This was the situation, then, in those late June days, when our Pennsylvania soldiers pined for action within sight of Paris. The American army had been blooded in the various drives, but the Twenty-eighth Division had not yet had a taste of the Hun action. Marines, the First and Second divisions of the Regular army, engineers and medical troops, had had a gallant part in the defense of Paris, and even in defense of the channel ports, in the Flanders thrust. Dormans, Torcy, Bouresches, Bois de Belleau, Cantigny, Jaulgonne, these and other localities had won place in the annals of American arms. Wherever they had come in contact with the enemy, without exception, the American troops had "made good," and won the high encomiums of their British and French comrades. Is it any wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanians chafed at the restraint which held them far away from where such great things were going forward? It was at the critical juncture in March, the darkest hour of the Allied cause, that President Wilson, waiving any question of national pride, directed General Pershing to offer such troops as he had available to be brigaded with the French and English to meet the German assaults. The reason for this was simple. The American army had not yet been welded into a cohesive whole. Its staff work was deficient. It was merely a conglomeration of divisions, each possibly capable of operating as a division, but the whole utterly unable to operate as a whole. By putting a brigade of Americans in a French or British division, however, the forces of our co-belligerents could be strengthened to the full extent of the available American troops. The American offer was promptly and gratefully accepted. Came the day, then, when our Pennsylvania men were ordered to move up to a sector below the Marne, there to be brigaded with a French army. The artillery brigade had not yet come into the divisional lines and few, even of the officers, had seen their comrades of the big guns since leaving Camp Hancock. Of all this, of course, the men in the ranks knew nothing. To them came only the command to "fall in," which had always presaged the same weary routine of drill and hike. This time, however, when they found lines of motor trucks stretching along the road seemingly for miles, they knew there was "something doing" and word swept through the ranks that they were off for the front at last. When the truck trains got under way with their singing, laughing, highly cheerful loads of doughboys and engineers, it was not directly northward, toward Montdidier, nor northeast, toward Soissons, where the latest heavy fighting had been going on, that they moved, as the men had hoped, but eastward.