On every hand were evidences of the reborn war of semi-movement. One day I would see a battery of light guns swing into position by a roadside, see an observing officer mount by ladder to a tree top and direct the firing of numberless rounds into the rumbling east. By the next morning, they would have changed position, rumbled off to other parts, leaving beside the road only the marks of their cannon wheels and mounds of empty shell cases. Between our infantry lines and those of the German, there was yet to grow the complete web of woven wire entanglements that marred the landscapes on the long established fronts. Still standing, silent sentinels over some of our front line positions were trees, church steeples, dwellings and barns that as yet had not been levelled to the ground. Dugouts had begun to show their entrances in the surface of the ground and cross roads had started to sprout with rudely constructed shelters. Fat sandbags were just taking the places of potted geraniums on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily, but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held much of its erstwhile beauty. Those days before Cantigny were marked by particularly heavy artillery fire. The ordnance duel was unrelenting and the daily exchange of shells reached an aggregate far in excess of anything that the First Division had ever experienced before. Nightly the back areas of the front were shattered with shells. The German was much interested in preventing us from bringing up supplies and munition. We manifested the same interest toward him. American batteries firing at long range, harassed the road intersections behind the enemy's line and wooded places where relief troops might have been assembled under cover of darkness. The expenditure of shells was enormous but it continued practically twenty-four hours a day. German prisoners, shaking from the nervous effects of the pounding, certified to the untiring efforts of our gunners. The small nameless village that we occupied almost opposite the German position in Cantigny seemed to receive particular attention from the enemy artillery. In retaliation, our guns almost levelled Cantigny and a nearby village which the enemy occupied. Every hour, under the rain of death, the work of digging was continued and the men doing it needed no urging from their officers. There was something sinister and emphatic about the whine of a "two ten German H. E." that inspired one with a desire to start for the antipodes by the shortest and most direct route.