After a couple of days’ rest the men were started on a schedule of training which was laid out for four weeks. Target ranges were prepared by the engineers and everything looked like a long stay. The training was necessary not so much for the old-timers as for the replacements who had been sent in to take the places of the men we had lost. We received five hundred from the 81st Division. We had known cases where our replacements had to go into line without anything like proper training. The night we left Epieds to advance into action at the Ourcq we received new men, some of whom knew very little about a rifle and had never once put on a gas mask; and the Captains took them out by night and drilled them for an hour with the gas masks in order to give the poor fellows some sort of a chance for their lives if exposed to danger of gas. The second day that I was in Goncourt Colonel McCoy came to see me with Major Lawrence and Major Donovan to lay down the law. They had decided that I was to go to the hospital at Vittel, where Major Donovan’s brother was one of the doctors, “for alterations and repairs.” General Menoher, with his usual kindness, sent over his car to take me there, and Father George Carpentier was brought over from the Sanitary Train to fill my place. I told him “Your name is French but it has the advantage of being the one French name that is best known and most admired by our bunch of pugilists.” I have had a nice lazy week of it at Vittel, which was a French watering place before the war, the hotels and parks now being given over to American soldiers. I hear a great deal of talk about a coming offensive in which the American Army is to take the leading part. I had gotten an inkling of it before from a French source, with strictest injunctions to secrecy. But here in Vittel I find it discussed by private soldiers on the park benches and by the old lady who sells newspapers. If it is a secret, all the world seems to know it. We have taken every step to make the Germans aware of it except that of putting paid advertisements in the Berlin newspapers. The fact is, these things cannot be kept secret. Here in Vittel they are cleaning out all the hospitals of wounded and that means that a big battle is expected somewhere in this vicinity within a short time. Then up along the line ammunition and supply trains are busy establishing dumps, and the drivers are naturally talking about it in the cafés, so that everybody knows that the Americans are planning something big and the place where it is going to happen. VITTEL _August_ 24th, 1918