They were fighting for Paris, for their country, for the soil which they tended, alive, and in which they slept, dead, and just at the moment when everything seemed to have been lost they were saving all.

The heroic age of France had come again, and the Third Republic was justifying the First.
The battle deepened and thickened to an extraordinary degree, as the space between the two fronts narrowed.

John for the first time saw the German troops without the aid of glasses.

They were mere outlines against a fiery horizon, reddened by the mouths of so many belching cannon, but they seemed to him to stand there like a wall.
Another giant shell burst near them, and two more members of the staff fell from their cycles, dead before they touched the ground.

That convulsive shudder seized John again, but the crash of tremendous events was so rapid that fear and horror alike passed in an instant.