It was this zeal for scrapping and the adventurous tendency that led minor expeditions against German positions to exceed their orders or to penetrate too far without support into the domain still held by the enemy. Thus it occurred that a machine-gun squad went over a hill, routed the Huns from an old stone ruins and then, after being unmercifully pounded with shrapnel for an hour, were attacked by ten times their number of infantry. How those Brownings, with their record of six hundred shots per minute, did talk back and how nearly every man in the bunch learned perforce to become a crack shot with his Springfield-Enfield, is a record that the survivors who tried unsuccessfully to compel the squad to surrender could well bear witness to. And when the Huns were finally beaten off and dared not to make another attempt to rout those few Yanks because of reinforcements, just half of that little group of gritty dare-devils came out of the old building alive and most of them were wounded. But they could still pull triggers or turn a gun crank. Who has not heard of the lost battalion, missing when the reports were turned in on October 3d, a contingent of the Seventy-seventh Division? It had been sent to rout out some gun nests that were proving troublesome in the Argonne Forest. When this task was done they just kept going and knew not when to stop until night shut down upon them. Then they sent runners back to ask for instructions and these fellows could not get through because of a flank movement of the Germans in some force between the battalion and the main division. So Major Whittlesey and his seven hundred men were trapped and for five days those brave boys, having lost almost half their number in killed and wounded, without food for three days and daring to get water only at night and that from a dirty swamp, stood off the repeated assaults of thousands of Huns upon the rocky hillside in the clefts and fissures of which the Americans found some shelter. They were fired upon from the hills on each side; enemy trench mortars smashed most of their machine guns and their ammunition ran out. Many of their number were captured also and one was induced to bring back a typewritten message demanding surrender, but to this Major Whittlesey returned a very decided refusal. Finally rescue came to the lost battalion; men in the forefront of the second drive reached them and chased out the Huns. Whereupon the dead that had been laid aside waiting burial that could not have taken place because of the danger, were now peacefully interred. CHAPTER IX INDIAN FASHION NO braver deed was ever done than that undertaken by seventeen men--all that remained of a platoon--and one other, a messenger from a squad in trouble. The platoon was left without a commissioned officer and was under the command of a sergeant; he and his men dared the very jaws of death to effect a rescue, performing that which seemed well-nigh miraculous.