"And they thought we wouldn't fight"

by Floyd Phillips Gibbons

Once in the village of Beaumont, we followed the winding duckboards and were led by small signs painted on wood to the colonel's headquarters. We descended the stone steps beneath a rickety looking ruin and entered.

"Guests for our party," was the Colonel's greeting. The command post had a long narrow interior which was well lighted but poorly ventilated, the walls and floor were of wood and a low beamed ceiling was supported by timbers. "Well, I think it will be a good show."

"We are sending over a little party of new boys just for practice and a 'look-see' in Hunland. We have two companies in this regiment which feel they've sorter been left out on most of the fun to date, so this affair has been arranged for them. We put the plans together last week and pushed the boys through three days of training for it back of the lines. They're fit as fiddlers to-night and it looks like there'll be no interruption to their pleasure.

"No one man in the world, be he correspondent or soldier, could see every angle of even so small a thing as a little raid like this," the Colonel explained. "What you can't see you have got to imagine. I'm suggesting that you stay right in here for the show. That telephone on my adjutant's desk is the web centre of all things occurring in this sector to-night and the closer you are to it, the more you can see and learn. Lieutenant Warren will take you up the road first and give you a look out of the observatory, so you'll know in what part of Germany our tourists are going to explore."

Darkness had fallen when we emerged, but there were sufficient stars out to show up the outline of the gaping walls on either side of our way. We passed a number of sentries and entered a black hole in the wall of a ruin. After stumbling over the uneven floor in a darkened passage for some minutes, we entered a small room where several officers were gathered around a table on which two burning candles were stuck in bottles. Our guide, stepping to one end of the room, pulled aside a blanket curtain and passed through a narrow doorway. We followed.

Up a narrow, steep, wooden stairway between two walls of solid masonry, not over two feet apart, we passed, and arrived on a none too stable wooded runway with a guide rail on either side. Looking up through the ragged remains of the wooden roof frame, now almost nude of tiles, we could see the starry sky. Proceeding along the runway, we arrived, somewhere in that cluster of ruins, in a darkened chamber whose interior blackness was relieved by a lighter slit, an opening facing the enemy.

Against the starry skyline, we could see the black outline of a flat tableland in the left distance which we knew to be that part of the heights of Meuse for whose commanding ridge there have been so many violent contests between the close-locked lines in the forest of Apremont. More to the centre of the picture, stood Mont Sec, detached from the range and pushing its summit up through the lowland mist like the dorsal fin of a porpoise in a calm sea. On the right the lowland extended to indistinct distances, where it blended with the horizon.

In all that expanse of quiet night, there was not a single flicker of light, and at that time not a sound to indicate that unmentionable numbers of our men were facing one another in parallel ditches across the silent moor.

"See that clump of trees way out there?" said the lieutenant, directing our vision with his arm. "Now then, hold your hand at arm's length in front of you, straight along a line from your eyes along the left edge of your hand to that clump of trees. Now then, look right along the right edge of your hand and you will be looking at Richecourt. The Boche hold it. We go in on the right of that to-night."

We looked as per instructions and saw nothing. As far as we were concerned Richecourt was a daylight view, but these owls of the lookout knew its location as well as they knew the streets of their native towns back in New England. We returned to the colonel's command post, where cots were provided, and we turned in for a few hours' sleep on the promise of being called in time.