Crouching low as they came up the slope, the Germans now advanced in earnest. The infantry had been ordered to let them get within three hundred yards. When they reached that distance the French officers shouted at the top of their voices the command which, at that period of the war, always seemed to inspire the Germans with terror, “_En avant à la baïonette!_” But the command was a ruse. The regiment had been warned that, when it was given, they were not to charge but to fire a succession of volleys from the trenches. As soon as the Germans heard the order snapping along the ranks and the bugles sounding the charge, the front ranks hurriedly rose from their crouching positions and with fixed bayonets advanced to meet the attack. That was their undoing. The first volley caught them just as they reached the wire entanglements two hundred yards in front of the trenches and mowed them down in hundreds. They fell in such dense masses that the men coming on from behind climbed and jumped over their bodies and the first line of entanglements at the same time. But they could get no further. Four separate times they came on to the assault over the open with fine courage, and each time they were checked by the withering fire from the Lebels, till at last, almost at nightfall, they gave up the attempt, and fell back on Pont-à-Mousson, leaving four thousand dead in front of those murderous trenches. For the moment their demoralization was complete. In the darkness some of them lost their way, and stumbling over the wire entanglements in front of Loisy-sur-Moselle, fell into the river and were drowned. This time, when the survivors reached Atton, the village south of Pont-à-Mousson, which they had passed through so confidently two days before, there were no longer shouts of “_Nancy demain!_” They had made their attack in overwhelming force and they had failed, and for Ste. Généviève they had coined a new and more expressive name. They called it, in bitter memory of the losses which they had suffered there, “The Hole of Death.” On the same day that the force from Metz started on their disastrous expedition, the battle was raging fiercely all along the line which was being attacked by the German Sixth Army under the Crown Prince of Bavaria, from Mont St. Jean, a little south and east of Ste. Généviève, to Dombasle on the Meurthe. In that twenty-mile stretch there were many Holes of Death, many desperate encounters, and many uncounted acts of corporate and individual gallantry on both sides. But for coolness and forethought and disciplined restraint as well as for mere courage in what might have seemed to officers and men an almost hopeless position, the defence of Ste. Généviève must rank with the very first achievements of the army of heroes that fought and won in front of Nancy.