The day began with a white flag incident, or rather with the appearance of two German cavalrymen accompanied by a bugler, and carrying a large flag of truce. The commandant went forward to speak to them—they had stopped thirty yards the other side of the wire entanglements—and three times they summoned him to surrender the fort. To the first summons he answered simply, “Never”; to the second, “France has given me charge of the fort and I will blow it up sooner than surrender it”; and to the last, “F.... moi le camp, je vous ai assez vus ... A bientôt, à Metz!” So that was the end of them and their mission. Up to now the guns bombarding them, as far as the garrison could make out, consisted of a battery of 150’s at the edge of the wood of Lamorville, about five miles to the east of the fort, and a field battery of 77’s, posted between one and two miles away on the reverse side of Hill 259, called La Gouffière. There were also some infantry engaged in digging trenches on the Signal of Troyon, close by, where the commandant had shot his partridges on the 7th. (On the 8th, in one of the lulls in the bombardment, he had two shots himself with 90 shrapnel at the men on his partridge ground, and rather spoilt their excavating work, but then the 150’s began again.) On the second day, after the white flag and its bearers had taken their departure, the bombardment began again, with greatly increased severity, as the enemy had now brought up some 280’s and 305’s, but in spite of the extraordinary havoc which they produced the plucky garrison still continued to serve their guns as best they could without any thought of surrender. When night fell there was another alarm of an infantry attack. This time there was no doubt about it. They could make out a black mass of men advancing towards the south cupola of the fort, and some of them were already busy cutting the barbed wire in front of it. The commandant, whose diary of the siege I have followed in this account, got his men together, ordered most of them under cover, and then opened fire on the swarm of assailants with machine-guns. That was too much for the Germans, and they broke and fled, leaving the ground strewn with their dead and wounded. Still later in the night he was knocked over and wounded in several places by fragments of a 305 shell which fell only a yard behind him. But as soon as his wounds were dressed he was up again, commanding and encouraging his men, and still the fort held out through the dark night, continually lit by the explosion of the bursting shells. And then, at last, the division from Toul arrived (I presume that the cavalry had had to wait at Buxerulles for the slower troops who were following them), the enemy were forced to abandon the bombardment not a moment too soon, and the commandant was carried off to hospital at Verdun (where he received the Croix de Guerre), but not before he had left fluttering on the crumbling parapet the flag of France. On the next