Chapter IV
A Letter From Élisabeth
It was nine o'clock; there was no holding the position; and the colonel was furious.
He had brought his regiment in the middle of the night—it was in the first month of the war, on the 22nd of August, 1914—to the junction of those three roads one of which ran from Belgian Luxemburg. The Germans had taken possession of the lines of the frontier, seven or eight miles away, on the day before. The general commanding the division had expressly ordered that they were to hold the enemy in check until mid–day, that is to say, until the whole division was able to come up with them. The regiment was supported by a battery of seventy–fives.
The colonel had drawn up his men in a dip in the ground. The battery was likewise hidden. And yet, at the first gleams of d
