The attack on the Grand Couronné was particularly severe. Wave after wave of the enemy threw itself against the works held by de Castelnau’s troops, who, though exhausted by a week’s continuous marching and fighting, showed an unbreakable spirit. And there were brought to the attack, besides the armies I have mentioned, four new Corps composed of seventeen brigades of Ersatz, so that the hostile forces numbered nearly half-a-million men. The assailants were encouraged not merely by their numerical superiority—Dubail’s army was about 150,000—but by their success in Lorraine, which had been hailed by their countrymen as a great victory. Furthermore, they were under the eye of the Emperor and a brilliant staff, who were watching them from the hill of Eply, to the north of the Couronné. The Kaiser’s dramatic sense had been awakened by the thought of a triumphal entry into Nancy, the ancient capital of Lorraine. He realised what it would mean in the Fatherland, and that, from a military point, it would signify that a breach had been made in the defences of France. Alas, for human hopes! The walls of Jericho refused to fall to the trumpet’s brazen call; and the Kaiser, after waiting in vain for a victory, departed sombre and silent for other fields. The Germans tried every imaginable means to break through, and bloody were the struggles on hill-tops and in the woods of the region. A regiment, suddenly debouching from a forest, was mown down within a few yards of the French trenches, and a division, marching to the attack with drums and fifes playing, met with a similar fate. The Forest of Vitremont, near Lunéville, was filled with the bodies of Germans, computed to number 4500. Vigorous counter-attacks by de Castelnau from north to south, and by Dubail from west to east, finally held the enemy in check, and this uneasy equilibrium lasted for a fortnight—the tremendous fortnight in which Joffre saved Paris and sent the Germans flying to the north. At that moment, the eastern frontier from Nancy to the Vosges was free of the enemy; but at what a cost! Thousands had been lost on either side and villages had been burned and civilians assassinated by the Germans in pursuance of their studied policy of terrorisation.