-Quentin.
XIX
The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume
after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering
nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage,
not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's
fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four
hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our
graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German
dead lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the
earth below Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them were
German. I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell
in the slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong
and awful.
But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity
through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept--oh, marvelous!--their
spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory.
Pages:
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722