These busses were driven by Chinese in the French service. With their impassive Oriental faces looking out over their great sheepskin coats, they looked fitting agents of destiny; grave Charons, bearing us on the last lap of our progress toward our fate.
At 4:00 o’clock we were off, with a jerk and a clank of gears and a steady rumble. On and on, over the long French road, rolling on through rain and wind, steadily, inevitably; each lorry nearly touching the one in front. Darkness fell; the long gray train rolled on, not a light, not a sound save the rumble of the trucks. We got colder and colder; more and more cramped. Capt. Fleischmann and I spent most of the night each cherishing the other’s icy feet in his bosom. On and on, through gray, silent towns, past the ghostly figure of a lonely M. P. at a crossroads; through fields, woods, villages, all wet and quiet in the falling rain.
Just as the daylight began to thin the inky mist, the train halted, and the word was passed along the line to debus. Wet, shivering, miserable, “B” Co. struggled hastily into clammy shoes and slung their heavy, soggy packs. As we formed on the side of the road, the busses started again, and rolled swiftly off into the shadows ahead, leaving us on the road, with heavy woods on either side.
We marched down the road to an open field on the left. Here a railroad track entered the corner of the wood. We turned off up the track, and about 300 yards along we came upon the 2nd battalion bivouacking. We went on just beyond them, and were allotted our own share of squishy ground and drenched underbrush.
A limited number of fires were allowed, and we made ourselves as comfortable as we could under the circumstances. I was detailed on O. D. and spent a busy day dissuading the regiment from straggling all over the road and open fields. All knew that a big attack was in preparation, and that it was important that the concentration be kept under cover from the enemy’s aircraft. But some men apparently couldn’t compree that we weren’t roosting in that bally old dysentery generator of a wood for sheer sport.
Showers fell intermittently during the day, but nothing like the previous day’s deluge. At about 4 P. M. there was an officers’ call, and we were warned to march at 7 P. M. Co. Commanders were issued maps, and we learned that our present bivouac was in the Bois de la Cote en Haye, east of Tremblecourt.
About 5 P. M., six French tanks came clanking down the road, did a Squads Left, waddled across the fields and disappeared over the brow of the hill, toward the rumble of intermittent artillery fire in the distance that meant the front.
The 312th Inf. was bivouacked on the other side of the railroad track, and the rest of the division was hidden in the woods near by. Across the main road was a great artillery ammunition dump, big enough to blow up ten divisions if a bomb ever hit it. But I kept this to myself, and what a soldier doesn’t know doesn’t worry him. He has enough to worry about anyhow.
The kitchens came up late in the afternoon, and we got outside of a ration of hot slum before dark.
By 6:45 P. M. we had rolled packs, and were ready to hit the road again. I went to sleep on the ground, with my pack on my back, and was awakened by Dunn to find it nearly dark, and the battalion ready to move off.