The Germans held Croane—the French and Germans, alternately, occupied the village of Croanelle, dominated by the fortress of Croane. This was before the days of the present heavy bombardment, and many of the deserted houses were still intact, beds unmade, dishes yet upon table, furnished, but vacant. Cattle, tied to mangers, lay dead in their stabs. In cellars, where combatants had tunneled through to connect, the dead of both sides lay impaled on bayonets. One Frenchman’s teeth were at a German’s throat, locked in combat, even in death. Out between the lines lay the unburied dead, in all shapes and conditions of rot, settled in the mud, half buried in open shell holes. Dried fragments of uniforms flapped on barbed wire through which the wounded had crawled into sheltered corners and died. No need to tell a patrol when, in winter darkness, as he stepped on a slippery substance, what it was—he knew. In the spring grass grew around and through these inanimate shapes. Rats and dogs waxed fat as badgers. [Illustration] From the day the 2d Regiment went into Croanelle till it was relieved, six months later, no German soldier who set foot in the shallow trench went back. Our regiment, repeatedly reinforced, was kept at full strength. [Illustration: UNITED STATES CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL (Reverse side reads) FOR PATRIOTISM FORTITUDE AND LOYALTY ] Americans there endured pain and suffering, the depth of which Washington’s Army at Valley Forge never reached. Those old Continentals had nothing in discomfort on these modern heroes in front of Croane. Washington’s Army, in their own country, had access to the necessities of life. They held communion with their fellows. These later-day Americans, under the hardest discipline in the world, were cut off from civilization. They were back to the age of barter and exchange. Money would not buy goods—there was nothing to be bought—but if one man had a little tobacco, and another man a pair of socks, they would swap. No furloughs were granted the first ten months. Every letter was censored. Packages of comforts, sent by friends, were stolen or confiscated en route. They were in a foreign country, whose language many could not speak. They had left good, comfortable homes for these holes in the ground, called trenches by courtesy, where one waded to his post on guard, rifle in hand, and carried a wisp of straw or a piece of plank on which to lie to keep from sinking into slime and slush, which covered his clothes with mud and filled his bones with rheumatism.