29/38 As many more shortly re-enforced him. He marched this small army--small, that is, as armies go these Titan times--for four days and three nights. In the last twenty-four hours of marching the eighteen thousand covered more than forty English miles--in the rain. They came on this same plateau, the one which we now faced, at six o'clock of the morning of September thirteenth, and within an hour were engaged against double or triple their number. Von Zwehl held off the enemy until a strengthening force reached him, and then for three days, with his face to the river and his back to the hill, he fought. |