The officers in charge of the party found presently, to their acute horror, that even the trenches were not enough for Mr. Baker. Nothing would do him but a listening-post. And when he had finally got back safe, and had come back to the communication-trenches from the front, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. The relief was premature, for the liveliest danger of all was on the return motor trip, when an immense shell buried itself in a crater not fifty yards from the secretary. Fortunately, the débris flew all in the opposite direction, and nobody was hurt. The First Division heard an address the following day from Secretary Baker. "It would seem more fit," he said, "and I should much prefer it, if, instead of addressing you, I should listen to your experiences. Your division has the distinction of being the first to arrive in France. May every man in your ranks aim to make the First Division the first in accomplishment. With you came a body of the marines, those well-disciplined, ship-shape soldiers of the navy. "Yours was the first experience in being billeted, and in all the initial details of adjusting yourselves to new and strange conditions. In this, as in developing a system of training, you were the pioneers, blazing the way, while succeeding contingents could profit by your mistakes. "Day after day and week after week you had to continue the hard drudgery of instruction which is necessary to proficiency in modern war. You had to restrain your impatience to go into the trenches under General Pershing's wise demand for that thoroughness, the value of which you now appreciate as a result of actual service in the trenches. "If sometimes the discipline seemed wearing, you now know you would have paid for its absence with your lives. "If I had any advice to give, it is to strike hard and shoot straight, and I would warn you at the same time against any carelessness, any surrendering to curiosity, which would make you a mark needlessly. The better you are trained the more valuable is your life to your country, as a fighter who seeks to make the soldier of the enemy, rather than yourself, pay the supreme price of war. "On every hand I am told that you are prepared to fight 'to the end,' and I see this spirit in your faces. Depend upon us at home to stand by you in a spirit worthy of you." Next Secretary Baker spoke, though informally, to the Forty-second Division, far better known as the Rainbow Division. There he explained some of the reasons for military secrecy.