Our outposts began to be driven in, but they had stubbornly defended our front, nor did they yield till the masses of blue battalions showed thickly, and then only to give the artillery free play. It was in waiting behind us, and the first crash as the shells hurtled over our heads made Hugh and I feel very strange in the pits of our stomachs--something like incipient sea-sickness. The veterans never once looked aloft, but only cuddled their rifles and wriggled their bodies to find a comfortable niche from which to fire. "Dig your toes into the embankment, you English," Marius Girr of our company called to us; "if you don't, the first recoil of the rifle will send you slipping down into the ditch." It was good advice, and with a few kicks we dug solid stances for our feet, in which our thick marching shoes were ensconced to the heels. We excavated also hollow troughs for our knees, and, as Hugh said, we behaved generally like so many burying beetles instead of gallant soldiers. All this was not done easily, for the ground was frozen hard, and in the river behind us we could hear the solid blocks of ice clinking and crunching together as the sullen grey-green current swept them along. It was Sunday, and upon the town road a little behind our line, but quite within the zone of fire, comfortable mammas and trim little daughters were trotting to Mass with their service books wrapped in white napkins. Hugh and I yelled at them to go home, but it was no use. Luckily I remembered their fear of the Iron Chancellor, and assured them by all the saints that "Bismarck was coming," whereupon they kilted their petticoats and made off homeward, their fat white-stockinged legs twinkling in the pearl-grey twilight. It was like a Dutch picture--trampled snow, low brooding sky, white-capped matrons and little girls wrapped in red shawls. But in a few moments we had other matters to occupy us. The Tanara regiment was on our right, and the sweep of the crescent being farther advanced than at our position, they received the first rush of the Pomeranians. But there was no waiting, for suddenly out of the woods in front of us stiff lines of blue emerged and began moving forward with the Noah's Ark regularity of marionettes. It seemed impossible that these could be soldiers charging. But we were soon convinced. The dip of the ground hid them for a long time, and then suddenly they appeared not four hundred yards off, no longer in column, but in two lines close together, with a supporting third some distance in the rear. We could see them extending companies far away on either side. But this we knew to be in vain, for the river protected us on the right, while on the left our entrenchments reached as far as the St. Leger hills which were crowned with our forts.