lieutenant led the way to the train.

They found several others already aboard, who were to make at least a
part of the trip with them. There were half a dozen men who had been
slightly wounded in the trenches, and now, completely well, were
returning to their regiments. Also, there was a wire company of the
Signal Corps, which was going to join another American unit.

For the first three or four hours of the trip the lads, even including
Hoskins and Rawle, found the returning young veterans the center of all
interest, and from them they heard many serious and amusing stories,
many true tales of the attack and retreat, of shot and shell and
shrapnel and the hand grenade and the poisonous gas bombs thrown by the
Boches.

And then, one by one, the soldiers of Uncle Sam dropped off into long
and restful slumber--slumber that was to fit them for hard and difficult
duties ahead.

"This is where we get off," finally announced Lieutenant Mackinson,
shaking the lads into wakefulness. "We leave the train here and travel
the balance of the distance by automobile."

Never had the boys seen such a powerful looking car as that to which an
orderly led them. Without the waste of a moment they climbed
in--Lieutenant Mackinson, our three friends, young Hoskins and the
towering Rawle. In another instant they were speeding across the country
with the break of dawn.

But their trip now was far different from the one they had had across
England. Where, in that country, they had seen big concentration camps,
and men preparing for war, with an occasional evidence of war's effects
in a building wrecked by a night air raid, here, in the eastern part of
France, they came upon actual war in all its fateful progress, with
whole towns demolished, forests and orchards blotted out--stark ruin
written over the face of the earth.

With a clear right-of-way, their high-power machine swept past
ammunition and food trains--long strings of powerful motor trucks
driving toward the scene of action. They came upon towns and villages in
that area known as "behind the lines," where French, American, Belgian
and British soldiers were recuperating after hard days and nights in the
front-line trenches.

By this time they were well within sound of the heavy guns, and their
driver told them that the artillery duel then going on had been in
progress for forty-eight hours at least.

"Sometimes it lasts for a week or more, you know," he said, "in
preparati