"Well," said the reporter, "I should think you'd want to say something. You were going to fire the first shot of the war, and more than that, you were going to fire the first shot in anger which the American army has ever fired in Europe. Of course, I didn't mean a speech exactly, but you must have said something."
"No," answered the officer, "I just gave 'em the range and then I said 'ready to fire' and then, 'fire.' It was just like this afternoon. We made it perfectly regular."
"In the army a thing like that's just part of the day's work," the lieutenant added, with an attempted assumption of great sophistication in regard to war matters, as if this was at least his twentieth campaign.
And yet I think that if we had heard our little quarterback give his order at six twenty-seven on that misty morning there would have been something in his voice when he said "fire" which would have betrayed him to us. I think it must have been a little sharper, a little faster and a little louder for this first shot than it will be when he calls "fire" for the thousand-and-tenth round.
The guns had decided to call it a day by this time and so we headed for the trenches. We had to travel across a big bare stretch of country which was wind-swept and rain-soaked on this particular afternoon. Every now and then somebody fell into a shell hole, for the meadow was well slashed up, although there didn't seem to be anything much to shoot at. On the whole, the sector chosen for the first Americans in the trenches might well be called a quiet front. There was shelling back and forth each day, but many places were immune. Some villages just back of the French lines had not been fired at for almost a year, although they were within easy range of field pieces, and the French in return didn't fire at villages in the German lines. This was by tacit agreement. Both sides had held the lines in this part of the country lightly and both sides were content to sit tight and not stir up trouble.
Things livened up after the Americans came in because the Germans soon found out that new troops were opposing them and they wanted to identify the units. Some of the increasing liveliness was also due to the fact that American gunners were anxious to get practice and fired much more than the French had done. Indeed, an American officer earned a rebuke from his superiors because he fired into a German village which had been hitherto immune. This was a mistake, for the Germans immediately retaliated by shelling a French village and the civilian population was forced to move out. For more than a year they had lived close to the battle lines in comparative safety. On the night the American troops moved in to the trenches a baby was born in a village less than a mile from one of our battalion headquarters. Major General Sibert became her godfather and the child was christened Unis in honor of Les Etats Unis.
The increase in artillery activity had hardly begun on the day we paid our visit. No German shells fell near us as we crossed the meadow, but when we reached a battalion headquarters the major in charge pointed with pride to a German shell which had landed on top of his kitchen that morning. The rain had played him a good service, for the shell simply buried itself, fragments and all. He did not seem properly appreciative of the weather. "All Gaul," he said, "is divided into three parts and two of them are water."
Still, we found ourselves drier in the trenches than out of them. They were floored with boards and well lined. As trenches go they were good, but, of course, that isn't saying a great deal. We were the first newspapermen to enter the American trenches and so we wanted to see the first line, although it was growing dark. We wound around and around for many yards and it was hard walking for some of us, as the French had built these trenches for short men. It was necessary to walk with a crouch like an Indian on the movie warpath. This was according to instructions, but we may have been unduly cautious, for not a hostile shot was fired while we were in the first line. It was barely possible to see the German trenches through the mist and still more difficult to realize that there was a menace in the untidy welts of mud which lay at the other side of the meadow. But the point from which we looked across to the German line was the very salient where the Germans made their first raid a week later and captured twelve men, killed three, and wounded five.
The doughboys wouldn't let us go without pointing out all the sights. To the right was the apple tree. Here the Germans used to come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the French on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and gather fruit without molestation so long as not more than two came at a time. This was another tacit agreement in this quiet front, for the tree was in easy rifle range. One of the doughboys unwittingly broke that custom by taking a shot at two Germans who went to get apples.
"I like apples myself," he said, "and I just couldn't lie still and watch a squarehead carry them away by the armful."