Standing on this crest, you were a thousand yards away from the edge of a woods.  German aeroplanes had seen the French massing for a charge under the cover of that crest; but French aeroplanes could not see what was in the woods.  Rifles and machine-guns poured a spray of lead across the crest when the French appeared.  But the French, who were righting for Sister Julie’s town, would not stop their rush at first.  They kept on, as Pickett’s men did when the Federal guns riddled their ranks with grapeshot.  This accounts for many of the mounds being well beyond the crest.  The Germans made a mistake in firing too soon.  They would have made a heavier killing if they had allowed the charge to go farther.  After the French fell back, for two days and nights their wounded lay out on that field without water or food, between the two forces, and if their comrades approached to give succour the machine-guns blazed more death, because the Germans did not want to let the French dig a trench on the crest.  After two days the French forced the Germans out of the woods by hitting them from another point.

We went over the field of another charge half a mile away.  There a French regiment put a stream with a single bridge at their back—­which requires some nerve—­and charged a German trench on rising ground.  They took it.  Then they tried to take the woods beyond.  Before they were checked twenty-two officers out of a total of thirty fell.  But they did not give up the ground they had won.  They burrowed into the earth in a trench of their own, and when help came they put the Germans out of the woods.

The men of this regiment were not first line, but the older fellows—­men of the type we stopped to chat with in the village—­hastening to the front when the war began.  Their officers were mostly reserves, too, who left civil occupations at the call to arms.  One of the eight survivors of the thirty was with us, a stocky little man, hardly looking the hero or the soldier.  I expressed my admiration, and he answered quietly:  “It was for France!” How often I have heard that as a reason for courage or sacrifice!  The enemies of France have learned to respect it, though they had a poor opinion of the French army before the war began.

“That railroad bridge yonder the Germans left intact when they occupied it because they were certain that they would need it to supply their troops when they took the Gap of Mirecourt and surrounded the French army,” I was told.  “However, they had to go in such a hurry that they failed to mine it.  They must have fired five hundred shells afterwards to destroy it, in vain.”

It was dusk when we entered the city of Luneville for the second time.  Whole blocks lay in ruins; others only showed where shells had crashed into walls.  It is hard to estimate just how much damage shell-fire has done to a town, for you see the effects only where they have struck on the street sides and not when they strike in the centre of the block.  But Luneville has certainly suffered as much as Louvain, only we did not hear about it.  Grim, sad Louvain, with its German sentries among the ruins!  Happy, triumphant Luneville, with its poilus instead of German sentries!