n those then accepted standards. The tendency was to
improve beyond the French and British, to apply new American principles
of time or labour-saving to simple operation, to save man-power and
horseflesh by sane safety appliances, to increase efficiency, speed,
accuracy--in a word, their aim was to make themselves the best fighting
men in the Allied cause.

One instance of this is worthy of recounting. I came upon the young
Russian who was the battery saddler. He was a citizen of the United
States whose uniform he wore, but he was such a new citizen, that he
hardly spoke English. I found him handling a small piece of galvanised
iron and a horse shoe. He appeared to be trying to fit the rumpled piece
of metal into the shoe.

In his broken English he explained that he was trying to fashion a light
metal plate that could be easily placed between a horse's shoe and the
hoof, to protect the frog of the foot from nails picked up on the road.
With all soldiers wearing hobnailed boots, the roads were full of those
sharp bits of metal which had caused serious losses of horseflesh
through lameness and blood poisoning.

* * * * *

The unloading had continued under the eyes of smiling French girls in
bloomers who were just departing from their work on the early morning
shift in the munition factory beside the station. These were the first
American soldiers they had seen and they were free to pass comment upon
our appearance. So were the men of Battery A, who overlooked the oiled,
grimed faces and hands of the bloomered beauties, and announced the
general verdict that "they sure were fat little devils."

The unloading completed, a scanty snack consisting of two unbuttered
slices of white bread with a hunk of cold meat and maybe the bite of an
onion, had been put away by the time the horses' nose bags were empty.
With a French guide in the lead, we moved off the platform, rattled
along under a railroad viaduct, and down the main street of Jarville,
which was large enough to boast street car tracks and a shell-damaged
cathedral spire.

The remaining townsfolk had lived with the glare and rumble of the front
for three years now and the passage back and forth of men and horses and
guns hardly elicited as much attention as the occasional promenade of a
policeman in Evanston, Illinois. But these were different men that rode
through those streets that day.

This was the first battery of American artil