At intervals of half-an-hour the balloon station, that is, the captive balloon, sends out meteorological data, which means weather reports, chief of which are the barometer readings, by wireless and this we get and transmit to the B. C. station by telephone, At 4 P.M. the batteries cease firing, we take down and pack up our station and go back to camp.
As I have said we repeated this performance for a month until we were letter perfect in cooperating with the airplanes. And then one morning almost without a word of warning we were told to pack up our personal equipment. We turned over the wireless apparatus to the supply officer of the company and by evening we were on our way to Camp Mead, Maryland, which was one of the ports of embarkation for overseas men. We spent ten glorious days at Camp Mead without a tap of work to do.
On the morning of the eleventh day we boarded a big three stack troop-ship, weighed anchor and by noon we were off for France. To most of the men aboard, many of whom had never seen the ocean before, and some of them were never to see it after, the voyage was a great joy or a big sorrow according to the states of their stomachs, but to me it was a long and tiresome trip. The ship had been altered from a floating palace into a purveyance which would carry the greatest number of men it was possible to crowd into her.
On the morning of the eighth day after we had embarked we landed at Liverpool and were given a royal reception by the enthusiastic Britons. The way they warmed up to us was a revelation to me for I had no more idea that an Englishman could change his attitude toward an American than that a jaguar could change his spots. The miracle had come to pass nevertheless.
From Liverpool we went on to London riding in first class compartment coaches as if we owned the railroad. We were in Lunnon, old dear, for a week in which time we paraded, and were dined and petted as if each man-jack of the whole bloomin’ outfit was a Beau Brummel, a Count D’Orsay, a Lord Byron, or some other dandy of a century before. I forgot entirely that a world-war was going on across the Channel and that we were over there to fight monsters of the kind that bayoneted babies, instead of living like dukes.
Then one night we were slipped in darkness from Folkestone across the English Channel to Calais. If the joy of the British in seeing us two thousand strong was great it wasn’t a marker to that of the French who cheered us as we marched through the streets of Paris, and later when the batteries had been dismissed they opened their arms to us—especially the demoiselles. Talk about morale, why I could have licked a dozen boches with my left arm tied back of me. That was the kind of fighting men the Hindenburg line had to go up against.
A couple of weeks later we were joined by our 75’s and horses which had been shipped across on a different boat. From that time on we moved by forced marches until we were only twenty miles back of the fighting line. For a month we were held in reserve and each day we would go out, as did numberless other batteries, set up our station and work with our airplane as we had done at West Point.
We were getting pretty tired of it for we wanted to see action and there right ahead of us was the big adventure where there was action a-plenty. At last one day came the call we had looked forward to so long and we marched under cover of the night to our position somewhere between the Argonne foothills and Château Thierry.
When daylight broke a most amazing sight spread out before us for there was a string of 75’s stretching on either side of our battery as far as the eye could reach and forming an almost solid wall. There was no trench fighting going on here, just open warfare between artillery, that’s all.
