"Victory!" Thrills pass through me, enthusiasm seizes upon me and stirs me so violently as to make me feel almost sick. I feel that I am too small to contain the emotion to which the sacred word gives rise. "_The retreat of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd German Armies is becoming pronounced before our left and centre. In its turn, the enemy's 4th Army is beginning to fall back to the north of Vitry and Sermaize._" So that is it, then! We have been progressing everywhere. We have grappled with them, badly torn them, wounded them! Oh! that it may run and run, that German blood, until every particle of strength shall have streamed out of them!... In the light of this news other things become simple and clear to me. That endless retreat of the first days of September, those forced marches through the heat along dusty, stifling roads--were not the flight of a disordered army knowing itself defeated. A retreat, yes; but step by step, and not an inch further than a line agreed upon by our leaders. Beside this bulletin announcing victory, I find the proclamation issued by the Generalissimo the night before the battle: "_The moment is come when we must no longer look behind us.... It is time now to attack and drive back the enemy...._" That was so every man among us had felt and known instinctively. "_Die where you stand rather than give way._" No one had read those words aloud to us at Condé in that hour when we turned once more and faced north. But they had been in our hearts; they had become our purpose in life and our will. Not knowing that on the events of those days of durance depended the safety of the country, we had nevertheless made the terrible but necessary sacrifice lightheartedly, joyously. Since those days, our land had been drenched with blood wherever we had loaded our rifles or fixed our bayonets. The fragile wall of living flesh had defied their enormous shells; their bullets could not shatter it; and when, after an avalanche of steel, the helmeted hordes had rushed forward to trample it beneath their feet, not all their stubborn attacks, renewed again and again with desperate fury throughout five long days, succeeded in creating the breach for which they had sacrificed so much. To-day, over towards Vauxmarie, the sappers are gathering together the bodies of the fallen Boches lying as thickly strewn as the grass in the fields. The corpses are taken in tens in tumbrils towards huge pits, yawning to receive their loads of dead flesh. When the carts arrive at the edge of these graves, they are tilted up, and the bodies tumble out, arms and legs swinging horribly, grotesquely. And the good earth of France swiftly hides from sight those greenish uniforms, those decomposing faces with blinded eyes, those heavy nailed boots which never again will trample the soil of our beloved land.