“Forward! till almost exhausted I throw myself down again; a hundred to a hundred and fifty Fusiliers form a firing-line.  Columns of infantry pour a murderous fire on to us from the forest.  It cannot go on thus; one after the other is wounded or killed.  We have advanced nearly eight hundred yards over open ground.  On the right there is a small thicket of reeds.  Some of the company have already sought shelter there, and I make a rush there with the same hope.

“‘For heaven’s sake, lie down, corporal,’ screamed a man as I came up.  In fact, the reeds afford no cover whatever.  Wounded and dead lie there and bullets keep hitting them.  In front of me lay a man from the fourth company; a bullet had entered his chest and passed out of his back; the blood was oozing out of a wound about the size of a shilling.  The horror was too much for me, and I crept to the other end of the strip.

“There I found everything far worse, but I cannot describe the terrors which I saw.  One poor fellow begs for a drop of water; there is just another draught in my bottle.  With grateful eyes he hands it back to me, and in the same moment I feel a stinging pain in the shoulder.  My arm is numbed and helpless; hardly one of us who is not wounded.

“We can offer no resistance to the enemy; but the awful way back!  At last the run back over eight hundred yards of open field begins.  Now and again a comrade sinks to the ground, never to rise again.  My breath is nearly gone; one last effort, and in truth I have escaped from the hail of bullets.”

It is remarkable and noteworthy that German writers charge the French armies with looting and destruction in their own country.  Probably this is merely a device to get rid of unpleasant accusations raised against the German army.  Furthermore, the most reckless charges of uncleanliness are made.  In commenting on the lot of the Landsturm troops quartered in the villages of Northern France, one author[168] writes:  “The Landsturm men pass their time as best they can in these holes, whose most conspicuous quality is their filth.”

[Footnote 168:  Erich Koehrer:  “Zwischen Aisne und Argonnen” ("Between the Aisne and the Argonnes"), p. 25.]

The same author gives his impressions of a visit to Sedan.  “Only one house has been completely and another partly destroyed, otherwise appearances are peaceful, and as far as possible, life goes on as usual.  Here, too, many of the inhabitants have left their homes and fled.  The stupidity of this flight becomes evident at every step.  In numerous small hotels whose proprietors have remained, one sees German soldiers buying bottles of splendid Burgundy wine at a shilling a bottle.

“But in another hotel whose proprietor had fled, is it a matter for surprise that the men caroused on discovering a cellar containing three thousand bottles of wine?  On the route I have myself purchased some of the oldest and best wines from our men at a price of three cigars a bottle, and the recollection of them belongs to the pleasantest memories of my sojourn at the front.