Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out, and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed, inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across it, and rose on its opposite edge.
I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward, becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.
My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed, and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard and above them the metallic clash of arms.
The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into the hollow--and from both sides--and the insignificant crease in the landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.
To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right, somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room, from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward, as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat screened in the desolated groves of trees.