“Guess you know by now that we don’t travel first-class in this country. You’ve seen them little cars that looks like a shoe-box set on wheels, marked, ‘40 hommes’—that’s forty like you and me—and ‘8 chevaux’—means eight horses or as many mules. Well, that’s the kind of parlor-cars that I’ve been tourin’ France in. I always get in a horse-car if I can, as it’s warmer, and, supposin’ the chevaux don’t step all over you, there’s a chance to lay down and cork off a bit.
“They loaded us bag and baggage on a train of them kind of cars and a Frog blew some kind of a horn. We was off for the front. God a’mighty, you should have heard them Yanks cheerin’ as we headed for the front. Passed through a lot of big towns and beaucoup villages where all of the Frogs came out to look at us as if we was a travelin’ circus. Come pretty near starvin’ before we got where we was goin’.
“Stayed on the train all one night and one whole day. About seven o’clock of the second night I squirmed into about three feet of floor space and cushayed. Must have slept pretty good, ’cause next thing I knew somebody was shakin’ me and yellin’, ‘Hey, come out of it, Jimmy—get up, we’re at the front.’ Gee! I snaps into it and rushes out of the door expectin’ to see the front right outside. It was pretty dark, but I looked hard and couldn’t see no Germans or trenches. It was quiet as death. I says to Frank Reynolds, who was top-sergeant of E Battery—you see, I had transferred from C to E—‘Where the hell is it?’ ‘What?’ he asks. ‘The front, you nut,’ I told him. ‘Oh, it’s right around here,’ and he waved his arms around pointin’ in every direction.
“I couldn’t see nothin’ but a railroad station and some flat cars. ‘Funniest front I’ve ever been on,’ said one of them Mexican-border veterans. ‘This ain’t no front,’ says I.
“’Bout that time it sounded as if there was goin’ to be a thunder-shower. Everybody looked at one another kinda funny-like. We heard the thunder encore. I looked to the north and there was a lot of flashes showin’ against the sky. The thunder began to growl like a bunch of bears over a big bone. Some rockets shot up and spilled a lot of sparks. A smart guy had to remark that they must be havin’ a Fourth of July up there, but I was too busy tryin’ to compree that them things meant war. I kept sayin’ to myself, ‘That’s a war goin’ on out there; that’s the thing we came up here to get in.’
“They talk a lot about thrills in love-stories and books, but those story-page people don’t know a thrill from a bowl of mush compared to the things that was runnin’ up and down my backbone that first night. Course you know the guns and flashes was quite a ways, ’bout twenty kilos from where we was, and there wasn’t much danger of us gettin’ in any trouble ourselves. But seein’ and hearin’ just got me to thinkin’ about the old guerre and knowin’ that we was in it at last—well, it kind of made me feel a little different, that’s all.
“We harnessed the old chevaux up, hooked ’em to the guns and got all the other junk, includin’ them fourgeons—French wagons, you know—started. ’Bout dawn we rumbled through a town that looked as if it had been shut up for the winter. Wasn’t a light goin’. Not a pup on the streets. Nothin’ but us. There was beaucoup houses all shot to hell—roofs gone, windows out, walls cavin’ in. Some places were nothin’ but rubbish. There was so little left of a few houses that you couldn’t have salvaged a thing even if you had a pull with the guy at the salvage dump. I found out later that the name of the place was Swasson (Soissons). Must have been some battlin’ ’round that joint.
“After leavin’ Swasson we hit a road that led right up to the trenches, or damn near it, anyway. Anybody, even an S. O. S. bird with six months’ experience in Paris, would have guessed that we must be somewhere near the front. There was old trenches runnin’ every which way; at that time I thought the detail that dug ’em must have been zigzag, as all of the trenches was crooked like a bunch of old dead snakes. I saw beaucoup barbed wire stretched ’round. But I’ve seen lots more since that day.
“As we hiked along a gun would boom out some place up along the front. Wasn’t none of that war stuff that you look for after readin’ some war books. Just now and then a boom and a flash or two.
“It was mighty cold ridin’ a horse that night. Bein’ from Florida, I ain’t used to much cold weather, and my hands and feet come pretty near bein’ ice before we finally got to our échelon near a tumbled-down village called Chassemy. Listen ’bout that échelon stuff. It was somethin’ new to me before I got to the front, as I never took Greek at school. Well, it seems that échelon means the place that ain’t quite at the front, but just about as bad, bein’ as how the Boche can always shell échelons with big guns. The men, horses, and other things that ain’t needed at the front all the time stay at the échelon till they send for them. Time we made the échelon everybody was so sleepy that we didn’t wait to unroll, but just sprawled about on the barrack floor and cushayed.