sh of the Moselle
and the Meuse. For one thing, there were better and cleaner billets than
had ever been encountered before by our men. Fresh, unthrashed oats and
fragrant hay had been found in the hurriedly abandoned lofts back of the
line and in the caves and cellars nearer the front.

In many places the men were sleeping on feather mattresses in
old-fashioned wooden bedsteads that had been removed from jeopardy above
ground to comparative safety below. Whole caves were furnished, and not
badly furnished, by this salvage of furniture, much of which would have
brought fancy prices in any collection of antiques.

Forced to a recognition solely of intrinsic values, our men made prompt
utilisation of much of the material abandoned by the civilian
population. Home in the field is where a soldier sleeps and after all,
why not have it as comfortable as his surroundings will afford? Those
caves and vegetable cellars, many with walls and vaulted ceilings of
clean red brick or white blocks of chalk, constituted excellent shelters
from shell splinters and even protected the men from direct hits by
missiles of small calibre.

Beyond the villages, our riflemen found protection in quickly scraped
holes in the ground. There were some trenches but they were not
contiguous. "No Man's Land" was an area of uncertain boundary. Our
gunners had quarters burrowed into the chalk not far from their gun
pits. All communication and the bringing up of shells and food were
conducted under cover of darkness. Under such conditions, we lived and
waited for the order to go forward.

Our sector in that battle of the Somme was so situated that the opposing
lines ran north and south. The enemy was between us and the rising sun.
Behind our rear echelons was the main road between Amiens and Beauvais.
Amiens, the objective of the German drive, was thirty-five kilometres
away on our left, Beauvais was the same distance on our right and two
hours by train from Paris.

We were eager for the fight. The graves of our dead dotted new fields in
France. We were holding with the French on the Picardy line. We were
between the Germans and the sea. We were before Cantigny.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RUSH OF THE RAIDERS--"ZERO AT 2 A. M."

While the First U. S. Division was executing in Picardy a small, planned
operation which resulted in the capture of the German fortified
positions in the town of Cantigny, other American divisions at other
parts along the