"Forward!"


The officers had advanced in front of the line of skirmishers. All the
men sprang up in an instant, and the three squadrons dashed forward
full speed.

But at the exact moment when our men, springing out of the ditches,
began their advance towards the wood, the enemy's artillery,
shortening its range, began to pour a perfect hail of shrapnel on our
line. It was now almost pitch dark, and there was something infernal
in the scene. The shells were bursting at a considerable height above
us, some in front, some behind. They made a horrible kind of music.
There must have been at least two batteries at work upon us, for we
could no longer distinguish even the three characteristic shots of the
German batteries in _rafale_ fire. The noise was incessant, and each
shell as it burst illumined a small section of the battlefield for a
second. It just showed a tree trunk, a bit of wall, a strip of hedge,
and then the darkness fell again over this point, while another was
illuminated by the crash of a new explosion.

At one moment a sudden horror gripped me. To my left a shrapnel shell
fell full on the line of the third squadron. This time the flash of
the explosion had not only lighted up a corner of landscape; I had had
a glimpse of a terrible sight.

You must imagine the intense and rapid light cast by a burning
magnesium wire, accompanied by a deafening noise, and in this brief
light the figures of several men, weirdly illuminated, in the