One Sunday evening just at dusk, I drove to our camp at Ker Avor. The boys called this camp their summer home. It surely was an ideal spot in the heart of a pine forest, high up in the Vosges Mountains. It was also near enough to the enemy lines—about a mile distant—to make it mighty interesting.
After delivering our supplies to the hut we went out to where a gang of soldiers who were off duty had gathered in the forest. One was playing a harmonica and another was "jigging" and telling funny stories. Instantly and gladly they swung the gathering into a religious service, with songs from the "Y" hymn book and a fine snappy address as a speaker stood on a hummock surrounded by the silent, thoughtful bunch. The sky was our canopy and with the moonlight filtering through the branches of the pines, an indelible impression was registered on every fellow there.
The boys were happy to have us come and showed us about their camp, including an ingenious little chapel which had been built by the Germans during their occupancy of this territory in the early part of the War.
My first near view of the Boche trenches came one day when, waiting for our movie man at one of the huts, I went out "masked and helmeted" to a hill between our first and second lines. The peculiar "chills" and "thrills" of first sensations are indescribable. Cautiously and with some inward trembling I followed Private Van Voliet, of the 146th Infantry (Colonel Weybrecht's Regiment), across a shell-torn field where twisted wire entanglements told of former fierce encounters. We passed a Stokes mortar battery of the 147th Infantry concealed in low bushes. The boys, lying idly in their dog-tents, wove canes from willow branches wound with wire and capped with bullets. I was presented with a cane by Private Boothby and a swagger stick by Private Rhoades.
A five minute walk brought us to the "alert zone," where gas masks must be adjusted and ready for instant use. The guard at the crossroad allowed us to pass with the warning, "Keep under cover or you will draw the fire of the Boche snipers." So we crawled through a hole in the camouflaged screen which protected the road from German observers, and keeping behind clumps of bushes we peered through at the trenches just across the valley, in which Hun rifles lay cocked and primed for any American who would dare become a target. I confess I breathed easier when we got safely back to the "Y" hut.
Night Bombing
For four nights in succession Boche planes had been trying to drop bombs on the rail-head where troop trains were being loaded near our Headquarters. On the fourth night, when returning from a front line hut with Secretary Johnson, who in America was a professor in Vassar College, we stopped on a high ridge overlooking the battle line. This was a favorite rendezvous on my return from night deliveries, as it gave a wonderful panoramic view of the whole front line for miles in either direction. The flashes of the guns, the dazzling brilliancy of the star shells, the long lines of varicolored signals as they went up from many camps and out-posts, and the flares dropped from scores of planes, passing and repassing in the darkness overhead, can never be forgotten. It was a nightly and wonderful Fourth of July celebration, enhanced by the weirdness and danger of actual warfare.
As we stood this night, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, wearing our "tin" hats and with gas masks at "alert," suddenly out of the night loomed a German plane, flying low, the Boche engine distinguished by its own peculiar throb. As it passed over our heads it dropped a red flare and proceeded toward Baccarat. Evidently, it had discovered our signals for that night and was using them. As soon as its deception was discovered our gunners opened fire, but not until it had dropped four bombs on the town and gotten away in safety toward the German lines. The explosions from the bombs were terrific and the flashes lit up the whole sky. We took refuge behind trees as shrapnel from our anti-aircraft guns rattled down in the roadway and the "ping" of machine-gun bullets startled our ears.
When we returned to town we found everything in confusion. One bomb had exploded in the treetops a half block from our billet and had wrecked the beautiful mansion of the French mayor of the town. It also wounded some American soldiers in a nearby barracks. Another bomb landed between two buildings at Hexo Barracks, killing three of our boys and one French poilu, besides wounding many and shattering the buildings. Four horses were killed by pieces of shrapnel, and when looking over the scene of destruction the next morning I noticed a hole, clean cut, through a half-inch steel tire on a nearby cart. It had been cut by a piece of shrapnel about an inch long which had also gone through spokes and hub and buried itself in the ground.