THIS was in the first months after the war. The old Frenchman was still in uniform. His round-topped, gold-braided cap lay on the table at his elbow, beside the open box of cigarettes, and the half-empty glass. The breast and the sleeve of his tunic bore testimony to his honorable service. He was a short man, a heavy man, with a large stomach, and solid shoulders; and his head hunched forward in a leonine fashion. His eyes were blue; and his hair was thick, and coarse, and white as snow. He was in New York on some business of reconstruction.... And while the other men had been exchanging reminiscences, he had stared with thoughtful eyes at a large, framed print upon the wall before him.

This print was a reproduction of a painting thoroughly familiar. It portrayed an old man, a man of middle age, a boy, a fife, a drum and a flag.... And one who looked at it could feel the brush of the wind through the banner’s waving folds, and hear the scream of shrill fifes piping in the air....

Hinchcliffe, who knew the Frenchman better than the others, observed this scrutiny, and asked a question, softly. The Frenchman smiled.

“I was thinking, sir,” he told Hinchcliffe, “That I have witnessed a scene like that, in my time.”

His words came in a little pause in the conversation of the others, so that they all heard, and waited for him to continue. And Hinchcliffe ventured to urge quietly: “Tell us.”

The Frenchman lifted his hand in a deprecating fashion; they insisted. He sipped at his glass, and in the end he nodded. Barton lighted a fresh cigar. Hinchcliffe shifted to a more comfortable position in his chair. Hughes beckoned the nearest attendant with a silent forefinger. The Frenchman began to speak. His tone was level and unemotional; his articulation was precise. Only an odd construction of sentences now and then betrayed his unfamiliarity with the tongue. His eyes were on the framed print upon the wall; and they seemed to look through it, and beyond....

II

It was, in the beginning, (said the old Frenchman) one of those valorous and devoted regiments to which fall the hardest and most honorable tasks. The men came, for the most part, from the Argonne; they were rugged stock, men of the farms and of the hills. Simple, and direct.... Good soldiers.... And Frenchmen.

It chanced that when the war came, this regiment fought in its own homeland. The men knew every foot of the hills they defended, the ravines which they turned into death traps, the forests through which they marched, the meadows where they skirmished. They knew this land, and by the same token, they loved it. It was as though they had their roots in the soil. They could not be torn from it. They waited for the Germans at ten kilometres from the frontier—you remember, my friends, how we waited for them there so that they might not say we had provoked the conflict—and when the Germans came, this regiment stopped its immediate foe and held the Germans in their tracks.

At this time, the French invasion toward Muelhausen was prospering; but at the same time, the Germans were crushing Belgium, and pouring through, so that they turned our flank and we were forced to go back. That was unpleasant, and for a little time, at the very first, it was dangerous. But in a few days we were safely disengaged, and the enemy was exhausting himself to come up with us, and our counter stroke was preparing.

But to give us time for this retreat and preparation, certain organizations had to be sacrificed. This regiment was one. It was ordered to stand firm, to hold.... It held. The enemy attacked on the front and was repulsed; but on either side, our lines gave way, and the second day saw the regiment attacked on the right flank, and the left.

It was well posted, upon a hill that dominated two good roads, and it held....

But the Germans poured past them on either side; and in the press of more important matters to the southward, the work of overwhelming this regiment was delayed. A containing force was left to hold them, starve them.... And the main battle swept away and left them stranded there.

The men had fought tirelessly; they were prepared to fight on, and to die. But when it became apparent that the Germans did not propose to push matters, and when it became clear that another day would see hunger among them, the commander determined to strike. He had, at this time, some three hundred fit men of the regiment remaining. They were no longer of use where they stood. And the regiment was not accustomed to be idle.

Therefore, that night, a little after mid-night, when it was very dark and only the occasional flashes from the German positions illumined the blackness, the regiment attacked. They went down in three lines, a hundred men to a line, with their commander and their officers ahead, gentlemen. And they flung themselves upon the Germans.

The Germans were surprised. They had expected another day or two of waiting, and then an easy surrender. Instead, they found themselves beset by swarming enemies, stout men with long bayonets who sweated and swore and struck. The first charge of the French cut through the encircling lines; the remnant of the regiment might have escaped even then. But there had been no orders to escape, so they turned to right and left along the German positions, and flung the huddled enemy back and back and back.

The word was passed that their commander had fallen; and this man—he was my very good friend and comrade, gentlemen—had been beloved by them. Therefore they continued to fight with bitterness in their hearts until the resistance melted before them. There may have been a thousand Germans left to hold this battered remnant of a regiment; but those who lived, out of that thousand, fled before the three hundred.

They fled, and were lost in the night; and the flame from a fired straw stack nearby illumined the field, so that the Frenchmen could look into each other’s eyes and consider what was to be done.

Their commissioned officers were dead, gentlemen; but there was an under officer in that regiment named Jacques Fontaine. He was a big man, a farmer; and he was a very serious and practical and thrifty man. Also, he knew that country, and many of the men of the regiment were his neighbors, and all of them knew him for what he was.

Therefore it seemed natural that he should take the command that night. He called to a man named Lupec, and spoke with him. This Lupec was a little, wry-necked man, as shrewd as a fox. And Lupec advised Jacques Fontaine, and the big farmer shouted aloud to the panting men of the regiment, where they stood about him in the red trousers and the blue coats that had made our army so vulnerable in that first rush of war. He looked about him, and he shouted to them....

He bade them strip cartridges and rifles from the dead; and he told them to take what provisions they could find. And when this was done, they were to scatter, and rendezvous the next night but one in a certain ravine which all that country knew.

This ravine was in the heart of the forest. It was well hidden; it might be defended. There was water in it; and there were farms upon the borders of the forest where food might be had.

When, a little before dawn, a German force came back and descended upon them, the men melted before it like the morning mists before the sun; and the Germans did not know what to do, so they made camp, and cooked, and ate, and slept. And the men of the regiment made their way, singly, and by twos and threes, through the forest toward the ravine that was the rendezvous.

This spot was called in your tongue, gentlemen, the Ravine of the Cold Tooth.

III

Now modern warfare, gentlemen, is a curious and inconsistent thing. It is vast, and yet it is minute.

This battered regiment, added to the French armies at that moment, would have been of small account. A burst of shrapnel, a mine, an unimportant counter thrust might have accounted for them all. Their weight in an attack would have been inconsiderable.

But this regiment which did not know how to surrender, and which was at large behind the German lines, was another matter, my friends. It was worth well nigh a division to France. For an army is as vulnerable as it is vast, gentlemen; and it can do only one thing at a time.

The Emperor discovered this truth, long ago, in Spain. When he scattered his army to overcome the guerillas, he exposed himself to the blows of the Iron Duke; and when he effected a concentration to attack Wellington, the Spanish peasants sliced off every straggler. He was incessantly harassed, and he lost that campaign; and that was his first defeat.

The warfare of today—or, let us say, the warfare of yesterday, which we hope will never be the warfare of tomorrow—the warfare of yesterday was like that. The army’s front is like the front of a dam, vast and impregnable; but behind, that front is bolstered and strengthened and buttressed by many little lines of communication and supply, just as a dam may be buttressed on the lower side. A division may shatter itself in vain against the army’s front; a hundred men may cut one of those little lines behind.

This was the fact which aided Jacques Fontaine and his men, the regiment.

You must understand, also, gentlemen, that in the heat of open battle, a fighting line is an unstable thing. It sways, and bends, and yields, and rebounds; and fragments are broken off from it. They return to their places, or they do not return. At times, the line itself is shattered, when it grows too thin. And when the line is shattered, its component parts are thrown to every side. In open country, these component parts—men, gentlemen—may be run down and sabred by the cavalry, or they may surrender.

In wooded land, however, it is hard to exterminate men who will yield to nothing less than extermination. Cavalry can work through the forest only in small patrols, and along defined paths and roads. And for infantry, the currying of a wood is slow and painful work.

Therefore, when an army makes a considerable advance, it leaves in its rear many small and scattered parties of the enemy. It was so when the Germans thrust down into France, gentlemen. There were many Frenchmen left behind to wander and hide in the forest, to starve, or yield, or die.... Or, perhaps, to survive.

This will explain to you, my friends, the growth of the regiment under Jacques Fontaine’s command. When they scattered, after dispersing the German force which had been set to hold them, there were scarce a hundred of them without wounds. When they gathered at the Ravine of the Cold Tooth, straggling parties had swelled that number so that Jacques Fontaine, counting, with his big forefinger pointing in turn toward each man and his lips mumbling as he counted, found that he had a force of two hundred and seven hardy and energetic men.

And he was pleased.

The first thing this man did, gentlemen, was to reconstitute the regiment. A regiment, you understand, is an immortal thing. It cannot die. When every man of it is dead, the regiment still lives; because a regiment is an idea, and ideas are eternal. Jacques Fontaine was a slow man, my friends; and you would have considered him a dull man. Nevertheless, this conception of the immortality of the regiment was a part of his heart and his soul. If you had told him the regiment was destroyed, he would have been very sorry for you.

They had saved their regimental colors, you understand; the banner with its honorable decorations. They had saved this, and Jacques Fontaine’s first act was to assign six men to guard this banner. He explained to them, carefully, that they were to seclude themselves. They were to engage in no enterprise involving hazard; and they were to keep the standard immaculate and unstained. They were to fight only to defend it; and they were to save it by evasion and flight when they could, and fight only when they must.

Jacques Fontaine understood, gentlemen, that the banner is the regiment.

When he had made this arrangement, he called Lupec, and they found a man skilled in writing, and they prepared a regimental roll. Those stragglers from other regiments who had joined them were mustered in after a formula which Jacques Fontaine devised. In the end, the two hundred and seven men were one body and one soul, and Jacques Fontaine was satisfied with the arrangement.

Having counted his men, he began, thriftily, to consider their equipment.

He found that these two hundred and seven men had two hundred and fifty-four rifles. A hundred or so of these rifles were German; and for these weapons there was a plentiful supply of German ammunition. But there were very few cartridges for the French rifles; there were only the long, needle-like bayonets.

Jacques Fontaine was vexed with this discovery. He was one of those penurious peasants whom De Maupassant knew how to paint, my friends. He could not bear poverty, or waste. He derived a solid satisfaction from the mere possession of wealth; and his conception of wealth was strictly in accord with academic economic principles. Any useful article was wealth to him.

He perceived that while his command was wealthy in rifles and bayonets, it was very badly off indeed for cartridges.

He sat down on a big rock at the head of the ravine, while the men with little fires cooked supper in the deeps below him; and he took off his hat and scratched his head and considered what to do. Another man might have chosen his course more swiftly; it required some hours for Jacques Fontaine to make up his mind.

But when he rose from the rock, this man had laid out before his feet the path they were to follow through the four interminable and glorious years which were to come.

Any other man would have been wise enough to know that the plan he had chosen was impossible. Jacques Fontaine was valorously stupid. He did not know he could not do that which he planned to do, gentlemen.

Therefore, he did the impossible.

IV

The German armies, at this time, were throwing themselves against our barricade of steel and fire along the Marne; and by every possible avenue, they were hurrying forward munitions and guns and all supplies. They gave little thought to the stragglers in the forests behind them. They knew that stragglers are not dangerous to an organized force. It is only when the stragglers organize that they become a peril.

Jacques Fontaine had organized these stragglers. At dawn, on the third day after that first rendezvous, he flung his men upon a wagon train that threaded one of the forest roads.

This train was escorted by a troop of some five score Uhlans; it was upon a road which was guarded by patrols of three and four men stationed at every farm. Yet in a dip between two hills, the single Uhlan in advance found his way blocked by felled trees in the road, and at the same time other trees, cut almost through and held erect by ropes until the appointed time, crashed down upon his comrades behind.

With the crashing of these trees was mingled the crashing discharge of two hundred rifles. And after the first discharge, out of a hundred troopers scarce fifty remained upon their horses; and after the second volley, not thirty men were still unharmed. And after the third, there were only fugitive Uhlans galloping headlong back to give the alarm.

Before these fugitives were out of sight, Jacques Fontaine and his men flung themselves upon the loaded wagons. The two foremost wagons bore cartridges. They laid open the boxes with axe and bayonet; and they plunged in their hands.

It was hopeless to attempt to make away with the wagons themselves. Thick forest lay on every hand. Therefore, by Jacques’ order, each man took all the cartridges he could bear, and raced back into the wood, and hid the precious things between rocks, and beneath logs, and in every cranny he could find; and when he had disposed of his burden he returned and took as many more as he could carry. The men filled their pockets, their belts, their pouches, their hats.... Some of them dropped the cartridges inside the legs of their trousers, so that the things hung heavy about their knees. And when this was done, of the two wagon loads, no cartridges remained.

The men took also the rifles and revolvers of the fallen Germans; and they stripped their own few dead of weapons. And then they slipped into the forest, and scattered, and fled away.

The hunt began within the hour; and for a week, the men were chivvied through the woods like hares. Dogs bayed upon their trails; they hid in caves, in trees, in the thick-growing underbrush; they lay for hours in the pools with only mouth and nose and eyes exposed above the water. And some of them were shot, and some were taken alive.... And some took Germans with them when they died.

Lupec was one of those who was captured. On the fourth day, weary and utterly exhausted, he fell asleep in a crevice beneath two boulders; and a German stumbled on him. His captor took him, at gun point, back through the forest toward a cross-road where the Germans were encamped.

When they came in sight of this place, his captor halted to stare, and Lupec also looked. The Germans were busy; they were engaged in hanging three Frenchmen by the necks to a beech tree beside the farmhouse there.

Lupec had no desire to thrust his wry-neck into a noose. Therefore he turned, and plunged into the man who had captured him, and knocked the man down. Even then he found time to snatch up the German’s rifle and turn and fire; and he saw the German officer who was watching the hangings pitch drunkenly forward on his saddle. So that Lupec was grinning as he plunged into the forest again.

He made good his escape; and thus he was able to bring to Jacques Fontaine, when the pursuit relaxed, the word of the hangings.

The big farmer was displeased with this news; because you understand, my friends, he had reconstituted the regiment, so that he considered that he and his comrades were soldiers of France, and as such entitled to better treatment than a noose. He frowned blackly at Lupec’s report; and he sent out men to discover if there had been other hangings.

They found that eleven Frenchmen had been murdered in this fashion, gentlemen; and Jacques Fontaine nodded at this, and made a calculation upon his fingers. He was slow at figures, you understand; but he knew what he wished to do. He made his calculation; and he sent out his men to the farms and the cross-roads, and he gave them careful orders....

They obeyed him so well, my friends, that on the second day after he was able to hang twenty-two Germans, two for each Frenchman, upon the same tree where the men of his regiment had been hung.

When the Germans discovered these pendant figures, looking like sacks of old clothes in their dirty, baggy uniforms, they were violently wrathful; and for two weeks more the forests were scoured in an effort to exterminate the remnants of the regiment.

But there were no more Frenchmen hanged.

V

To understand the history of the four years which followed, gentlemen, it is necessary to understand the man Jacques Fontaine; it is necessary to understand the spirit of Frenchmen. It is necessary, in short, to comprehend France.

I believe I may be forgiven for holding that valor is a trait of most Frenchmen. And by valor I do not mean the bravery which can be taught, which is merely a form of habit. You may take the most craven material and teach it the habit of obedience, and you have what passes for a brave soldier; but the Frenchman is valorous before he is a soldier, and he is valorous when he is no longer a soldier. The whining beggar has valor; so has the peasant, and the comfortable bourgeois, and the man of birth and breeding. You will find it universally, my friends.

This is perhaps because the French are the great phrase-makers of the world. The turn of a phrase comes easily to them; and the turn of a phrase captivates and conquers them, so that they will die for it. Danton made a phrase that saved France. Verdun made another. Combine the two, my friends, and you have the spirit of France. Dare—and yield not. The valor of France is the valor that will die rather than violate those mighty phrases....

Thus I say Jacques Fontaine was valorous. Bravery is a tangible thing; valor defends the intangible. Bravery is steadfast, and it is sensible. Valor may be foolhardy. Valor is a form of pride. And Jacques Fontaine was proud. Thus, when the Germans hanged men of the regiment, he hanged Germans. He would have done the same, knowing that he himself must be hanged forthwith thereafter. For valor does not consider consequences.

But Jacques Fontaine was not only valorous; he was thrifty. And it was the combination of these two characteristics that enabled him to survive. It is this same combination which has enabled France to survive, my friends. She is valorous; but she is thrifty. She is audacious; but she is pre-eminently logical. Thus Jacques Fontaine; valorous and thrifty, audacious and logical.

Thrift was bred in him. It was thrift which enabled him to survive and keep his regiment alive. He saved supplies, munitions, guns, men.... He had no other belongings save the things of war; therefore he hoarded these things, and when his stores ran short, he secured fresh supplies.

When his stores ran short, he foraged through the land, and he raided the German trains. When munitions threatened to fail, he watched his opportunity to replenish them. When guns wore out, he got new ones. And when the wastage of these operations, the unceasing perils of this life reduced the numbers in his command, he attacked and liberated a convoy of prisoners and recruited his regiment once more.

Through it all, he kept careful records of his regimental life. These records show that at one time, this man and his tattered remnant of a regiment possessed three German machine guns, four hundred rifles, and almost fifty thousand cartridges. Besides clothing, and stores of food, all hidden in caches in the forest depths.

It was inevitable that he should be hunted. There were at least four determined attempts by the Germans to exterminate the regiment. One of these occupied six weeks; it cut the roll from a hundred and eighty men down to less than sixty; it reduced weapons and supplies to a minimum; and for the full six weeks, the men saw each other only now and then, in groups of two or three. For this was the secret of their survival; they scattered before the hunt, they became units, as difficult to find as the beasts of the forest in which they dwelt.

Yet always they survived. That is to say, a nucleus of men always survived; and the regiment could never die. The regimental colors were never captured; the regimental records were never found. And Jacques Fontaine, and Lupec, and a handful of others of the original regiment, preserved themselves and held the rest together.

Picture it to yourselves, my friends, if you can; this handful of men, cohering, enduring; and all around them by the hundred thousand, the enemy. Behind every tree, a possible rifle; in every wood, a potential ambush; in every comrade, the danger of a spy....

There were three spies in the regiment during those four years. The first was suspected and killed before he had reached the rendezvous. The second was detected on the third day when he stiffened at a barked command in German. The third, alone, was clever; he deceived them, he lived among them, he learned their plans, and when the chance came, he brought down a German force upon the rendezvous when almost the full command was there.

But Jaques Fontaine had never grown careless; he had made it a rule from the beginning to post twenty guards in a wide circle about the Ravine of the Cold Tooth when the regiment was assembled. And one of these guards escaped the attempt to overcome him, and gave warning just in time. The regiment flung out of the ravine, broke boldly through the jaws of the German trap, left half its strength in German hands ...

But the remnant escaped, and lived.

In the winter of 1915, this regiment was reduced to twenty-seven men. The next winter, at the time of the great hunt, when the men were tracked through the snow, they were cut down to fifty-four. The fall of 1917 was the time of the spy; and some seventy men went through that winter like the beasts, some of them nursing wounds for months on end. They stirred from their hiding places only once, and that was when they cut off a German patrol in which the spy rode, and took him from his comrades and hanged him to the beams of a barn.

They had been forced to leave the Ravine of the Cold Tooth, since the Germans knew that spot; they hid now under the shoulder of one of the little mountains. And there, that winter and the next spring, their numbers grew again....

They had ninety men in March; and the friendly peasants brought to them by devious ways soldiers of England and of France who were cut off in the great offensive of that year, so that in May they numbered a hundred and fifty men; and in June, close to two hundred.... And the Germans were too much concerned with other matters to divert so much as a regiment to run them down....

When in due time the hour came for them to fulfil their destiny, my friends, this regiment which Jacques Fontaine had kept alive numbered three hundred and ninety men, with rifles for all, and two machine guns, and cartridges to feed those clamoring things.... And Jacques prepared to strike his blow for France.

VI

It is certain, my friends, that I have failed to give you any comprehensive picture of the life of this poor regiment during the years of its isolation. It is impossible for you, who have always been well fed and comfortable, to imagine the hunger, the cold, the loneliness, the misery. Some of you have faced peril, perhaps for hours on end. But these men, gentlemen, faced death for years on end. There was never a moment when their lives were secure. They were like the animals in the forest about them; they slept fitfully; they squatted on their haunches while they ate, and were alert to spring to their feet at the least alarm. They subsisted on berries, on nuts, on uncooked grain pilfered from the fields which the Germans forced the peasants to cultivate; they snared rabbits, they were able, now and then, to kill larger game. And when desperation drove them, they attacked the Germans and wrested food from them at price of blood.

This existence was at best an ordeal; and when the Germans found time to try to hunt them down, it became torment. Regiments encircled them, beating through the woods, searching every brake and gully and ravine. Dogs tracked them, baying on their trails; their footprints in the snow, bloody and stumbling, led their pursuers through the forest. At one time, one of the little German princelings gave great sport to his friends by organizing a hunt for these men as he would have organized a hunt for the wild boars. When the beaters overcame a Frenchman, they took his weapons and let him go, and then the princeling and his friends charged the unarmed man with levelled lance, and ran him through.

The Frenchmen spoiled this sport by a stubborn refusal to run before the horses. Robbed of their weapons, they stood erect and faced their foe and took the steel in their breasts, so that the princeling was furious, and those with him were shamed, and the sport was broken off....

Of such things as this was existence for these men....

But I have been unjust in failing, before this, to speak of the peasants who helped them. Word of this regiment had gone abroad through the forest and the mountains. And wherever they went, they were welcomed, and given food, and shelter, and clothed.... And the peasants brought recruits to them, and brought them warnings, and information. They made endurance possible....

It was the peasants, in the end, who brought the word to Jacques Fontaine that told him his hour had come to strike. They came and they said the great battle to the southward was rolling nearer every day. This was at the time, you understand, when we had begun to push the German back; it was at the time when he was giving way each time a little more easily than the time before. We advanced one mile today, two miles tomorrow, three the day after....

And the word of this was abroad among the peasants in that part of France and of Belgium which the German still held. They were fermenting, as though these rumors of approaching liberation had been yeast cast among them....

They came, and they told Jacques Fontaine. And Jacques Fontaine, and wry-necked Lupec, cast about them to find a task for their hands.

The Germans were making up their mind, at this time, to draw back to a new defensive line, where, they counted on being able to hold us at last. And they were withdrawing slowly, a little here, and a little there, and a little yonder, day by day. Behind them they left a ruined country, every house destroyed, every fruit tree cut off at the roots.... But they were going back and back....

There was one line of railroad, along which the trains were pounding, day by day; and this line ran north and south past the fringe of the forest and the mountains where Jacques Fontaine and his regiment were hiding. The regiment was scattered, groups of four men and five and six dwelt here and there among the ravines. But when Jacques Fontaine and Lupec had considered, and had secretly scouted back and forth, and had decided upon what they wished to do, they sent runners to gather the regiment together.

There was a spot where the railroad line which the Germans were burdening so heavily crossed a little stream. On the north bank of this stream, and overlooking the bridge which spanned it, there rose a rocky hillock; and this hillock was topped by one of those ancient, ruined chateaus which were the chief beauty of France before the war. On three sides, sheer precipices fell away from the walls of this old chateau; on the other side, the way of ascent was steep and hard.

A dozen men could hold this spot against an army, so long as cannon were not concerned in the affair. And Jacques Fontaine believed the Germans had other uses for their cannon at this time.

So he gathered his regiment, and drew them near the spot he had chosen, and waited his time to strike.

There was, you understand, a guard set about this bridge. But the guard was not strong, for a strong guard was not considered necessary. There were soldiers passing constantly, working slowly northward in the great retreat; and the long trains of stores and supplies crossed one after another, through every day.

It was like a river of men and of supplies; one of the rivers of war. And on a certain night, Jacques Fontaine dammed that river. His men swept down, they overwhelmed the guard upon the bridge.... And they fired the petard which the Germans had themselves laid, to destroy that bridge when their forces should be across. They fired the petard, and the bridge disappeared in a great flame of orange fire; and Jacques Fontaine and his men fell back swiftly into the night. When dawn came, they were all within the walls of the old chateau, high above the bridge, commanding it. And when the German pioneers swarmed out to repair the bridge, Jacques and his men began to fire.

They swept the pioneers away, for they were marksmen, all. They had been trained for four years never to waste a cartridge; that was the thrift of Jacques Fontaine. And they wasted none now. They did not use the two machine guns. Those were reserved to repel the attack that was sure to come. They used their rifles, and they strove to make every bullet take its toll.

A troop train came north in the morning, and the Germans flung the men against the old chateau, up the steep path. The Frenchmen slaughtered them; they built a barricade of German bodies before the very muzzles of their guns. And more trains came, and were held up by the destroyed bridge. The dammed river began to rise, and grumble, and fret and fume.... The pioneers, down by the ruined bridge, strove fruitlessly under the hail of balls.

The second day, the Germans brought guns to bear. At first, there was only shrapnel, and it spattered harmlessly. But after that came high explosive; and each great shell, detonating amid the ruined walls of the chateau, turned every stone and pebble into a missile that swept to right and left and all about in a storm of death.

When three hundred men are huddled in a narrow area, a single shell will kill half of them. This happened, on that day. An hour after the bombardment began, not a hundred men remained alive upon the top of the little peak; an hour after that, scarce fifty remained, ...

But while it was easy to kill the first hundred, and while it was not difficult to kill the second hundred, it was very hard indeed to complete the extermination of the force. A dozen men may live where a hundred would perish; and at noon, the riflemen in the ruins of the old chateau still kept the ruined bridge cleared of men and none could toil there.

By that time, the congestion on the southern bank of the river had become so great that that tide overflowed. And Jacques Fontaine, with a scarf bound around his chest to crush back the blood that was leaking from his great body, could see and hear the roar of the French guns, ten miles away, harassing the fleeing enemy....

By mid-afternoon, French shells began to fall amid the huddle on the southern bank of the river; and at nightfall, the Germans broke, there....

They broke; they poured across the stream, wading, swimming, drowning. They broke in flight to escape the merciless guns. And the French planes overhead till dark was fully fallen marked their going, and signalled the guns that harassed the fleeing men.

Before that, the Frenchmen had been silenced; the Frenchmen of Jacques Fontaine, in the old chateau. There were some few of them still unwounded; there were others who breathed and groaned as they slowly died. There were not enough of them to keep the bridge clear; but that duty no longer was required of them. They had held up a division, till the French armies could come up and rout it. And the Germans, flinging one last charge against the old chateau, drew off to the north and left Jacques Fontaine and his men, masters of the field.

VII

I was with the army that came up to that bridge at dawn, my friends. And I was one of those who saw, floating in the first light above the ruined walls of the old chateau, a flicker of glorious color.... A banner, floating there....

Our skirmishers were flung across, pressing northward. Our engineers swarmed upon the ruined bridge, rebuilding....

And one patrol of men turned aside, by the road that led toward the chateau. They went to solve this riddle, gentlemen. They went to discover who it was that had set there, the banner of France.

They went carefully, one man ahead, others behind. They feared a trap; they did not understand....

I was with them. We came, thus, to a turn in the road; and we rounded it, and we saw our advance man at the halt, upon his horse, in the road ahead.

Toward this man were marching, down the road from the chateau, four men.

One of these men was tall, and strong, and bulky. And there was a scarf about his chest; and the scarf was red. Of the others, two marched proudly; two who had come unscathed through that hell where the chateau had stood. And the fourth, though there was a smeared bandage about his face and eyes, so that he held to the arm of Jacques Fontaine; this fourth man, my friends, held his head as high as any; and his shoulders were erect, and his steps were firm.

It was this fourth man who bore, resting it against his hip and steadying it with his other hand, the flag. They came on, these four, heads high. And though they were haggard, and stained, and worn, the banner above them was unsullied and unsoiled....

As they came toward us, we could hear them singing, in cracked and hoarse voices. Singing those immortal words of Rouget de l’Isle....

When they came near our vidette, where he sat his horse so quietly, they halted. And I saw then that these men still wore the red trousers and the blue coats of their ancient uniforms, which they had preserved for this occasion through the years. And we were all very still as we listened so that we heard the vidette challenge, in a ringing voice:

“Qui vive?”

There was, for me, something splendidly symbolic in the scene. For to that challenge, those battered but unconquerable men gave answer with one voice, one word.

“Qui vive?” the vidette challenged.

And the four answered hoarsely: “France!”