ortalized by his song, a parody on "When you wore a tulip,
and I wore a big red rose":

"I was sleeping in a dugout right up close to the front line,
Now I was feeling fine, when those Dutch they issued mine;
They shot some high explosives right in my dugout door,
And since that time my dugout is no more.
I grabbed my full equipment then and started back to town,
For those dirty kraut eaters had torn my play house down.

_Chorus._

When they blew up my dugout, my most substantial dugout,
Then I got right on my toes;
And when that shrapnel busted, I was thoroughly disgusted
And the speed I made, no one knows.
When I started running, my feet had a yearning
To go from where the shrapnel flows;
So when he blew up my dugout, I got my clothes and tore out,
The reason--the Lord only knows."

On another night, when Lt. Vardon and Sergeants Knight and Childs were
racing for a dugout, Lt. Vardon ran past the entrance. The glare cast by
a nearby shell explosion lighted up the dugout and, doubling back, Lt.
Vardon beat Childs into it. A man casts dignity aside and sprints when
shells begin dropping around him.

At Mittlach there were no raids in the proper sense of the term. No
detachment of the infantry ever went over the top there. But there were
numerous casualties among our troops, due to the activity of German
snipers and to accidents. Then, too, the German artillery had such an
open sweep at the town of Mittlach and the valley below it, that several
Americans were either killed or wounded by shrapnel. In fact, the very
evening that our main detachment arrived in Mittlach, a corporal of the
137th Infantry was killed by a shell as he stood in the street reading a
letter. This was the first casualty in the regiment, so the chaplain
decided to give the man a military funeral, firing squad and all. He
made the funeral arrangements over the telephone and set the time for
the funeral at 9 o'clock the next evening. The time for the funeral came
and the procession was just leaving the Alpine Ambulance when the German
artillery again began shelling the town. There were, by actual count,
just twenty-two men in the street when the first three-inch shell came
whining towards the town. It took one of those shells about six seconds
to reach Mittlach after it could first be heard, and when the first one
exploded nearby, half of those twenty-two men had al