“That’s a rotten, damn shame, because we always got good eating back where I was—fresh meats—vegetables—butter—jam—milk in the coffee all the time,” interrupted O. D. “Listen to that,” exploded Jimmy. “There you are—everybody for himself in this army. Those ginks back there ain’t worryin’ much ’bout us guys that’s fightin’ this _guerre_. ‘Send ’em up a carload of “corn-willy” and a train of hardtack—that’ll be enough to keep ’em goin’ another month or two,’ that’s what they say down in the S. O. S., I guess. “Round about April tenth the Boches thought they’d give our lines a good feel, so they came over strong and sent gas barrages and high explosive mixed up with _beaucoup_ shrapnel and other stuff, along with their doughboys. This happened up in the Bois Brûlé—which means burned woods in Frog lingo. Now you might think that our boys, bein’ a bit green at the _guerre_ stuff, would have been sick to their stomachs, or somethin’ like that after gettin’ such rough treatment from the Boches, but it wasn’t that way at all. I believe that most of the doughboys was just itchin’ for a good battle, anyway. The way they waded into the Boches was big stuff. Banged ’em all over the lots. When the ammunition gave out the fellows started wallopin’ ’em with their fists and the butt-ends of rifles. You know Boches ain’t no good when it comes to fightin’ at close quarters. In fact, if you take ’em out of that close formation stuff that they pull when comin’ over—well, they ain’t worth a hurrah—so when the Yanks shoved their fists in the snouts it was _finee toot sweet_. “The battlin’ kept up for about three or four days. Every time the Boches tried to get a footin’ in Appremont we’d throw ’em out again. Soon they got tired, seein’ how impossible it was to stay there, and went back to their trenches and dug-outs. “The Boches stayed quiet until the night of April nineteenth, or rather first thing in the mornin’ of the twentieth. I was up in a position so close to the front-line trenches that you could throw hand grenades at a Yankee doughboy, if he was fool enough to stick his bean over the parapet. About ten men from each battery had been detailed to man a ninety-five-millimeter battery—some old-fashioned French guns, relics of the war in 1870. “Well, O. D., they can talk ’bout battles till they’re blue in the face, but I’ll always claim that the battle of Seicheprey which was pulled off that mornin’ was the first big battle of the _guerre_ that this army ever got mixed up in. We lost five hundred men that one night and the Boches lost a hell of a lot more—so you can judge by that.