“At the double-quick Scots and English, a few feet apart, yelling like demons, pounce on the attackers.  Rifles are silent.  It is cold steel alone.  Our battery captains cry ‘Stop firing.’  There is a risk of shelling our own men now.  We become spectators.

“On the right the Guard has suddenly turned toward the hill.  A bugle blast and the mass of men half turns and seems to be thrown on the back of the British, outflanked.  The situation is desperate.  Our artillery is useless.

“Listen!  Over the valley, rising louder and still louder, comes a song which the Germans have heard before.  A crash of brass, a hoarse roar fills the air, echoing across the valley, drowning the shouts and curses of the human wave fighting below.

“The ’Marseillaise’—­the English and Scots have heard it.  ’Hold tight, the French are coming,’ we scream.  They cannot hear us, but we must shout—­the strain is too intense.

“Past our batteries a company of Spahis rushes like a cyclone.  Two more follow, then the Zouaves.  Rifles close to their hips, bayonets low, throwing out over the valley its glorious anthem, the human flood crashes against the Guard.

“The lines waver in an indescribable jumble of gray, yellow, blue, and red uniforms, then seem to bounce back from the very force of the shock.  Men appear, raised from their feet, and raised high in the air.

“Caught in a vise between the British and the French, the Guard alone remains.  Ten times the shattered remnants of the Kaiser’s proud regiment charged, and ten times was thrown back, first against the French, then against the British.  Crying, ‘Comrades, comrades!’ hundreds began throwing their guns aside.

“At 2 o’clock it was over.  The Allies had lost 1,200 men.  Only prisoners remained of the Second Prussian regiment of the Guard.

PROGRESS OF THE EASTERN CAMPAIGN

The campaign in the eastern theater of war attracted the attention of the whole world in December, when the German operations begun in November under Field Marshal Von Hindenburg, the victor of Tannenberg earlier in the war, were continued with varying successes.  Early in the month the Germans captured Lodz, the second city and chief manufacturing center of Russian Poland, with a population of about 500,000, after a bombardment of a week’s duration, the city being set on fire in many places.  The Russians made a desperate resistance, and the fighting around Lodz constituted the most bitter struggle of the entire war on this front.  A general Russian retirement in the direction of Warsaw followed, but the Germans failed in their subsequent efforts to envelop the flanks of the Russian army to the north and south.  Russian reinforcements from Warsaw coming up promptly, the Germans were in their turn compelled to retire.  Two German army corps were then practically cut off by the Russians, but made a successful retreat, fighting their way back to safety with the bayonet in one of the most brilliant exploits of the war.  Thus the net result of the German campaign in Poland in December left the general situation there practically unchanged and the Russian front unbroken, while in East Prussia, too, the Russian invasion continued despite German efforts to roll it back across the frontier.