the present conflict. Regiments to which
the announcement was made, broke spontaneously into cheers."

Particularly were there cheers when the news spread through the ranks of
the First United States division, then on duty on the line in front of
Toul, that it had been the first American division chosen to go into
Picardy. I was fortunate enough to make arrangements to go with them.

I rode out from old positions with the guns and boarded the troop train
which took our battery by devious routes to changes of scenery,
gratifying both to vision and spirit. We lived in our cars on tinned
meat and hard bread, washed down with swallows of _vin ordinaire_,
hurriedly purchased at station _buvettes_. The horses rode well.

Officers and men, none of us cared for train schedule simply because
none of us knew where we were going, and little time was wasted in
conjecture. Soldierly curiosity was satisfied with the knowledge that we
were on our way, and with this satisfaction, the hours passed easily.
In fact, the blackjack game in the officers' compartment had reached the
point where the battery commander had garnered almost all of the French
paper money in sight, when our train passed slowly through the environs
of Paris.

Other American troop trains had preceded us, because where the railroad
embankment ran close and parallel to the street of some nameless
Faubourg, our appearance was met with cheers and cries from a welcoming
regiment of Paris street gamins, who trotted in the street beside the
slow moving troop train and shouted and threw their hats and wooden
shoes in the air. Sous and fifty centime pieces and franc pieces
showered from the side doors of the horses' cars as American soldiers,
with typical disregard for the value of money, pitched coin after coin
to the scrambling mob of children. At least a hundred francs must have
been cast out upon those happy, romping waves of childish faces and
up-stretched dirty hands.

"A soldier would give his shirt away," said a platoon commander, leaning
out of the window and watching the spectacle, and surreptitiously
pitching a few coins himself. "Hope we get out of this place before the
men pitch out a gun or a horse to that bunch. Happy little devils,
aren't they? It's great to think we are on our way up to meet their
daddies."

Unnumbered hours more passed merrily in the troop train before we were
shunted into the siding of a little town. Work of unloading was started
a