According to the system worked out by the high command for bringing new troops up to front line caliber, they should then have gone into their own camp within sound of the guns, but behind the actual "zone of operations." There the division should have been reassembled and gotten to functioning properly and smoothly as a division, and then have been moved up by easy stages. It should have occupied one billet area after another, each closer to the lines, until it should actually have been under artillery fire behind the fighting line. Then, with its nerves tautened and having learned, possibly through some losses, how best to take care of and protect itself, it would at last have been sent into the front line, but even then not without some misgivings and it would have been carefully watched to see that it reacted properly to the new conditions. In the progress of this customary routine, the work of assembling the division was begun a few miles northwest of Paris. Division headquarters was established at Gonesse, a little over ten miles from the heart of Paris. The infantry regiments and the engineers were scattered through a myriad of villages in the vicinity, billeted in houses, stables, buildings of any kind that could be turned to adequate shelters. Established thus, the organizations extended over a considerable stretch of territory. The 109th, for instance, was at Mitry and Mory, twin villages, but a short distance apart and usually referred to, for convenience, as one place, Mitry-Mory, eight miles by airline from division headquarters. The 53rd Artillery Brigade still was hard at its training work miles away and the doughboys, surmising that they would not be withheld from action to wait for the guns, gave thanks that it was the old Second, and not one of their regiments, that had been turned into artillery. Men of the old Third, particularly, recalled that it had been generally expected, when there was talk of transforming an infantry regiment to artillery, that theirs would be the regiment to be chosen, and that the naming of the Second had come as something of a surprise. CHAPTER II OFF FOR THE FRONT The infantry regiments had been assembled during June and a long and a wearisome wait impended while other units moved into the divisional concentration. No leaves were granted to go to Paris, although the crown of the Eiffel Tower could be descried above the haze from the city by day and at night the searchlights, thrusting inquisitive fingers of light through the far reaches of the sky in search of prowling Hun airmen, seemed to point the way to joys to which all had long been strangers. From the other direction came, when the wind was right, the dull rumbling, like distant thunder, which they had learned was the guns.