Two nights later, in company with a party of correspondents, I paid a midnight visit to our men in the front line trenches of that first American sector. With all lights out, cigarettes tabooed and the siren silenced, our overloaded motor slushed slowly along the shell-pitted roads, carefully skirting groups of marching men and lumbering supply wagons that took shape suddenly out of the mist-laden road in front of us.
Although it was not raining, moisture seemed to drip from everything, and vapours from the ground, mixing with the fog overhead, almost obscured the hard-working moon.
In the greyness of the night sight and smell lost their keenness, and familiar objects assumed unnatural forms, grotesque and indistinct.
From somewhere ahead dull, muffled thumps in the mist brought memories of spring house cleaning and the dusting out of old cushions, but it was really the three-year-old song of the guns. Nature had censored observation by covering the spectacle with the mantle of indefiniteness. Still this was the big thing we had come to see—night work in and behind the front lines of the American sector.
We approached an engineers' dump, where the phantoms of fog gradually materialised into helmeted khaki figures that moved in mud knee-deep and carried boxes and planks and bundles of tools. Total silence covered all the activity and not a ray of light revealed what mysteries had been worked here in surroundings that seemed no part of this world.
An irregular pile of rock loomed grey and sinister before us, and, looking upward, we judged, from its gaping walls, that it was the remains of a church steeple. It was the dominating ruin in the town of Beaumont.
"Turn here to the left," the officer conducting our party whispered into the ear of the driver.
The sudden execution of the command caused the officer's helmet to rasp against that of the driver with a sound that set the cautious whispering to naught.
"Park here in the shadow," he continued. "Make no noise; show no light. They dropped shells here ten minutes ago. Gentlemen, this is regimental headquarters. Follow me."
In a well buttressed cellar, surmounted by a pile of ruins, we found the colonel sitting at a wooden table in front of a grandfather's clock of scratched mahogany. He called the roll—five special correspondents, Captain Chandler, American press officer, with a goatee and fur coat to match; Captain Vielcastel, a French press officer, who is a marquis and speaks English, and a lieutenant from brigade headquarters, who already had been named "Whispering Willie."