Nevertheless, it was an immense delight, as he would sometimes confess to Bernard, to be going towards the fighting line. He had the feeling that he was making for a definite object, the only one that interested him: Élisabeth's deliverance. Even though he was attacking this frontier and not the other, the eastern frontier, he was still rushing with all the strength of his hatred against the detested enemy. Whether that enemy was defeated here or there made little difference. In either case, Élisabeth would be free.
"We shall succeed," said Bernard. "You may be sure that Élisabeth will outwit that swine. Meanwhile, we shall stampede the Huns, make a dash across Belgium, take Conrad in the rear and capture Èbrecourt. Doesn't the proposal make you smile? Oh, no, you never smile, do you, when you demolish a Hun? Not you! You've got a little way of laughing that tells me all about it. I say to myself, 'There's a bullet gone home,' or 'That's done it: he's got one at the end of his toothpick!' For you've a way of your own of sticking them. Ah, lieutenant, how fierce we grow! Simply through practise in killing! And to think that it makes us laugh!"
Roye, Lassigny, Chaulnes. . . . Later, the Bassée Canal and the River Lys. . . . And, later and at last, Ypres. Ypres! Here the two lines met, extended towards the sea. After the French rivers, after the Marne, the Aisne, the Oise and the Somme, a little Belgian stream was to run red with young men's blood. The terrible battle of the Yser was beginning.
Bernard, who soon won his sergeant's stripes, and Paul Delroze lived in this hell until the early days of December. Together with half a dozen Parisians, a volunteer soldier, a reservist and a Belgian called Laschen, who had escaped from Roulers and joined the French in order to get at the enemy more quickly, they formed a little band who seemed proof against fire. Of the whole section commanded by Paul, only these remained; and, when the section was re-formed, they continued to group together. They claimed all the dangerous expeditions. And each time, when their task was fulfilled, they met again, safe and sound, without a scratch, as though they brought one another luck.
During the last fortnight, the regiment, which had been pushed to the extreme point of the front, was flanked by the Belgian lines on the one side and the British lines on the other. Heroic assaults were delivered. Furious bayonet charges were made in the mud, even in the water of the flooded fields; and the Germans fell by the thousand and the ten thousand.