en attached. Our men
riding behind the screen peered through apertures in it and saw the
distant hills forward, from which German glasses could have observed all
passage along that road had it not been for the screen.

So we moved into position. It was late in the night of October 22nd,
1917, that our batteries of artillery and companies of infantry moved
through the darkness on the last lap of their trip to the front. The
roads were sticky and gummy. A light rain was falling. The guns boomed
in front of us, but not with any continued intensity. Through streets
paved with slippery cobbles and bordered with the bare skeletons of
shell-wrecked houses, our American squads marched four abreast. Their
passing in the darkness was accompanied by the sound of the unhastened
tread of many hobnailed boots.

At times, the rays of a cautiously flashed electric light would reveal
our infantrymen with packs on back and rifles slung over their
shoulders. A stiff wind whipped the rain into their faces and tugged the
bottoms of their flapping, wet overcoats.

Notwithstanding the fact that they had made it on foot a number of miles
from the place where they had disembarked from the motor trucks, the men
marched along to the soft singing of songs, which were ordered
discontinued as the marching columns got closer to the communicating
trenches which led into the front line.

In the march were machine gun carts hauled by American mules and rolling
kitchens, which at times dropped on the darkened road swirls of glowing
red embers that had to be hurriedly stamped out. Anxious American staff
officers consulted their wrist watches frequently in evidence of the
concern they felt as to whether the various moving units were reaching
designated points upon the scheduled minute.

It was after midnight that our men reached the front line. It was the
morning of October 23rd, 1917, that American infantrymen and Bavarian
regiments of _Landwehr_ and _Landsturm_ faced one another for the first
time in front line positions on the European front.

Less than eight hundred yards of slate and drab-coloured soft ground,
blotched with rust-red expanses of wire entanglements, separated the
hostile lines.

There was no moon. A few cloud-veiled stars only seemed to accentuate
the blackness of the night. There, in the darkness and the mud, on the
slippery firing step of trench walls and in damp, foul-smelling dugouts,
young red-blooded Americans tingled for