Lenharrée formed a bridgehead on the right bank. The French held it on September 6 and 7 under a heavy fire, but on the morning of the 8th the two companies of the 225th, who, by good shooting and frequent bayonet charges, had held at a respectable distance a much superior German force, were obliged to withdraw towards Connantray. The Saxons and the Guards, holding Normée, had managed to advance down the left bank and thus threatened to take the defenders of Lenharrée in the rear. Of this small force all the officers and non-commissioned officers were lying dead or wounded around Captain de Saint-Bon, who himself fell as he gave the order to retire. "Never mind me," he said to his soldiers, who wanted to carry him away with them, "Don't be killed trying to save me." [Illustration: TRENCH NEAR THE SOMME] [Illustration: RUINS, NORMÉE] After their withdrawal on September 8 and 9 the French returned to the neighbourhood of Lenharrée. This they reached on the 10th and entered the next day. They found in a barn 450 wounded Germans and 150 French. The terrible struggle had drenched the village with blood and reddened the waters of the river. "_There are heaps of German dead everywhere_," wrote a witness, "_in the streets, in the cellars, in the church, and in the cemetery. One walked on them without being aware of it. Behind a hedge ten yards in length I counted twenty-two; a hole in a rock five to six metres deep was a regular charnel-house._" Graves in the courtyards of the houses recall the hand-to-hand fighting. There is one in the large ruined farm seen in the photograph on p. 191. This farm is on the right after the first group of houses at the entrance to the village, fifty yards beyond the cross-roads seen in the view at the top of p. 191. During the German occupation an old inhabitant, M. Félix, was killed by blows from the butt-end of the rifles of the German soldiers whom he tried to prevent from pillaging his house. _Going through the village, leave the church on the right. We come to the bridge_ around which are the graves of the men who fell during the combats on this bitterly disputed spot (photograph p. 192). _Cross the bridge and turn to the right; 50 yards further on, take, on the left, the road leading through a cutting to +Lenharrée+ railway station (800 yards)._ Numerous graves border the railway and the road, for the struggle, which began at the Somme, continued on the railway before spreading under German pressure to Fère-Champenoise, Connantray, and beyond. [Illustration: LEVEL-CROSSING, NORMÉE] _Return to_ G. C. 18, _in which turn to the left_. The road commands the Somme, and here the troops of the eleventh Corps established trenches along the river bank in order to obstruct the passage. The _view on p. 192_, taken _about 1 km. beyond Lenharrée_, shows one of these trenches in which is a German grave.