At the village of Moyen the battery stopped long enough to water the horses. At 10:30 we arrived in Vathimenil, where the battery halted till 1 o’clock, and mess was served. In the afternoon in the dust and heat of a sunshiny day such as Lorraine can produce after a cold spring night, the battery hiked through St. Clermont to Lunéville, the cannoneers following the carriages on foot.
There we were quartered in an old barrack of French lancers, whose former stables housed our horses. Big, clean rooms, on the third floor, were assigned to Battery E. With bed ticks filled with straw, we made this a comfortable home.
A practice review the following morning and another, the real thing, in the afternoon, before a French general and his staff, formally introduced us to Lorraine. In our free hours during the day and in the evening, we added to this acquaintance by pretty thorough familiarity with the city of Lunéville.
Though its nearness to the battle front restricted trade and industry a great deal, yet its shops, restaurants and cafes proved a paradise for the men who remained there at the horse-line, as the battery’s song, “When We Were Down in Lunéville,” attests. Though the streets were absolutely dark, behind the shuttered windows and the darkened doors business was brisk enough. At 8 o’clock, however, all shops were closed, and soldiers must be off the streets by 8:30.
These restrictions were, in fact, precautions against enemy aeroplanes. Of these we had close enough experience on our third night in the city, when a bomb fell in the fields that lay back of the barracks, shaking the windows by its explosion.
The cannoneers did not stay long in Lunéville. February 25 they marched out of the city with their packs on their backs, up near Marainviller. There were between forty and fifty men altogether, including the four gun crews and the engineers’ detail. When we marched along a road screened from the enemy by a mat of boughs stretched by wires between high poles along one side of the way, we knew we were not far from the front. The big thrill came, however, when, turning off the high road, we went forward one squad at a time at intervals of about 200 yards. The chief object was to avoid attracting the notice of some chance enemy aeroplane by the movement of a considerable body of men. To our minds the precaution seemed for the purpose of limiting casualties, in case a shell burst on the road, to the men of only one squad.
But we took our way in peace up the hill in front of us, and carried up supplies and tools that followed on the ration cart. We put all in a big abri—a marvelous piece of work, of long passages, spacious rooms, wooden floors and stairways, electric lights, and flues for stove chimneys. Then we discovered that this was not for us, but for some brigadier-general and his staff when he directed an operation at the front. So we moved ourselves and baggage to another big abri not far away and not much less comfortable, except that it lacked the wooden floors, the electric lights, and the spaciousness of the rooms which the first abri possessed.
The next four days were spent in preparations for building a battery position. The spot chosen was in a hollow, back of a gently rising slope. The woods near by and the tall thickets made good concealment, but the ground was rather marshy in the wet weather we were then having. Part of the men began to dig, and part wove twigs through chicken wire to stretch over the excavations as camouflage. From 7 a. m. to 5 p. m. was a long arduous day, particularly since it was begun and ended by a hike of two miles from the dug-out to the position. Rain fell most of the time, soaking through slickers and blouses to one’s very skin.
Two of the days the gunners, No. 1 and No. 2 men of each section spent at a French battery near by, to gain experience in actual firing. Little firing was done—only 24 rounds per gun one day and 15 rounds the second, for in this quiet sector there was little ordinarily but reprisal fire—but the men learned quickly the actual working of a battery. To the Frenchmen the quickness and the constant good-humor of the American boys, much younger than the average among them, were matters of comment. “Toujours chantant, toujours riant” (Always singing, always laughing), were the words of the lieutenant who fired the battery. The warm-hearted hospitality of these Frenchmen—resting in this sector from the fearful work, night and day, at Verdun and pardonable, one would say, if somewhat uneven-tempered and unmindful of others in their fatigue from that strain—impressed the Americans in turn. Every comfort that the dug-outs afforded was offered to the visitors, and when the Americans had, in an impromptu quartette, entertained the Frenchmen with harmonized popular songs, the latter summoned a young “chanteur” who sang the latest songs from Paris till his voice was weary.
Orders came to cease work on this position, and none too soon. For when the men were returning from work there for the last time, about 5 p. m., March 2, the woods in the vicinity were deluged with gas shells.