Under the tornado of fire--for the enemy knows how to keep what he has won--our infantrymen advance. They want to go on until they get into touch with their comrades. They will go on.
A shell penetrates into the C.O.’s headquarters. The telephone apparatus remains intact, but the operator has both hands cut off by a splinter. He holds out the stumps to his chief and apologises:
Like the attack of June 6, that of the composite brigade succeeds in encircling the fort. The enemy, however, occupies the superstructure, and his machine-guns work great havoc in our ranks. His reinforcements are constantly coming up. The battalion on the right can only just hang on to the terrain, after very slow progress. In the centre, the advance continues up to the ditches of the fort. It is at this moment that the German machine-guns do us the most serious damage. The leaders of the expedition fall one after the other, among them Major Gilbert and Major Jérôme de Mouy. The latter was a cavalry officer who had passed the staff college; he had returned from Morocco and been awarded a staff appointment, but asked for the command of a battalion of Zouaves.
The two battalions, deprived of their officers, are compelled to give up the scheme of recapturing the fort and to entrench themselves in the parallel lines from which they started.
Suddenly an explosion occurs in the fort, and a dense black smoke issues from casemate 5.
There is no human being left alive in this last stronghold.
At eight o’clock in the morning the battalion of the colonial regiment which acts as a support still has no precise information about the operation that has been embarked upon, save that the two attacking battalions have not returned. Hence they have had to advance, and they need munitions to ward off the imminent counter-attacks. A fatigue party of eighty men is told off, under the command of a lieutenant and of Cadet Jacques Bégouen. They carry grenades, rockets, and Bengal fire to stake out our lines. Their progress can be followed in detail, thanks to Cadet Bégouen’s notes, from which I will quote a passage. He too, later on, will be among the chroniclers of the war. A son of Count Bégouen, whose historical learning is well known, he has two brothers serving with the colours--one of them, like himself, belongs to that heroic colonial regiment of Morocco which distinguished itself at Dixmude in December 1914, and which, in the battle of Verdun, added new lustre to its crown of glory.