"Come on!" Sergeant Demange said again, more urgently this time. "It was like this in the summer of '18, too. If we hit 'em a good lick, we'll get 'em." We'll get 'em-on les aura. The slogan from the last war should have seemed as dated as ground-scraping skirts. Somehow, it didn't.
Luc scrambled out of the shell hole and trotted forward. Sure as hell, the Germans were pulling back. Yes, they were pros. They had rear guards with machine guns to make sure nobody chased them hard. But they were pulling back. They weren't breaking through. They wouldn't break through. And if they wouldn't, they wouldn't win the war in a hurry. What would happen once they saw that, too? Luc lit a Gauloise. That was their worry, not his. He kept on advancing.