“Next night we took the four pieces and everythin’ needed to fight the _guerre_ with and hit for the front. You can imagine us goin’ to the front for the first time. Lots of the boys was expectin’ a battle before we got up there and other guys kept lookin’ for dead men or wounded. It was the same as walkin’ to church on Sunday. We got to the front without knowin’ it. “‘Here we are,’ says the skipper, and he halted the column on the side of a road. The top-sergeant thought he was tryin’ to fool us and asked him what the halt was for. ‘Do you want to go out in No Man’s Land?’ asked the Cap. To tell the truth, it was hard for any of us to believe that we were at the front. You’ll find that the front ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, in a way. “We put the guns in four positions that had already been built by the French and camouflaged ’em with a lot of nettin’. When I saw ’em in daylight I thought I was lookin’ at a scene in a theater. The gun positions was right on the road, mind you—any one passin’ could see ’em, and I thought that we would hide the things ’way down in some kind of a mysterious valley, or somethin’ like that. “Our homes were ’way down under the earth, dug-outs they call ’em. No chance much to keep warm in dug-outs, and two men couldn’t pass each other in ’em, they was so narrow. We _cushayed_ on wooden planks. Every thing, kitchens, officers’ quarters, and all, were down in dug-outs. When you did get upon the ground you had to be mighty careful as there was _beaucoup_ shell-holes. The fields looked as if they had the smallpox—and it was hard to keep from fallin’ into them shell-holes. “After foolin’ around with the old army stuff of changin’ orders a hundred times a day we put over our first shots by registerin’ on a brewery that the Germans was supposed to live in. Before I forget it let me tell you one of the funniest things about fronts. Our guns pointed one way and the front was in another, or almost that bad, anyway. I kept thinkin’ the lines was out beyond the muzzles of our pieces, but the Cap said that it was off to the right more and that if we walked that way we’d most likely run into the Germans’ first-line trenches. Sure was a puzzle to me for a long time.