Our supply officer, meanwhile, was annexing everything in sight for the battalion in the most approved fashion. One time his right-hand man, Sergeant Wheeler, passed by some tethered mules which belonged to a green regiment. He hopped off the ration cart he was riding, caught them, and tied them behind the cart. A mile down the road some one came pounding after them. "Hey! Where are you going with those mules?" Wheeler was equal to the occasion. "Are them your mules? Well, what do you mean by leaving them loose by the road? I had to get out and catch them. I have a good mind to report you to the M. P. for this." Eventually Wheeler compromised by warning the man, and giving one of the mules back to him. Then the trains arrived. We had never traveled on a regular military train before. A military train is made up to carry a battalion of infantry; box cars holding about forty men or eight animals each, and flat cars for wagons, kitchens, etc. We entrained safely and got off all right, though we were hurried at the last by a message saying the schedule given us was wrong, and our train left one half hour earlier than indicated. We creaked off toward the southwest. We didn't know where we were going, but by this time we had all become philosophical and self-sufficient and believed that if the train dropped us somewhere far away from the rest of the division, we would manage to get along by ourselves without too much trouble. After a day's travel we stopped at a little station. The only thing that we had to identify us was a long yellow ticket scratched all over with minute directions, which none of us could read. Here I was informed by a French guard that this was the regulating station and the American regulating officer was waiting to see me. I hopped off the train and ran back, finding Colonel Hjalmar Erickson, who afterward became a very dear friend of mine and later commanded the regiment. He was busy trying to figure things out with the French _chef de la gare_, an effort complicated by his inability to speak French. "My lord, Major, why aren't you the Seventh Field Artillery?" was Colonel Erickson's greeting. As he was giving me the plans and maps I heard a whoop from the train outside. I ran to the door and found that, for some reason, best known to himself, the French engineer had started up again and my battalion was rapidly disappearing down the track. I started on the dead run after them. Fortunately some of the officers saw what was happening, and by force of arms succeeded in persuading the engineer to stop the train. That night we detrained a couple of days' march from Chaumont-en-Vexin, where division headquarters were to be. We hiked through a beautiful peaceful country, the most lovely we had yet seen in France, billeting for the night in a little town where a whole company of mine slept in an old château. At Chaumont we stayed for some few days, maneuvering while the division was being fully assembled.