t have almost
every house opened by force, in order that the men, worn out with
marching and fighting, may rest. Here and there, in answer to
prolonged knocking, one of the inhabitants comes to the door. When the
shell fire began they took refuge in their cellars.

In the brightly tiled hall of a pretty house that has escaped damage I
sit with the gentlemen for several hours over glasses of mulled wine.
We are waiting for orders for the next day. The orders reach us at 1
o'clock that night; the detachment is to take its stand at 7 o'clock
beside the church at R., in order to continue the advance toward L.

But during the hours of the night many changes have taken place. The
troops driven out of R. have sent their patrols, the black scouts, to
the very edge of the suburb again, under cover of darkness; and
reports of our cavalry and bicycle men tell that during the night
heavy detachments of troops sent from the north have reached L. They
talk of 40,000 to 50,000 men, chiefly newly enlisted forces and
territorials; but Englishmen, too, are said to be among them. Our
assigned task does not include fighting a destructive battle. We are
simply to compel the enemy to unfold his forces, for certain strategic
reasons the nature of which, of course, we do not know. Accordingly,
our small detachment must risk everything in order to lure upon itself
as many as possible of the enemy's troops. That, too, is just what
happened.

We take our former positions. The cavalry division has departed, with
its artillery, its bicycle corps, its Jaegers, and its machine guns.
New problems are in store on the right wing for the brave division
which has already distinguished itself throughout the entire campaign.
We remain alone with our battery--the third battalion of the active
regiment and our provincial Landwehr battalion.

It is going to be a heavy, heavy, heavy day of fighting.

Patrols establish the fact that F. is free of the enemy's forces. But
as we enter the road toward L. the French machine guns at once
announce themselves. They sing and whistle and whirr above our heads.
After yesterday's losses (half a column of the Fifth Company is still
busy burying our dead, laying our wounded in automobiles and wagons to
be sent to the hospitals) our artillery will first shoot breaches in
the enemy's lines before we advance.

But at midday the field artillery of the Frenchmen already replies to
ours. They must have transshipped, at night