The number of arrivals by way of the air in that particular village every day numbered high in the thousands. Under such conditions, no life-loving human could have failed to produce the last degree of utility out of a spade. The continual dropping of shells in the ruins and the unending fountains of chalk dust and dirt left little for the imagination, but one officer told me that it reminded him of living in a room where some one was eternally beating the carpet. This taste of the war of semi-movement was appreciated by the American soldier. It had in it a dash of novelty, lacking in the position warfare to which he had become accustomed in the mud and marsh 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."