onging to the First and Second Army Corps were ordered
to the edge of the river at daybreak, and as soon as the first
gleam of dawn appeared in the sky, the heroic effort began.

At the risk of seeming a little detailed, in order to understand
the somewhat involved maneuvers by which the British won the crossing
of the Aisne, instead of dealing with the advance of the British army
as a unit, in the manner that was done in discussing the battles of
the Marne, their activities will be shown as army corps: the Third
Army Corps to the westward, under General Pulteney; the Second Army
Corps, under Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, and the First Army Corps
to the eastward, under Sir Douglas Haig, all, of course, under
the general direction of Sir John French.

The British had no means of knowing what was in front of them.
There was only one way to find out--a way, alas, often costly,
a way that in every campaign costs thousands of lives apparently
fruitlessly, and that is a frontal attack. Down over the slopes of
the southern bank, into the bright, smiling river valley, where the
little white villages in the distance were hiding their dilapidated
state, marched the British army. Not a sign of activity showed
itself upon the farther shore. A summer haze obscured objects at
a distance, but, shortly before nine o'clock, the German batteries
opened fire with a roar that was appalling.

The Third Army Corps, after a brief artillery duel, advanced on
Soissons to cover the work of the engineers who were building a
pontoon bridge for the French troops. The German fire was deadly,
yet though more than half their men fell, the engineers put the
pontoon bridge across. German howitzer fire, from behind the ridge,
however, soon destroyed the bridge. The Turcos crossed the river in
rowboats and had a fierce but indecisive struggle in the streets
of the medieval city. Meanwhile, with the failure of the pontoon
bridge at Soissons, General Pulteney struck to the northeast along
the road to Venizel. The bridge at that point had been blown up,
but the British sappers repaired it sufficiently to set the Eleventh
Brigade across, and even, despite the lurid hail of shot and shell,
four regiments gathered at Bucy-de-Long by one o'clock on that
Sunday, September 13, 1914. Over the heads of these courageous
regiments towered the great hill of Vregny, a veritable Gibraltar
of heavy guns with numerous machine guns along the wooded edge.
There was no protec