McGee spent a full day trying to find someone with the correct information as to the location of the squadron.
At last an officer on the General Staff looked over McGee’s papers and gave him a transportation order to a little town west and south of Verdun.
“Is my squadron there, sir?” McGee asked.
“They should be,” the officer replied. “At least near there,” and he closed the conversation as though that were quite enough for any pilot to know.
But when McGee reached the town, part of the journey being by rail and part by motor lorries, he found himself as completely lost as possible. Again no one seemed to know anything about the squadron. His search was made doubly difficult by the fact that 217there was an unusual air of activity; all the troops seemed to be on the move, and officers were far too busy with their own cares to listen to the troubles of a lost aviator.
That night McGee watched two or three regiments pass through the town, fully equipped for battle. It came to him, suddenly, that all this activity and night marching could mean only one thing–a new attack along some new front. Encouraged by the success of St. Mihiel, the Americans were going in again. But where? McGee put the question to a dozen officers, and not one of them had the foggiest notion of where he was going.
This served all the more to convince McGee that a new operation was being secretly planned by Great Headquarters, and from the many different divisional insignias which he had noticed, he felt convinced that it would be a major offensive. Regiment after regiment of soldiers marched through the little village; then came lumbering guns and caissons clattering over the resounding cobblestones of the street. Battery after battery passed by. They were followed by a long train of motor transports; then came some hospital units with their motor ambulances; then more infantrymen, singing and joking as they swung along in the darkness.
Watching them, McGee was suddenly seized with an idea which no amount of logical thinking could exclude 218from his mind. Where these troops were going, there he would find action. Somewhere, between this point and their final stopping place, the trenches, he would find some unit of the air force. The army must have its eyes, and any member of any air unit could tell him more than he could learn here.
The spirit of this new type of adventure moved him to action. He had often wondered about the life of the doughboy. Now, for the night, he would fall in and march along with them. It would be fun just to be going along, answerable to no one and making his way forward on foot, by hooked rides, or by whatever means that presented itself and seemed attractive.
Slinging his musette bag over his shoulder, and buttoning up his flying coat, he stepped into the street, followed along the dark buildings for a few yards and then fell in alongside a long line of infantrymen.