Off on our left, a noiseless passenger train slid silently across the rim of the valley, blue dimmed lights in its coach windows glowing like a row of wet sulphur matches. Far off in the north, flutters of white light flushed the night sky and an occasional grumbling of the distant guns gave us our first impression of the battle of battles. Every man in our battery tingled with the thrill. This was riding frontward with the guns--this was rolling and rumbling on through the night up toward the glare and glamour of war. I was riding beside the captain at the head of the column. He broke silence. "It seems like a far cry from Honolulu with the moon playing through the palm trees on the beach," he said quizzically, "to this place and these scenes and events to-night, but a little thing like a flip of coin decided it for me, and I'm blessing that coin to-night. "A year ago January, before we came into the war, I was stationed at San Antonio. Another officer friend of mine was stationed there and one day he received orders to report for duty at Honolulu. He had a girl in San Antonio and didn't want to leave her and he knew I didn't have a girl and didn't give a damn where I went, or was sent, so long as it was with the army. He put up the proposition of mutual exchange being permitted under regulations. "He wanted to take my place in San Antonio and give me his assignment in Honolulu, which I must say looked mighty good in those days to anybody who was tired of Texas. I didn't think then we'd ever come to war and besides it didn't make much difference to me one way or the other where I went. But instead of accepting the proposition right off the reel, I told Jim we'd flip a coin to decide. "If it came tails, he would go to Honolulu. If it came heads, I would go to Honolulu. He flipped. Tails won. I'm in France and poor Jim is out there in Honolulu tending the Ukulele crop with prospects of having to stay there for some time. Poor devil, I got a letter from him last week. "Do you know, man knows no keener joy in the world than that which I have to-night. Here I am in France at the head of two hundred and fifty men and horses and the guns and we're rolling up front to kick a dent in history. The poor unfortunate that ain't in this fight has almost got license to shoot himself. Life knows no keener joy than this." It was a long speech for our captain, but his words expressed not only the feeling of our battery, but our whole regiment, from the humblest wagon driver up to the colonel who, by the way, has just made himself most unpopular with the regiment by being promoted to a Brigadier Generalship. The colonel is passing upward to a higher command and the regiment is sore on losing him. One of his humblest critics has characterised the event as the "first rough trick the old man ever pulled."