It seemed impossible, in the cold light of the day after the passing excitement of battle, to conceive of troops successfully storming such intrenched positions But this is just what the Germans did, or thought they did, for their officers did not realize that the giving way of the French at this point was part of General Joffre’s counter-stroke.

There were five successive lines of permanent French trenches, each with its entanglement of barbed wire, supported on iron posts.  German pioneers cut their way through the first entanglement before the general attack, but it was necessary for the others to make the advance across the exposed positions under fire.

These attackers, however, were General Von Kluck’s veterans, who, after the famous dash on Paris, the battle of the Marne and the retirement to the Aisne, had remained in comparative inactivity since the middle of September.

They succeeded in sweeping across the plateau, first in the center and then on the eastern flank, carrying trench after trench by storm in an interrupted and irresistible attack.

The French retired from the plateau.  Then they gave up the valley below and retreated across the river.  The Germans advanced through the valley.

The narrow turnpikes had become great cemeteries.  Four thousand German troops, engaged in the work of burying the dead as fast as they fell, had been unable to clear the field of even their own dead after eight days, while the field was strewn with the bodies of French infantrymen, in their far-to-be-seen red-and-blue uniforms, swarthy-faced Turcos, colonials, Alpine riflemen and bearded territorials.

There came a lull in the fighting.  The French retained a foothold north of the river at St. Paul, where the bridge from Soissons crosses the stream; but the bridge head was commanded by German artillery on the heights.

The promenade along the exposed side of the plateau, in sight of Soissons and the bank of the Aisne, also held by the French in force, gave a rather uncanny feeling of insecurity.  However, it was less dangerous than it seemed, for a slight haze rendered the group in German field gray invisible to the French artillery on the heights on the opposite side of the valley.

In the part of the field where Hal and Chester had been on the eighth day of the fighting, at the edge of the plateau, the struggle had been desperate.  Here, with the final German assault, the French had fought stubbornly and a hand-to-hand struggle ensued.

Regiments of French troops, rather than retire to safety down a declivity, had contested this section of the field to the last, finally to be mowed down by the German artillery as the infantry was forced back.

Hal and Chester had taken no important part in the battle, and had remained with the little body of British troops, held with masses of infantry of the French, in reserve, and had only been thrown forward with the reenforcements when General Joffre decided that it was time to halt the tide of the German advance.