"I was looking at one of those stakes," a doughboy told me, "and I kept alooking and alooking and all of a sudden it grew a pair of shoulders and a helmet and I let go at it." There were others who suffered from the same optical illusion that night, but let it be said to their credit that when a working party examined the wire several days later they found some stakes which had been riddled through and through with bullets. CHAPTER XX TRENCH LIFE They dragged the gun up by hand to fire the first shot in the war for the American army. The lieutenant in charge of the battery told us about it. He was standing on top of the gun emplacement and the historic seventy-five and a few others were being used every little while to fire other shots at the German lines. He had to pause, therefore, now and then in telling us history to make a little more. "I put it up to my men," said the lieutenant, "that we would have to wait a little for the horses and if we wanted to be sure of firing the first shot it would be a good stunt to drag the gun into place ourselves. We had a little talk and everybody was anxious for our battery to get in the first shot, so we decided to go through with it and not wait for the horses. We dragged the gun up at night and I can tell you that the last mile and a half took some pulling. Excuse me a second----" He leaned down to the pit and began to shout figures. He made them quick and snappy like a football signal and he looked exactly like a quarterback with the tin hat on his head which might have been a leather head guard. There was a sort of eagerness about him, too, as if the ball was on the five-yard line with one minute more to play. It was all in his manner. Everything he said was professional enough. After the string of figures he shouted "watch your bubble" and then he went on with the story. "We fired the first shot at exactly six twenty-seven in the morning," he said. "It was a shrapnel shell." He turned to the gunners again. "Ready to fire," he shouted down to the men in the pit. "You needn't put your fingers in your ears just yet," he told us. "It was pretty foggy when we got up to the front and we thought first we'd just have to blaze away in the general direction of the Germans without any particular observation. But all of a sudden the fog lifted and right from here we could see a bunch of Germans out fixing their wire. I gave 'em shrapnel and they scattered back to their dugouts like prairie dogs. It was great!" The lieutenant smiled at the recollection of the adventure. It meant as much to him as a sixty-yard run in the Princeton game or a touchdown against Yale. He was fortunate enough to be still getting a tingle out of the war that had nothing to do with the cold wind that was coming over No Man's Land. A moment later he grinned again and he suddenly called, "Fire," and the roar of the gun under our feet came quicker than we could get our fingers in our ears.