It was an immense victory of organization, and a
movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the
German deathblow would again be averted.
I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern
Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern
Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war,
at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre
of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid
spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.
"It is nothing, my little one," said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with
the laughing eyes of a D'Artagnan; "we shall bite their heads off. These
brutal bosches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable
deathtrap. We shall have them at last."
Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges.
The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with
turned-back flaps were war worn and flanked with the dust of long
marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not
forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to
see.
They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side
with their old foes.
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