“Forward!”

The officers had advanced in front of the line of skirmishers.  All the men sprang up in an instant, and the three squadrons dashed forward full speed.

But at the exact moment when our men, springing out of the ditches, began their advance towards the wood, the enemy’s artillery, shortening its range, began to pour a perfect hail of shrapnel on our line.  It was now almost pitch dark, and there was something infernal in the scene.  The shells were bursting at a considerable height above us, some in front, some behind.  They made a horrible kind of music.  There must have been at least two batteries at work upon us, for we could no longer distinguish even the three characteristic shots of the German batteries in rafale fire.  The noise was incessant, and each shell as it burst illumined a small section of the battlefield for a second.  It just showed a tree trunk, a bit of wall, a strip of hedge, and then the darkness fell again over this point, while another was illuminated by the crash of a new explosion.

At one moment a sudden horror gripped me.  To my left a shrapnel shell fell full on the line of the third squadron.  This time the flash of the explosion had not only lighted up a corner of landscape; I had had a glimpse of a terrible sight.

You must imagine the intense and rapid light cast by a burning magnesium wire, accompanied by a deafening noise, and in this brief light the figures of several men, weirdly illuminated, in the attitudes induced by the terror of certain death, and you will get a faint impression of what I saw.  Then, suddenly, everything fell back into darkness, a darkness that seemed more intense than before after the glare of the explosion.  I dimly discerned bodies on the ground, and shadows bending over them.

I did not stop, but I heard the voice of the Major calmly giving orders: 

        “Pick him up!  Gently....”

But the wounded man shrieked, refusing to allow himself to be touched; his limbs, no doubt, were shattered.  No matter!  Forward!  Forward!  We rushed on towards the wood, where we hoped to get some protection from the avalanche of shells.  A voice called out names behind me: 

“Corporal David killed!  Sergeant Flosse wounded; leg broken.”

My men were running forward so impetuously that presently they were on a level with me.  What fine fellows!  I half regretted that some hostile troop was not waiting for us ambushed in the wood.  We might have had a splendid fight!  But would there have been a fight at all?  Would the Prussians have ventured to measure themselves against these dare-devils, whom danger excites instead of depressing?  Well, we were at the edge of the wood at last, waiting till the Major came up with us.