Well, as I was saying, we reached the firing line on October 4, after marching up from Toulouse, where they'd moved us from Rouen to finish our training. We went down there in a cattle truck at the end of August in a hurry, as they expected the Germans any minute; the journey took sixty hours instead of ten, and was frightfully hot. That was our first experience of what service in the Foreign Legion really meant--just the sordidest, uncomfortablest road to glory ever trodden by American adventurers. After we'd been at Toulouse about a month, they incorporated about two hundred of us recruits--thirty Americans and the rest mostly Britishers, all of whom had seen some sort of service before--in the Second Regiment Etranger which had just come over from Africa on its way to the front. They put us all together in one company, which was something to be thankful for, as I'd hate to leave a cur dog among some of the old-timers--you never saw such a lot of scoundrels. I'll bet a hundred dollars they have specimens of every sort of criminal in Europe, and, what's more, lots of them spoke German, though they claimed to have left seventeen hundred of the real Dutchies behind in Africa. Can you beat it? Going out to fight for France against the Kaiser among a lot of guys that looked and talked like a turn verein at St. Louis! Why, one day Thaw and I captured a Dutchie in a wood where we were hunting squirrel--as a necessary addition to our diet--and, believe me, when we brought him into camp he must have thought he was at home, for they all began jabbering German to him as friendly as possible, and every one was quite sad when he went off in a train with a lot of other prisoners bound for some fortress in the West of France. But that was only a detail, and now I'm telling you about our arrival in the trenches. The last hundred miles we did in five days, which is some of a hurry; but none of the Americans fell out, though we were all mighty tired at the end of the last day's march. Worse still, that country had all been fought over, and there were no inhabitants left to give us food and drinks as we had had before at every resting place, which helped us greatly. Along the roadside lots of trees had been smashed by shell fire, and there were hundreds of graves with rough crosses or little flags to mark them, and every now and then we passed a broken auto or a dead horse lying in the gutter.