The enemy in proportion lost even more than he did, he thought.

The General had no English; he told us all this in German, Von Theobald standing handily by to translate for him when our own scanty acquaintance with the language left us puzzled.
"We punished them well and they punished us well," he added.

"We captured a group of thirty-one Scotchmen--all who were left out of a battalion of six hundred and fifty, and there was no commissioned officer left of that battalion.

A sergeant surrendered them to my men.
They fight very well against us--the Scotch." Since then the groundswell of battle had swept forward, then backward, until now, as chance would have it, General von Zwehl once more had his headquarters on the identical spot where he had them four weeks before during his struggle to keep the German center from being pierced.

Then it had been mainly infantry fighting at close range; now it was the labored pounding of heavy guns, the pushing ahead of trench-work preparatory to another pitched battle.
Considering what had taken place here less than a month before the plain immediately before us seemed peaceful enough.
Nature certainly works mighty fast to cover up what man at war does.
True, the yellow-green meadowlands ahead of us were scuffed and scored minutely as though a myriad swine had rooted there for mast.