistling in the air all about and the bullets flew—“for a terribly long minute,” as georges described it—then the enemy came on again, and kept on coming, in a broad, thick wave, company after company. and only a battalion of four companies to resist them! georges fired without aiming. what was the use of aiming at that horde of men? the boys jumped to their feet, fired again and again, and then, as their comrades dropped about them everywhere, they began to retreat, some picking up the wounded as they went. at first they withdrew in order, turning back to fire another volley; but when the germans fixed their bayonets and came at them on the double-quick, the french broke, and ran for it, helter-skelter, this way and that, in a second rout, even worse than the first.
georges ran with the rest, and the shrapnel followed him, killing men on either hand,52 in front, behind. then, over the rise, came the uhlans, yelling, galloping in to cut them up. looking back, georges saw the cavalry sabering and lancing, and he ran like a deer for his life, ran up the hillside, ran into the woods. he ran for at least a mile with the thunder of the cannon still in his ears. when, finally, he stopped to take breath, it was only a fragment of his company that he found near him—some ten or eleven men, among them a sergeant. where were the others? nobody knew. the regiment, demoralized, had split up into numberless terrified detachments, and wandered all over the countryside. such was the inglorious battle of raucourt. of the week following georges could give no consecutive account. he remembers only that he and the others tramped and tramped for miles inquiring of peasants, gendarmes, of the stragglers, everyone, everywhere, the whereabouts of53 the twentieth regiment. they climbed over hills, they rested in little deserted villages where every house was gutted of furniture, doors open, rooms littered, and here and there a starved cat or two, lean and wild. the roads were alive with refugees, french and belgian, all plodding mournfully toward the south, dreary processions of wagons and cattle and weeping women, children, and stony-eyed, sulky men. no, nobody had seen the twentieth regiment.
they tramped from villers to malmy, and, apparently (georges isn’t quite sure where they did go), from malmy to maire. at le vivier, or perhaps it was mont dieu, they found an infantry regiment, but it was not their own. the twentieth should be down vouziers way, said the officers. so they trudged on.
more and more stray men had joined georges’s party. few of them had knap54sacks, some didn’t even have guns. hats of all kinds; costumes—promiscuous but all disheveled. they were, by this time, a villainously whiskered lot—ragged, dirty, weary, famished, sullen, desperate—without discipline, without leaders. occasionally, in some ransacked village they found stale bread or vegetables that they cooked in the woods; whatever else they ate was begged from the few frightened peasants that still remained on their farms.
there was one village, however, that georges did remember, and that was les alleux. there he slept in an actual bed. how les alleux happened to be abandoned with all its houses undisturbed—with the clocks still going and the furniture in place, even the beds made up—georges doesn’t know. some sudden alarm had evidently caused the inhabitants to fly at a moment’s notice. what mainly interested him was55 that they had left their barnyards full of poultry.
les alleux was almost gay. there were some hundred soldiers collected there, now; all tatterdemalion stragglers from the rout, making the most of their unexpected good luck. there was almost everything to eat except bread. georges fairly gorged himself on hot roast chicken and cheese, made merry with the rabble of soldiery, sang, smoked, and then slept for twelve solid hours, with his boots off on a delectable feather bed and sheets. and, for once, without the din of cannon in his ears.
this, however, was hardly the way to save his country. georges’s conscience and the booming of german guns awoke him to his duty next morning. the mob scattered, fleeing south in a hurry. georges’s party, he found when they started, had grown smaller. “i don’t know whether or not i ought to56 mention this detail,” he told me, “but at least it will show that i wasn’t quite so bad as the rest. but i think some of the boys found citizens clothes in the houses there at les alleux, and got away in them. at any rate, they didn’t come along with us.”
his odyssey ended at a village called pauvres on the highroad between rethel and vouziers. here they found what was left of the twentieth regiment, and georges was welcomed like one from the dead. all received new rifles and accoutrements, and the regiment was reorganized. of its three battalions there remained hardly enough to form two—a third was made up of waifs and strays from other divisions.