The affray in which the first lives were lost on each side took place at Joncherey, close to Delle on the Swiss frontier, five miles nearer to Belfort than Suarce. A glowing account of it was given in the _Elsasser Kurier_, a paper published at Colmar, which not only acknowledged the raid and the date (August 2, 1914), but deliberately gloried in the achievement of its leader, Lieutenant Mayer, of the 5th Chasseurs. He was, it says, when he received his orders from the general officer commanding the brigade to reconnoitre in the direction of Belfort, “full of joy and the lust of fighting, and proud to be the first to teach the enemy the might of the German trooper.” When he and his patrol of six or seven crossed the frontier into France they found, according to the same authority, that the numerous French cavalry and infantry detachments which had patrolled the district for some days before had disappeared—in obedience, of course, to the orders of their Government. On the way to Delle they saw, however, two sentinels posted on the road. “Like a flash of lightning,” wrote the Colmar enthusiast, “Lieutenant Mayer overtook them, and with the first stroke of his German sabre cleft to the breast the head of a French _pioupiou_, who was almost paralyzed by terror. At the same time, just as quickly, first-class trooper Heize thrust his lance with such fury into the breast of the other private that he could not withdraw his weapon from the body which he had pierced (“overtaken” is the word used), and was obliged to continue his ride with his sabre (and not his lance) in his hand.” The German story then goes on to tell how the little troop proceeded to gallop through a company of fifty French infantry without losing a man, how Lieutenant Mayer was shot down after they had passed them, and how first-class trooper Heize then took command and finally reached the German lines with a further loss of three men. As a matter of fact, the feats of arms of the gallant lieutenant and first-class trooper Heize were not quite so charmingly mediæval as the story makes out. What really happened was that when they came upon the French post, consisting of a corporal and four men, Lieutenant Mayer, by way of answer to Corporal Peugeot’s challenge, fired three shots at him with his revolver, one of which wounded him mortally, and was himself hit and killed by three bullets fired by the guard. (He was afterwards buried at Joncherey with full military honours, and a wreath was placed on his grave by the French.) The rest of the German account, except the appearance on the scene of the fifty worst shots in the French army, is fairly correct. In any case it is near enough to the truth to prove without need of further witness that the raid was not a mere youthful indiscretion on the part of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mayer.