We advanced at the double, lay down and got up again, just as at manoeuvres. What am I saying? Better than that. We kept our intervals and direction with incredible exactitude. There was not a straggler or funk among us. All honour to these proud troops, these splendid soldiers! They are dead--dead, nearly all of them. They appeared to feel, in the vague intuition of their flesh, in the vibration of the nourishing air, that their end, even if they survived to-morrow's sanguinary triumph, was inscribed on the pages of the disastrous winter or the fatal spring to come. There was no sadness or despair, but something indescribably resigned and shy crept into their gait. Joking was out of date. Judsi himself had put a damper on his animation. We kept on and gained ground. At one point--the wonders could not be repeated indefinitely--a single _rafale_ on our left mowed down about forty men. We did not slacken our pace--hardly turned our heads. We went on in a rising tide, and I thought how the sight of this inexorable multitude rolling towards them, like God's judgment, must strike terror into the hearts of the enemy's gunners. * * * * * At the end of the day we neared a wood. I was very much afraid lest the hostile infantry might be hidden there, watching for us. Those barricades of trees looked most suspicious. Our reconnoitring patrol went on ahead of us. I trembled for their safety. The rest of us lay down and waited in an agony of fear. Not a shot was fired. What a relief it was when the wood turned out to be unoccupied--by living men, at all events. When we, in our turn, penetrated into it, we found it strewn with dead bodies. What a struggle must have raged there during the last few days! There was not much undergrowth, which made it propitious for hand-to-hand fighting. The scene was re-enacted in my mind. The Bosches about to continue their defensive organisation, surprised by the attack of the rifle brigade--our dead bore this uniform. The furious onslaught with the sword. We had driven them back at the point of the bayonet and massacred them wholesale. In advancing, we came upon heaps of Germans. We had lost a great many men, too, but they had cleared the way for us. We were duly grateful to them and the men stepped carefully and reverently over their remains as they advanced in single file. "Pore old chaps!" sighed Icard. "You're havin' a rest now and it's our turn to do the swottin'."