Reading a French gazette, early saturday morning, having a coffee and a croissant in a cafe in Montmartre, Paris, during a brief leave away from the front.
I remember. Waves after waves or iron storms passing over our heads and not much in reply. We were waiting, waiting, so desperate to actually do something and release the tension that we were eager when the attack started. We were ready for a fierce man-to-man fighting, for German MG bullets having their wild dance in the fog. But what we found were mostly tetanized young concripts, mostly dead (and in parts), the others cowering. A few had gone mad and blew themselves up with grenades, causing us our few casualties (that and the shells that had fallen unexploded and sometimes, for no apparent reason, started to fuse and sometimes detonated).
We came back to Nancy after that raid, leaving the iron deposits to the Germans if they wanted to use it with so many of their bodies laying around. We left some survivors to tell the others of the hell they had lived through and to demoralize the rest of the army.
1 MG and 3 conscripted regiments were killed that way. Yesterday a friend whose regiment is in Flanders told me nearly the same had happened on two "secret" parts of the front between Ypres and Bruxelles (2 MG and 2 concript regiments dead for almost no French casualties).
And the newspaper I am reading speak mostly of our fleet that sunk a destroyer and a submarine in the cold waters of the North sea while another part has shelled to hell the beautiful city of Ragusa, forcing its inhabitants to flee (minus 2 pop at least) and destroying its barracks (at least).
Still, these "victories" as the newspaper call them, don't make me think the war will be over soon. Will I live through it ? Tomorrow, the Lorraine taxis are bringing me back to the front at Nancy...
