r lost from his
regiment, was no new thing in France. It happened daily. Men were
discharged from hospitals, ordered to a certain point to rejoin their
commands, only to discover on reaching there that the outfit had
seemingly vanished in thin air.

McGee spent a full day trying to find someone with the correct
information as to the location of the squadron.

At last an officer on the General Staff looked over McGee's papers and
gave him a transportation order to a little town west and south of
Verdun.

"Is my squadron there, sir?" McGee asked.

"They should be," the officer replied. "At least near there," and he
closed the conversation as though that were quite enough for any pilot
to know.

But when McGee reached the town, part of the journey being by rail and
part by motor lorries, he found himself as completely lost as possible.
Again no one seemed to know anything about the squadron. His search was
made doubly difficult by the fact that there was an unusual air of
activity; all the troops seemed to be on the move, and officers were far
too busy with their own cares to listen to the troubles of a lost
aviator.

That night McGee watched two or three regiments pass through the town,
fully equipped for battle. It came to him, suddenly, that all this
activity and night marching could mean only one thing--a new attack
along some new front. Encouraged by the success of St. Mihiel, the
Americans were going in again. But where? McGee put the question to a
dozen officers, and not one of them had the foggiest notion of where he
was going.

This served all the more to convince McGee that a new operation was
being secretly planned by Great Headquarters, and from the many
different divisional insignias which he had noticed, he felt convinced
that it would be a major offensive. Regiment after regiment of soldiers
marched through the little village; then came lumbering guns and
caissons clattering over the resounding cobblestones of the street.
Battery after battery passed by. They were followed by a long train of
motor transports; then came some hospital units with their motor
ambulances; then more infantrymen, singing and joking as they swung
along in the darkness.

Watching them, McGee was suddenly seized with an idea which no amount of
logical thinking could exclude from his mind. Where these troops were
going, there he would find action. Somewhere, between this point and
their final stopping place, the trenches, h