At last, when every man and officer had reached the point of absolute disgust, the guns were dragged out of their mud-holes and hauled by horse and man power to the positions from which they were scheduled to launch their part of the drive.
Passing through the shell-torn village of Rupt-en-Woevre, the Second Battalion, of which Jimmy’s battery was a part, swerved off the main road and followed a woods trail that seemed to lead straight into the noises and strange, mysterious lights of the front.
A gun barked out, not forty feet from the road. O. D. looked to Jimmy.
“Are we at the front now Jimmy?” he asked in a whisper.
“Don’t know myself. Guess there’s a battery in the woods near here. We’ll be there soon now.”
The firing was not very heavy that night. Occasionally a big gun spoke or the staccato voices of machine-guns stabbed the night air intermittently. Flares and rockets went up frequently, causing the darkness of the woods that bordered the road to accentuate. O. D. owned some strange, indescribable feelings at times, but he could not identify any of them as the sensations which he had expected to experience upon his first intimacy with the things of the front.
The column halted at a crossroad. Orders to dismount came quickly and were repeated down the line of guns in ordinary tones. Before O. D. had a chance to ask what was going on platoon commanders had issued instructions for the piece teams to haul the guns into certain positions nearby.
“Well, we’re here. Now for the business,” declared Jimmy.
“You mean we are at the front,” gasped O. D., incredulously. “I thought—”
“Sure, we all thought the same thing when we came up the first time. Looked for signposts sayin’, ‘This is the front,’ or a bunch of Germans tryin’ to get us. Just like that No-Man’s-Land stuff. I’d heard so much about that place before comin’ to France that I thought it would be as easy to find as a piece of choice real estate. Kinda expected that it would be a square field, or somethin’ like that, between two story-book trenches. First No Man’s Land I ran into was in the middle of a village. Graveyard and church made most of it. The front’s built on the same idea.”