Just as the sun fell behind the green hills of Verdun and the shadows of night began to fill the valleys a long column of American artillery started rolling toward the lines of the St. Mihiel sector. Jimmy McGee and William G. Preston, alias O. D., loaded down under their equipment and carrying canes, followed behind Betsy, the third piece of Battery C, humming the chorus of “Where Do We Go from Here, Boys?”
It was two o’clock in the morning when the regiment reached its rendezvous in a wooded valley near Rupt-en-Woevre. The sky had become clouded and the early morning was jet black.
“Guess we’ll get soaked, O. D.,” prophesied Jimmy when they halted and got a chance to observe the weather conditions.
“Will we stay here now?” asked O. D.
“Oui. Might just as well scare up a place to cushay. Wait here; I’ll look ’round.”
A little while later Jimmy returned with the news that there was nothing to do but put the pup tent up again and sleep on the ground.
“There’s one barrack here, but the First Battalion guys grabbed that as they got here first,” he explained.
Jimmy and O. D. put the tent up on the slope of a hill that formed the eastern side of the valley in which the horses and matériel of the entire regiment were hidden.
O. D. heard, in a sort of indifferent manner, the growl of big guns that seemed very near. He was startled once or twice by the crash of bombs and the anti-air-craft guns. But he was too tired to lend ears and thoughts to such things on his first night at the front, for the regiment was only a few kilometers from the first lines. O. D. fell asleep immediately and didn’t wake until three hours later when a downpour of rain splashed him from head to foot.
The wind that accompanied the rain swept the tent away time and time again. Everything that Jimmy and O. D. owned got soaked. The earth beneath them turned into crawling slime. Finally, seeing the impossibility of keeping the tent up, Jimmy told his friend to pull his shelter-half over him, head and all. Jimmy did likewise with his shelter-half and blankets. The two boys, wrapped in canvas and blankets, lay in the deluge like two muffled mummies, trying to sleep.
Instead of moving into position at once the regiment made at least fifty final preparations to do so, only to be ordered to remain in the valley for further orders.
Four days passed. Rain fell incessantly. The bottom of the valley became as slippery as glass. Men bogged up to their knees in mud. There were no boots. The mess was a succession of “corned willy,” hardtack, and sugarless coffee meals.
At last, when every man and officer had reached the point of absolute disgust, the guns were dragged out of their mud-holes and hauled by horse and man power to the positions from which they were scheduled to launch their part of the drive.
Passing through the shell-torn village of Rupt-en-Woevre, the Second Battalion, of which Jimmy’s battery was a part, swerved off the main road and followed a woods trail that seemed to lead straight into the noises and strange, mysterious lights of the front.
A gun barked out, not forty feet from the road. O. D. looked to Jimmy.
“Are we at the front now Jimmy?” he asked in a whisper.
“Don’t know myself. Guess there’s a battery in the woods near here. We’ll be there soon now.”
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CHAPTER XIII—“WE’RE GOIN’ TO TAKE METZ.”
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CHAPTER XV—PINCHING OFF THE ST. MIHIEL SALIENT
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