For mile on mile along that bristling line, the big guns gave tongue, not in gusts or intermittently, as had been the case for days, but continuously. Only later did the men in the trenches learn that the attack covered a front of about sixty-five miles, the most pretentious the Huns had launched. Karl Rosner, the Kaiser's favorite war correspondent, wrote to the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger: "The Emperor listened to the terrible orchestra of our surprise fire attack and looked on the unparalleled picture of the projectiles raging toward the enemy's positions." Pennsylvania's doughboys and engineers shared with the then Prussian War Lord the privilege of listening to the "surprise fire attack," but to them it was like no orchestra mortal ear had ever heard. Most of those who wrote home afterward used a much shorter word of only four letters to describe the event. There was, indeed, a strange unanimity about the expression: "It seemed as if all ---- had broken loose!" Crouching in their trenches, powerless to do anything for themselves or each other, they endured as best they could that tremendous ordeal. The very air seemed shattered to bits. No longer was it "the rumbling thunder of the guns," to which they had been giving ear for weeks. Crashing, ear-splitting explosions came so fast they were blended into one vast dissonance that set the nerves to jangling and in more than one instance upset completely the mental poise of our soldiers, so that they had to be restrained forcibly by their comrades from rushing out into the open in their temporary madness. Paris, fifty miles away "as the crow flies," was awakened from its slumber after its holiday celebration by the sound of that Titanic cannonade and saw the flashes, and pictures were jarred from the walls by the trembling of the earth. The regiments back in the support line were little, if any, better off than the four companies of Pennsylvanians up in the front line, for the Hun shells raked the back areas as well as tearing through the front lines. Men clenched their hands to steady shaking nerves against the sheer physical pressure of that awful noise, but officers, both French and their own, making their way along the lines in imminent peril to encourage the men, found them grimly and amazingly determined and courageous. As usual with the Boche, he had a schedule for everything, but it went wrong at the very start this time. The schedule, as revealed later in captured papers, called for the swinging of prepared pontoon bridges across the Marne at 1.30 o'clock, after one solid hour of artillery preparation, and the advance guards were to be in Montmirail, thirteen miles to the south, at 8.30 o'clock that morning.