ant grunt,
like a strong wallop on a wet carpet, is an _arrivee_. It has arrived
from Germany. In the dugouts, our men smoked dozens of cigarettes,
lighting fresh ones from the half-consumed butts. It is the appetite
that comes with the progressive realisation of a long deferred hope. It
is the tension that comes from at last arriving at an object and then
finding nothing to do, now that you are there. It is the nervousness
that nerveless youth suffers in inactivity.

The men sloshed back and forth through the mud along the narrow confines
of the trench. The order is against much movement, but immobility is
unbearable. Wet slickers rustle against one another in the narrow
traverses, and equipment, principally the French and English gas masks,
hanging at either hip become entangled in the darkness.

At times a steel helmet falls from some unaccustomed head and, hitting
perhaps a projecting rock in the trench wall, gives forth a clang which
is followed by curses from its clumsy owner and an admonition of quiet
from some young lieutenant.

"Olson, keep your damn fool head down below the top of that trench or
you'll get it blown off." The sergeant is talking, and Olson, who
brought from Minnesota a keen desire to see No Man's Land even at the
risk of his life, is forced to repress the yearning.

"Two men over in B Company just got holes drilled through their beans
for doing the same thing," continued the sergeant. "There's nothing you
can see out there anyhow. It's all darkness."

Either consciously or unconsciously, the sergeant was lying, for the
purpose of saving Olson and others from a fool's fate. There was not a
single casualty in any American unit on the line that first night.

"Where is the telephone dugout?" a young lieutenant asked his French
colleague. "I want to speak to the battalion commander."

"But you must not speak English over the telephone," replied the
Frenchman, "the Germans will hear you with the instruments they use to
tap the underground circuit."

"But I was going to use our American code," said the front line novice;
"if the Germans tap in they won't be able to figure out what it means."

"Ah, no, my friend," replied the Frenchman, smiling. "They won't know
what the message means, but your voice and language will mean to them
that Americans are occupying the sector in front of them, and we want to
give them that information in another way, _n'est ce pas?_"

Undoubtedly there was some co