Now the Regiment was placed under the tactical orders of the General commanding the 164th Division of the French Army, the Division then occupying what was known as the Lunéville Sector. On February 21st, the 1st and 2nd Battalions, Headquarters Company and Machine Gun Company paraded in the central square of Lunéville and were reviewed by Major General Bassilière, then commander of the 17th French Army Corps. A few days later, the Regiment was made happy by learning that orders to go to the front had been received. On February 27th and 28th respectively, Companies D and B marched to their posts in the front line trenches, relieving companies of the 15th Group of Chasseurs of the French Army. And now came a chapter in the history of the 69th Regiment which blotted out from the minds of officers and men all the hard work of the Camp Mills training period, all the privations and discomforts of the ocean trip and the journey across blizzard-beleagured France. The 69th was actually in the fighting—it was called “a period of training in the trenches,” but it was no time of sham-battles and manoeuvres. It was, in fact, an initiation into battle, by way of what was (up to the time of the 42nd Division’s entry into it) a quiet sector. A “quiet sector” is one in which the German and French lines are separated from each other by a considerable distance—sometimes as much as five kilometers—in which there is no immediate objective for which the troops on either side are striving, in which, finally, shots are seldom fired, the opposing forces being content merely to hold their trenches almost undisturbed. These are also termed “rest sectors,” and the task of holding them is given either to troops wearied by participation in great battles or to troops fresh from the drill field and lacking in experience in actual warfare. Nothing could have been more idyllic than the Rouge-Bouquet-Chaussailles Subsector of the Lunéville Sector when Company D marched to its strong point before dawn on the morning of February 27th. The subsector is heavily wooded and almost clear of underbrush. As the company marched up the hill through groves of birch, pine, spruce, and fir, and saw to right and left little summer houses, benches, tables and dugout entrances elaborately decorated with rustic woodwork they were rather shocked by the idyllic beauty of what they saw. Not for service in such a recreation park had they crossed the seas. Where were the bursting shells, where was the liquid fire, where were the bayonets of the charging Boches? This series of outposts joined by little ditches seemed at first too much like Central Park to satisfy the battle-hungry soldiers of the 69th.