“Guess you know by now that we don’t travel first-class in this country. You’ve seen them little cars that looks like a shoe-box set on wheels, marked, ‘40 _hommes_’—that’s forty like you and me—and ‘8 _chevaux_’—means eight horses or as many mules. Well, that’s the kind of parlor-cars that I’ve been tourin’ France in. I always get in a horse-car if I can, as it’s warmer, and, supposin’ the _chevaux_ don’t step all over you, there’s a chance to lay down and cork off a bit. “They loaded us bag and baggage on a train of them kind of cars and a Frog blew some kind of a horn. We was off for the front. God a’mighty, you should have heard them Yanks cheerin’ as we headed for the front. Passed through a lot of big towns and _beaucoup_ villages where all of the Frogs came out to look at us as if we was a travelin’ circus. Come pretty near starvin’ before we got where we was goin’. “Stayed on the train all one night and one whole day. About seven o’clock of the second night I squirmed into about three feet of floor space and _cushayed_. Must have slept pretty good, ’cause next thing I knew somebody was shakin’ me and yellin’, ‘Hey, come out of it, Jimmy—get up, we’re at the front.’ Gee! I snaps into it and rushes out of the door expectin’ to see the front right outside. It was pretty dark, but I looked hard and couldn’t see no Germans or trenches. It was quiet as death. I says to Frank Reynolds, who was top-sergeant of E Battery—you see, I had transferred from C to E—‘Where the hell is it?’ ‘What?’ he asks. ‘The front, you nut,’ I told him. ‘Oh, it’s right around here,’ and he waved his arms around pointin’ in every direction. “I couldn’t see nothin’ but a railroad station and some flat cars. ‘Funniest front I’ve ever been on,’ said one of them Mexican-border veterans. ‘This ain’t no front,’ says I. “’Bout that time it sounded as if there was goin’ to be a thunder-shower. Everybody looked at one another kinda funny-like. We heard the thunder _encore_. I looked to the north and there was a lot of flashes showin’ against the sky. The thunder began to growl like a bunch of bears over a big bone. Some rockets shot up and spilled a lot of sparks. A smart guy had to remark that they must be havin’ a Fourth of July up there, but I was too busy tryin’ to _compree_ that them things meant war. I kept sayin’ to myself, ‘That’s a war goin’ on out there; that’s the thing we came up here to get in.’ “They talk a lot about thrills in love-stories and books, but those story-page people don’t know a thrill from a bowl of mush compared to the things that was runnin’ up and down my backbone that first night. Course you know the guns and flashes was quite a ways, ’bout twenty kilos from where we was, and there wasn’t much danger of us gettin’ in any trouble ourselves. But seein’ and hearin’ just got me to thinkin’ about the old _guerre_ and knowin’ that we was in it at last—well, it kind of made me feel a little different, that’s all.