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By Root 2033 0

long, but jumped to our rifles and until eleven at night we really thought we were giving them a prize pasting… But you must know that there were less than five thousand of us and those sods just went on coming and coming and then some. I was on a little rise lying behind a bush and I saw them coming out straight ahead of me and to right and left, real anthills and streams of black ants, so that when there weren’t any more left there were still some more to come. Though I says it as shouldn’t, we did all think the officers were a lot of bloody fools to have landed us in a hornet’s nest like that, miles from our friends, and let us be flattened out without coming to our help. Well then, our general, that poor bugger General Douay, and he wasn’t a fool or a coward either, he went and caught a bullet and was laid out, all four legs in the air. Cleaned out, nobody left! All the same, we held our ground. But there were too many of them and we had to push off. We fought in a field, we defended the station in a racket enough to make you deaf for life. And after that, I don’t know, the town must have been taken because we found ourselves on a mountain, the Geissberg, they call it, I think, and there we withdrew into a sort of castle, and didn’t we half mow them down, the sods! They jumped up into the air and it was a real pleasure to see them come down again on their noses… and then, well, they still came on and on, ten to one and guns ad lib. When it’s like that all bravery does for you is to leave you dead on the field. Anyway, it was such a mess that we just had to fuck off… All the same, for a lot of chumps our officers took the biscuit, didn’t they, Picot?’

There was a pause. Picot, the tall one, swallowed a glass of white wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘That’s a fact. Like at Froeschwiller – you must be as barmy as a donkey to fight in such conditions. My captain, who was a smart little bloke, said as much… The truth is they couldn’t have known. A whole army of those buggers fell on us when we were scarcely forty thousand, and our lot weren’t expecting to fight that day, and the battle began just afterwards without the officers wanting it, apparently… Well, I didn’t see everything, of course, but what I do know is that the dance started up all over again from one end of the day to the other, and when we thought it was over, not a bit of it, the violins were just tuning up for something better still! First at Woerth, a nice little village with a funny church tower that looks like a stove because they’ve covered it all with porcelain tiles. I don’t know why the hell they ever made us leave it in the morning, because we fought tooth and nail to reoccupy it and didn’t manage to. Oh, I’m telling you, mates, we didn’t half fight there, and the number of bellies split open, and the brains scattered about, you wouldn’t credit it! Then they fought round some other village, Elsasshausen, a name as long as your arm! We were being potted at by lots of guns firing at their ease from the top of a bloody hill we had given up that morning too. And that’s when I saw, yes, with my very own eyes, the charge of the cavalry. How they faced death, those buggers! It was a real shame to send horses and men over ground like that, a slope covered with bushes and full of potholes. Especially, for Christ’s sake, when it couldn’t do any good. Never mind, it was plucky and it warmed your heart… Then it seemed that the best thing was to go off and get our breath back further away. The village was flaming like a match, and the Badeners, the Württembergers and the Prussians, in fact all the gang, over a hundred and twenty thousand of the bleeders they reckoned it was later, had surrounded us. But was it over, not at all, the band started playing louder still around Froeschwiller! For this is the gospel truth, MacMahon may be a fathead, but he is brave. You should have seen him on his big horse with shells all round him! Anybody else would have sloped off at the outset, deciding there was no disgrace in refusing to fight when you haven