How nearly exact his calculations were will probably never be known. It was certainly a case of touch and go whether they came off or not. In my opinion what upset them more than almost anything else was the final stand at Amance, in which guns and infantry both bore their full share. For consider what they did, and above all when they did it. They were put to the supreme test on September 8th, the day, let me recall, before the retreat from the Marne began. The Kaiser himself gave the order for the final assault. From the woods a mile away, headed by their fifes and drums, wave upon wave of Germans advanced as steadily and as pompously as if they were on parade, to the attack of the French infantry positions on the side of the hill. The French guns were silent. There was nothing to show whether they had been put out of action by the preliminary bombardment or were only biding their time. Except the music of the bands there was not a sound, for the infantry also reserved their fire till the enemy were within two hundred yards. Then their time had come. With their bayonets fixed and with shouts of “_Vive la France!_” they sprang suddenly from the trenches and charged. The two lines met with a desperate shock, and after a violent hand-to-hand struggle it was the German ranks which broke. As they fled to the shelter of the forest the 75’s came into action, and firing at short range mowed them down rank by rank. But they were splendidly gallant. They fought like knights, not like the savages who had sacked and burnt the villages of Lorraine and the Vosges. There were always others ready to take the places of the men who fell. Six times they advanced towards that deadly hill, and six times they were driven back to the sheltering woods. At some places at its base the bodies were piled up five or six feet high, and when the survivors took cover behind the heaps of dead and wounded the 75’s still raked them through and through, smothering dead and living in a horrible mire of flesh and blood, while the 155’s, firing over the heads of the front ranks, finished off the work further back. The losses were enormous. Thousands of German dead were left lying on the plain, and in the evening they asked and were granted a few hours’ truce to bury them. The victory was complete. There was no longer any risk of a German advance. Nancy was inviolate. The Grand Plan had broken down.