Two doors in the blank wall swung open revealing a hermetically sealed recess in which a bed just fitted. This arrangement, quite common in France, indicated that the device now popular in two-room sleeping apartments in America, must have been suggested by the sleeping customs of mediæval times.
Early the next morning, our battery pulled out for the front. We were bound for the line. We took the roads out of Saint Nicolas to the east, making our way toward that part of the front that was known as the Luneville sector. Our way lay through the towns of Dombasle, Sommerviller, Maixe, Einville, Valhey, Serres, to the remains of the ruined village of Hoeville.
The sector runs almost along the border between France and old Lorraine, occupied by the Germans since 1870. Even the names of the old French towns beyond the border had been changed to German in the effort of the Prussians to Germanise the stolen province.
It was in this section during the few days just prior to the outbreak of the war that France made unwise demonstration of her disinclination toward hostilities with Germany. Every soldier in France was under arms, as was every soldier in Europe. France had military patrols along her borders. In the French chamber of deputies, the socialists had rushed through a measure which was calculated to convince the German people that France had no intentions or desire of menacing German territory. By that measure every French soldier was withdrawn from the Franco-German border to a line ten miles inside of France. The German appreciation of this evidence of peacefulness was manifested when the enemy, at the outbreak of the war, moved across the border and occupied that ten-mile strip of France.
France had succeeded in driving the enemy back again in that part of Lorraine, but only at the cost of many lives and the destruction of many French towns and villages. Since the close of the fighting season of 1914, there had been little or no progress on either side at this point. The opposing lines here had been stationary for almost three years and it was known on both sides as a quiet sector.
The country side was of a rolling character, but very damp. At that season of the year when our first American fighting men reached the Western front, that part of the line that they occupied was particularly muddy and miserable.
Before nine o'clock that morning as we rode on to the front, the horse-drawn traffic, including our battery, was forced to take the side of the road numerous times to permit the passage of long trains of motor trucks loaded down with American infantrymen, bound in the same direction.
Most of the motor vehicles were of the omnibus type. A number of them were worthy old double-deckers that had seen long years of peaceful service on the boulevards of Paris before the war. Slats of wood ran lengthwise across the windows of the lower seating compartment and through these apertures young, sun-burned, American faces topped with steel helmets, peered forth.
Some of our men reposed languidly on the rear steps of the busses or on the tops. Most of the bus-loads were singing rollicking choruses. The men were in good spirits. They had been cheered in every village they had passed through on the way from their training area.
"Howdy, bowleg," was the greeting shouted by one of these motoring mockers, who looked down on our saddled steeds, "better get a hustle on them hayburners. We're going to be in Berlin by the time you get where the front used to be."