“Scattered around, of course, and on duty.” The man spoke with an attempt to appear civil, but it was clearly camouflage; his habitual contemptuous expression and lowering glance indicated all too plainly that he possessed some animosity toward the lieutenant. Herbert, noting this, wondered. He had never seen the fellow before; evidently the dislike was sudden, mutual. Whitcomb ran on up the hill and rejoined his men, never once looking back, and the incident was at once almost forgotten. CHAPTER IV “INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH” ON the platoons went, gaining the top of the low hill that crowned the valley slope and then--suddenly the terrors of real war descended with one swift stroke and bit and tore and gnashed with even more than their usual fury. Captain Lowden had been walking with a French guide up the slope and not far from where Herbert preceded his men. A moment before the former had gained the top and come within sight of the enemy’s front-line defenses, hardly a second before the outburst of machine-gun fire from the entrenched foe, the captain had turned to his second lieutenant. “He says,” meaning the guide, “that right over the hill is the edge of the famous Argonne Forest. It is a wild place; the Huns have chosen to make a stand in it and they have boasted that nothing will be able to dislodge them. But we shall see, my boy; we shall see!” How false was this boast of the Germans has been well and repeatedly set forth in the history of the Great War. Among America’s most glorious deeds on the fields of battle; among the most heroic annals of all warfare the bitter fight for the possession of the Argonne Forest may be ranked with the highest. Perhaps nowhere on earth has the grit and bravery of men at war been so sorely put to the test as in this struggle of exposed attacking troops against thoroughly trained and efficient soldiers with the skill of expert snipers behind well masked machine guns. The French, long practiced in the art of war, asserted that this wide tract which had been held by the Germans since 1914 had been made defensively impregnable. According to all previously held standards it was a place to avoid, but the Yanks took a different view of it; the Huns must be dislodged and the former were the lads who could, in their expressive slang, “make a stab at it,” and this in the early morning of the 26th of September, 1918, they were beginning to do.