I stood under the flag and waved frantically, first to the American train crew and then, oh joy! to my Company A! There they all were, crowded in the open doors of their box cars, “Side-door Pullmans” as they call them, Magulligan the prize fighter, comically conspicuous with his head done up in a sort of night-cap made from a large white handkerchief. The train pulled by, slowed down, came to a standstill up the track. We hustled the chocolate cans out by the roadside. Company A, the first off the train, came marching down the road; each man held out his mess-cup and got a dipperful of cocoa. “Where are we?” they demanded. “Four miles south of Verdun. How do you like the scenery?” “All right except the grave-yard. That’s too handy.” “Say,” spoke up one of the boys, “I heard the mud out here in the trenches was pretty deep.” “Is that so?” “Yes they said a feller went in over his ankles there the other day.” “I wouldn’t call that very deep!” I bit. “Mm, but he went in head-first!” I asked one of the corporals how things were going. “We were feelin’ kind o’ lost,” he confessed. “Then we looked out and saw the old flag and you. After that it seemed just like home somehow.” They marched off down the road looking very business-like and military. Next came the other companies belonging to the first battalion, and the regimental machine-gun company. These were not permitted to stop by the station-house on account of the danger of being observed by enemy aircraft, but were halted at a distance down the road. We picked up the chocolate cans and chased after them. When every man in the First Battalion had had a drink, we hurried back to the stone-house to get ready for the next trainload. As I stirred the chocolate on one of the little stoves set up outside, several of the train crew came to talk to me. I was the first “real honest-to-God American girl” they had seen in months they told me; and they were just as excited over me as I had been over their engine. If the history of America in the Great War should ever be written down in detail, surely one chapter should be given over to a Little Iliad of the “Six Bit Railway” that runs from Sommeil to Dugny-Est, five kilometers south of Verdun; how, as I had it from the lips of one of those engineers, the English took it over from the French and tried to run it and failed, how the Canadians took it after them and failed too, how then the —— Engineers fell heir to it. How they lived with the French, eating French rations which were gall and wormwood to them. How they struggled with an alien tongue and finally reduced it to a weird unholy gibberish which was yet somehow intelligible both to the French and to themselves. How they came through shell-fire and gas and bombing raids, seemingly bearing charmed lives. And how they worked forty-eight hours at a stretch whenever the big drives and shifts were on.