e at the entrance to this
arcade. We didn't dare venture into the redan, for sporadic explosions
were still occurring in the ammunition stores. Also there were fires
raging. Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of the tunnel. It
didn't seem possible that there could be anyone alive back yonder.

"All of a sudden, men began to come out of the tunnel. They came and
came until there were nearly two hundred of them--French reservists
mostly. They were crazy men--crazy for the time being, and still crazy,
I expect, some of them. They came out staggering, choking, falling down
and getting up again. You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes, the
gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had
escaped--all these had distracted them. They danced, sang, wept,
laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously
until they dropped. They were deafened, and some of them could not see
but had to grope their way. I remember one man who sat down and pulled
off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his
bare feet until he cut the bottoms of them to pieces. I don't care to
see anything like that again--even if it is my enemies that suffer it."

He told it so vividly, that standing alongside of him before the tunnel
opening I could see the procession myself--those two hundred men who had
drained horror to its lees and were drunk on it.

We went to Fort Boussois, some four miles away. It was another of the
keys to the town. It was taken on September sixth; on the next day,
September seventh, the citadel surrendered. Here, in lieu of the 42-
centimeter, which was otherwise engaged for the moment, the attacking
forces brought into play an Austrian battery of 30-centimeter guns. So
far as I have been able to ascertain this was the only Austrian command
which had any part in the western campaigns. The Austrian gunners
shelled the fort until the German infantry had been massed in a forest
to the northward. Late in the afternoon the infantry charged across a
succession of cleared fields and captured the outer slopes. With these
in their possession it didn't take them very long to compel the
surrender of Fort Boussois, especially as the defenders had already been
terribly cut up by the artillery fire.

The Austrians must have been first-rate marksmen. One of their shells
fell squarely upon the rounded dome of a big armored turret which was
sunk in the earth and