O. D. heard, in a sort of indifferent manner, the growl of big guns that seemed very near. He was startled once or twice by the crash of bombs and the anti-air-craft guns. But he was too tired to lend ears and thoughts to such things on his first night at the front, for the regiment was only a few kilometers from the first lines. O. D. fell asleep immediately and didn’t wake until three hours later when a downpour of rain splashed him from head to foot. The wind that accompanied the rain swept the tent away time and time again. Everything that Jimmy and O. D. owned got soaked. The earth beneath them turned into crawling slime. Finally, seeing the impossibility of keeping the tent up, Jimmy told his friend to pull his shelter-half over him, head and all. Jimmy did likewise with his shelter-half and blankets. The two boys, wrapped in canvas and blankets, lay in the deluge like two muffled mummies, trying to sleep. Instead of moving into position at once the regiment made at least fifty final preparations to do so, only to be ordered to remain in the valley for further orders. Four days passed. Rain fell incessantly. The bottom of the valley became as slippery as glass. Men bogged up to their knees in mud. There were no boots. The mess was a succession of “corned willy,” hardtack, and sugarless coffee meals. At last, when every man and officer had reached the point of absolute disgust, the guns were dragged out of their mud-holes and hauled by horse and man power to the positions from which they were scheduled to launch their part of the drive. Passing through the shell-torn village of Rupt-en-Woevre, the Second Battalion, of which Jimmy’s battery was a part, swerved off the main road and followed a woods trail that seemed to lead straight into the noises and strange, mysterious lights of the front. A gun barked out, not forty feet from the road. O. D. looked to Jimmy. “Are we at the front now Jimmy?” he asked in a whisper. “Don’t know myself. Guess there’s a battery in the woods near here. We’ll be there soon now.” The firing was not very heavy that night. Occasionally a big gun spoke or the staccato voices of machine-guns stabbed the night air intermittently. Flares and rockets went up frequently, causing the darkness of the woods that bordered the road to accentuate. O. D. owned some strange, indescribable feelings at times, but he could not identify any of them as the sensations which he had expected to experience upon his first intimacy with the things of the front. The column halted at a crossroad. Orders to dismount came quickly and were repeated down the line of guns in ordinary tones. Before O. D. had a chance to ask what was going on platoon commanders had issued instructions for the piece teams to haul the guns into certain positions nearby. “Well, we’re here. Now for the business,” declared Jimmy. “You mean we are at the front,” gasped O. D., incredulously. “I thought—”