On March 20 the battery was engaged in tearing down enemy barbed wire, firing 216 rounds per gun during the day, in preparation for an attack that night. At 7:40 p. m. commenced the actual bombardment. A few minutes before that time 75’s began to bark from the woods to our left and in the rear of us. The reports gradually grew in number. At the appointed moment, our guns began to bang away. For the next two hours and forty-five minutes, the noise was deafening. Batteries of whose existence we had not the slightest suspicion were firing near us. Every hillock and clump of trees seemed to blaze with gun flashes. Joined with the constant bark and bang of the 75’s near by was the deep thunderous roar of heavier cannon in the distance.

At 10 o’clock the firing began to die away. Half an hour later only a few shots at long intervals could be heard. Fatigued with their strenuous and racking work, the men eagerly attacked the mess just then brought up to them. Nearly all were a little deaf from their guns’ racket. A few, on the gun crews, were totally oblivious to all sound whatsoever, and could comprehend only signs.

B. C. Detail at Observation Post near Ancerviller Cook Boisacq Hears Thrilling Tales at the O. P.
Horseshoers’ Shop at the Merviller Horse-lines Aeroplane Scouts Wouldn’t See this Pup-Tent

The first published account of an engagement of the 42d Division was brief and anonymous. In the Paris edition of the “New York Herald” of March 22, 1918, at the end of a column on the first page telling of the decoration of Corporal Alexander Burns and other members of the regiment appeared this paragraph, under date of March 21:

“Members of the American force made a raid last night. Following a long barrage, the boys went over in good shape, but the German trenches were deserted, the long heavy Allied barrage having driven every one out. No American was hurt or killed.”

The enemy’s reply to us did not come till the next morning. Roused at 4 to stand by the guns, the cannoneers had scarcely occupied their posts when shells began to drop dangerously near. Captain Robbins ordered everyone into the abris till the shelling ceased. Half an hour later we went out to find that a gas shell had made the officers’ abri and vicinity untenable, all our telephone wires were cut, and shell fragments had torn up things here and there. How Nickoden fared, who had been out at the rocket post on the hill-top during it all, we learned when he was relieved shortly after. Hearing not a sound, he was aware that shells were falling near only when he saw them plow up the ground within a few hundred feet of him. Corporal Buckley was wounded by a shell fragment and Private McCarthy was badly gassed that morning, in the machine-gun post at the top of the hill.

Private (later Corporal) Mangan was recommended for the D. S. C. by the regimental commander “for volunteering to and aiding the French in keeping open a telephone line running from a forward observation station across the open to the rear. This on March 19 and again on March 20, when the telephone line was repeatedly cut by an intense enemy bombardment of heavy caliber shells from both guns and trench mortars.” The French cited Mangan for the Croix de Guerre for his conduct on this occasion also.

Orders to move came that day. A few more shells landed within a few yards of the position in the afternoon, and one end of Laneuveville-aux-Bois received considerable shrapnel. But we pulled out safely that evening, reaching Lunéville at midnight.

Two days later the regiment left Lunéville on a 120-kilometre hike to the divisional area, in the vicinity of Langres, where the division was to spend some time in manoeuvres. But the orders were countermanded before the regiment had gone more than its first day’s hike, on account of the Germans’ success in their first big offensive of the spring on the northern front.

So the battery remained for a week at Remenoville, in readiness to return to the front upon the receipt of orders. During those seven days of sunshiny weather, in the bright warmth of early spring, the men basked in ease and comfort. Gun drill for the cannoneers and grooming for the drivers occupied the mornings. The afternoons the men had to themselves, for games of horseshoes, writing letters to make up for lost time at the front, baths in the cold brook, and washing clothes in the village fountain. Eggs and potatoes and milk were abundant in the town—until the battery’s consumption depleted the supply—and the men ate as often in some French kitchen as in their battery mess line. Some boys “slipped one over on the army,” too, by sleeping between white sheets in soft big beds, renting a room for the munificent sum of one franc a day, instead of rolling up in their blankets in the haymow where they were billeted.