am YOUR officer?" the Major said slowly
and coldly, with emphasis on the word "your." "Suppose I tell you I am a
German officer and these men behind me are Germans. How do you know?"

With a quick movement the American brought his rifle forward to the
challenge, his right hand slapping the wooden butt with an audible
whack.

"Advance one, and give the countersign," he said with a changed voice
and manner and the Major, moving to within whispering distance, breathed
the word over the man's extended bayonet. Upon hearing it, the soldier
lowered his gun and stood at attention.

It was difficult to figure whether his relief over the scare was greater
than his fears of the censure he knew was coming.

"Next time anybody gets that close to you without being challenged," the
Major said, "don't be surprised if it is a German. That's the way they
do it. They don't march in singing 'Deutschland Ueber Alles.'

"If you see them first, you might live through the war. If they see you
first, we will have wasted a lot of Liberty bonds and effort trying to
make a soldier out of you. Now, remember, watch yourself."

We pushed on encountering longer patches of trench where duck boards
were entirely missing and where the wading sometimes was knee-deep. In
some places, either the pounding of shells or the thawing out of the
ground had pushed in the revetments, appreciably narrowing the way and
making progress more difficult. Arriving at an unmanned firing step
large enough to accommodate the party, we mounted and took a first look
over the top.

Moonlight now was stronger through the mist which hung fold over fold
over the forbidden land between the opposing battle lines. At intervals
nervous machine guns chattered their ghoulish gibberish or tut-tut-ted
away chidingly like finicky spinsters. Their intermittent sputtering to
the right and left of us was unenlightening. We couldn't tell whether
they were speaking German or English. Occasional bullets whining
somewhere through that wet air gave forth sounds resembling the ripping
of linen sheets.

Artillery fire was the exception during the entire night but when a
shell did trace its unseen arc through the mist mantle, its echoes gave
it the sound of a street car grinding through an under-river tunnel or
the tube reverberations of a departing subway train.

We were two hundred yards from the German front lines. Between their
trenches and ours, at this point, was low land, so boggy