Still other organizations of the Twenty-eighth Division hastening to the front were the ammunition train and the supply train. The division was being reassembled, for the first time after leaving Camp Hancock, as rapidly as the exigencies of hard campaigning would permit.
With the 112th and 111th in the van, the Pennsylvanians pushed northeastward after the Germans. It was at times when the Huns had stopped, apparently determined to make a stand at last, only to be blasted out of their holding positions by the Americans and continue their flight that, as so many officers wrote home, they "could not run fast enough to keep up with Fritz," and the artillery was outdistanced hopelessly.
Repeatedly our doughboys had to be held up in their headlong rush to permit the artillery to catch up. It being useless to waste life by sending infantry against the formidable German positions without artillery support, our lines were held back until the struggling field guns could come up to silence the German guns by expert counter battery work.
The Pennsylvanians were wild with eagerness and excitement. None but the officers had access to maps, and hundreds of the men, having only hazy ideas as to the geography of France or the distances they had traveled, believed they were pushing straight for Germany and had not far to go.
One and all realized fully that, when they began their fighting, the Germans for months had been moving forward triumphantly. They realized just as well that the Germans now were in flight before them. Each man felt that to his particular company belonged the glory of that reversal of conditions. Thus, scores wrote home: "Our company was all that stood between the Boche and Paris, and we licked him and have him on the run"—or words to that effect.
They were like a set of rabbit hounds, almost whining in their anxiety to get at the foe. Deluged by high explosives, shrapnel and gas shells, seeing their comrades mowed down by machine gun fire, bombed from the sky, alternately in pouring rain and burning sun, hungry half the time, their eyes burning from want of sleep, half suffocated from long intervals in gas masks, undergoing all the hardships of a bitter campaign against a determined, vigorous and unscrupulous enemy, yet their only thought was to push on—and on—and on.
The likeness to rabbit hounds is not uncomplimentary or far-fetched. One soldier wrote home: "We have had the Boche on the run in open country, and it has been like shooting rabbits—and I am regarded as a good shot in the army."