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When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux, les corbeaux, the Duke, overwhelmed with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, 'Où, où sont les aigles? That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy.
The Germans now shifted their ground of attack from the east to the west of the Meuse, and on 2 March a four days' bombardment began of the Malancourt-Forges line. Their first attack was on the eastern sector of this front, and by nightfall they had gained Hill 265 and penetrated into the Bois des Corbeaux which stretched between it and Mort Homme.
Our artillery fire from the edge of Corbeaux Wood isolated them.... At times a rocket appeared in the air; the call to the cannons, then the marking of the road. The regular ticktack of the machine guns and the cracking of the shells were distinctly heard even among the terrific noises of the bombardment.
An entire division was employed by the Germans in this assault, and the French, overwhelmed by weight of men and metal, were forced out of the position. In the morning of March 7, 1916, the Germans began a furious bombardment of Corbeaux Wood.
Finding in the Petty Bourgeois a Madame Cardinal whose comic personality and peculiar moral squint suited one of his plays, he adopted her entirely, name and all, altering only what her more recent surroundings required. Henri Becque digested Balzac rather than imitated him. One feels in reading his Corbeaux that it is a disciple's own work.
At first the French enjoyed every advantage, for though the Germans had penetrated the position, the French by a dashing attack occupied almost the whole of the wood. A mass attack made by the Germans against Béthincourt having failed, they counterattacked at Corbeaux Wood, during which their force was almost annihilated.
[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types of opening. In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In La Parisienne Clotilde and Lafont are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde, voil
"The French mitrailleuse corps pressed close on their comrades' heels, placing weapons at vantage points that had escaped the fire and showering a leaden hail upon the main body of Germans retreating up Corbeaux Hill. "Hundreds fought in a terror-stricken mob to hide in a hole that might have sheltered a score. Those beneath were stifled.
The Germans suffered heavily, but persevered, and soon dense columns appeared amid the shell-torn brushwood on the southern fringe of the Corbeaux Wood, pouring down into the valley separating them from the former French position on the hillside.
A year later, in nearly the same place, Lieutenant Pierre Guilland, observer on board a biplane of the Moroccan division, was forced down by three enemy airplanes just at the moment when his division, whose progress he was following in order to report it, started its attack on the Corbeaux Woods east of the Mort-Homme, on August 20, 1917.
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