At the cantonments at Fiefs and Berles, where we passed a fortnight before the 9th of May, the afternoons were entirely given up to sport. We organized “field days” in the woods, obstacle races, and the men, recruits and old reservists, galloped through these spring days with absolutely unbounded animation. To give the men the habit of moving without anxiety over open ground where the bullets whistled, I took advantage of the nights when we were working on saps and parallels to make them march in patrols a short distance in front of the lines. If I saw that the workmen were thinking of crouching down, I made them stand up for a while; as for me, I fortified myself by walking up and down in front of the working party. We wished for an irresistible assault and therefore tried to inculcate in the men the instinct of hand-to-hand fighting, at which they ordinarily hesitate with the result that the close combat is stopped for days and months at a few score metres from the enemy. We had bayonet fencing, but it was a demoniacal fencing, the fencing of the chargers of Froeschwiller. The fencing exercises, carried out by the company to prepare for the attack, were as follows: first, a brief review of the movements, then immediately fencing on the run; the men were formed at a few paces intervals and then started on a run; it was “Halt! Thrust! Thrust again!” They started again, climbed the embankments, lunged and relunged furiously; they got winded, so much the worse.... “Right face!” and everyone ran to the right, descended the slope stabbing and stabbing again, getting excited and feverish, the officers and sergeants galloping more furiously than the rest. Afterwards fencing with the dummy. We had stuffed sacks full of straw and made them smaller each day to make a smaller target and oblige the men to be more accurate in their thrusts. Each man attacked the dummy individually, shouting with all the frenzy of which his imagination was capable, and those who attacked the best, with the greatest _élan_, went over it again to show their comrades how to do it. It was no play, they knew enough of the Germans to believe them in front of them, and I recall that among those from Gascony, Toulouse, and Provence, who formed the basis of the company, some shouted with frenzy, “Piquo, Piquo!” In order to give more movement, the exercise against the dummy was arranged in the following manner: