The gun had earned a rest now and we went down and looked at it. The gunners had chalked a name on the carriage and we found that this seventy-five which fired the first shot against the Germans was called Heinie. We wanted to know the name of the man who fired the first shot. Our consciences were troubling us about that. This was our first day up with the guns in the American sector and the men had been in two days. There were drawbacks in writing the war correspondence from a distance as we had been compelled to do up to this time. We'd heard, of course, that the first gun had been fired and that made it imperative that the story should be "reconstructed," as the modern newspaperman says when he's writing about something which he didn't see. Of course, everybody back home would want to know who fired the first shot. Censorship prevented the use of the name, but we couldn't blame the censors for that, because when we wrote the stories we didn't know his name or anything about him. With just one dissenting vote the correspondents decided that the man who fired the first shot must have been a red-headed Irishman. And so it was cabled. Now we wanted to know whether he was. The lieutenant told us the name, but that didn't settle the question. It was a more or less non-committal name and the officer volunteered to find out for us. He led the party over to the mouth of another dugout and called down: "Sergeant ----, there's some newspapermen here and they want to know whether you're Irish." Immediately there was a scrambling noise down in the dugout and up came the gunner on the run. "I am not," he said. "Haven't you got an Irish father or mother or aren't any of your people Irish?" asked one of the correspondents hopefully. He was committed to the red-headed story and he was not prepared to give up yet. "Not one of 'em," said the sergeant, "I haven't got a drop of Irish blood in me. I come from South Bend, Indiana." The party left the gunner rather disconsolately. That is, all but the hopeful correspondent. "He's Irish, all right," he said. We turned on the optimist. "Didn't you hear him say he wasn't Irish?" we shouted. "Oh, that's all right," answered the optimist, "you didn't expect he was going to admit it. They never do." "Say," inquired another reporter, "did anybody notice what was the color of the sergeant's hair?" I had, but I said nothing. There had been disillusion enough for one day. It was black with a little gray around the temples. The lieutenant took us to his dugout and we tried to get some copy out of him. A man from an evening newspaper spoiled our chances right away. "I suppose," he said, "that you made a little speech to the men before they fired that first shot?" The little lieutenant was professional in an instant. He felt a sudden fear that his manner or his youth had led us to picture him as a romantic figure. "What would I make a speech for?" he inquired coldly.