At la Croix aux Mines, Mandray, Entre-Deux-Eaux, Sauley-sur-Meurthe, Taintrux, Le Bois de Champ, Brouvelieures, Mortagne, la Vallée des Rouges-Eaux, le Haut Jacques, Autrey, La Bourgonce, La Salle, Nompatelize, St. Rémy, Etivalle, St. Michel, Col de la Chipotte, St. Benoit, Bru, Menille, Doncières, Xaffévillers, St. Piermont and Le Plateau de Moyen thousands of French and Germans fought and died in those few August and September days. The fighting was particularly violent at La Bourgonce, La Salle, Nompatelize, St. Rémy, Etivalle, the Col de la Chipotte and St. Dié. At the two last the number of the German dead alone was probably over 20,000. There was no question then of off-times in leafy cantonments between the spells of duty in the trenches. The men ate and slept where they could on the ground where they had fought. Day after day and hour after hour the fighting went on. Brilliant bayonet charges and desperate struggles hand-to-hand and body-to-body followed each other with hardly a moment’s break. The same positions were lost and taken over and over again, and the firing of the guns and the explosions of the shells kept up a ceaseless hurricane of noise, as the storm of shells ploughed up the green fields along those valley roads and mangled the bodies of the two armies that had been set to butcher each other to suit the purposes of the Prussian Junkers and the Kaiser’s militarist advisers. But the French soldiers never flinched, outnumbered and outweighed as they were. Above all the Chasseurs-à-pied and Chasseurs Alpins, whom the Germans feared and respected more than any other troops in General Dubail’s army, covered themselves with glory—glory that is none the less immortal, though very few individual acts of bravery will ever be recorded because most of the officers who saw them are silent in their graves. But that hardly matters. They were fighting not for glory and for recognition but for France and the freedom of the world. And they did their work. If they had failed, if the Teuton hordes had broken through between Epinal and Toul and the grand German plan had been carried out in all its completeness, then the whole defence of France would have broken down. But they did not fail. They gave their lives and France was saved.