d and cross roads had started to sprout with rudely constructed
shelters. Fat sandbags were just taking the places of potted geraniums
on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily,
but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that
process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held
much of its erstwhile beauty.

Those days before Cantigny were marked by particularly heavy artillery
fire. The ordnance duel was unrelenting and the daily exchange of shells
reached an aggregate far in excess of anything that the First Division
had ever experienced before.

Nightly the back areas of the front were shattered with shells. The
German was much interested in preventing us from bringing up supplies
and munition. We manifested the same interest toward him. American
batteries firing at long range, harassed the road intersections behind
the enemy's line and wooded places where relief troops might have been
assembled under cover of darkness. The expenditure of shells was
enormous but it continued practically twenty-four hours a day. German
prisoners, shaking from the nervous effects of the pounding, certified
to the untiring efforts of our gunners.

The small nameless village that we occupied almost opposite the German
position in Cantigny seemed to receive particular attention from the
enemy artillery. In retaliation, our guns almost levelled Cantigny and a
nearby village which the enemy occupied. Every hour, under the rain of
death, the work of digging was continued and the men doing it needed no
urging from their officers. There was something sinister and emphatic
about the whine of a "two ten German H. E." that inspired one with a
desire to start for the antipodes by the shortest and most direct route.

The number of arrivals by way of the air in that particular village
every day numbered high in the thousands. Under such conditions, no
life-loving human could have failed to produce the last degree of
utility out of a spade. The continual dropping of shells in the ruins
and the unending fountains of chalk dust and dirt left little for the
imagination, but one officer told me that it reminded him of living in a
room where some one was eternally beating the carpet.

This taste of the war of semi-movement was appreciated by the American
soldier. It had in it a dash of novelty, lacking in the position warfare
to which he had become accustomed in the mud and mar