“I’m off the souvenir stuff. I’ll be good enough souvenir if I get myself back,” said Jimmy as he discarded some German belts that he had picked up. “Guess we’ll get back and _monjay_. ’Ain’t had any breakfast yet, you know,” suggested Neil. In the mess-line the talk was running fast. Samson and Johnson, who had been up in the O. P.’s with the doughboys and had just returned to the outfit, told about the capture of St. Mihiel and the speed with which the Boches were evacuating the salient. “We’re in a hell of a fix, though,” said Samson. “Can’t move another inch forward. There’s a plain twenty kilometers deep in front of us. The Boches have got high ground behind it and we couldn’t go across it without losing the whole division. Guess we’ll have to stand pat awhile. Ain’t that hell?” His words panned out true. Before the guns of the Yankee division lay a great deep plain. To send men out into that plain meant to expose them to certain death with no possibility of a military advantage being obtained by so doing. Consequently, with the exception of a sacrifice attack planned against the enemy to divert his attention from the major operations being launched in the Argonne forest, the division remained in its victorious tracks for nearly six weeks. The sacrifice attack succeeded, but it cost the division almost the entire One Hundred and Second Infantry Regiment. During this time O. D. drank to the dregs of the front. He became able to distinguish the difference between the whine of an ordinary shell and the whistle of a gas shell. Whizz-bangs got to be a part of his vocabulary, and he knew enough to duck _toot sweet_ when he heard one coming. The mud stuck to him as Neil told him it would. He became friendly with cooties. “Damn it all, Jimmy,” said O. D. five weeks after the St. Mihiel salient had been nipped off by the pinchers of the First American Army, “if they’d only lay off that ‘canned willy’ once in a while this _guerre_ wouldn’t be half bad. Say, I lost my gas-mask two days ago, wonder if Joyce has got any in yet. The Boches are puttin’ gas over right along now.” “Hope the hell we get up to a regular front again soon,” replied Jimmy, offering O. D. a cigarette. “Since Austria blew up we ought to get behind the Boches and push ’em right in the Rhine.” CHAPTER XVI—BEYOND VERDUN “Is this place hot enough to suit you, Jimmy?” asked O. D. as he and Jimmy huddled in a water-filled shell-hole while a drove of barrack bags went skimming over their heads. “I’ll say, _oui_,” replied Jimmy. “Wish for a thing and you’ll sure get it. Remember my wishing that they’d send us to a real front. There ain’t no camouflage to this joint. Listen to that damn machine-gun music, will you?” From the depths of the Haumont Bois issued the frenzied snapping and barking of machine-guns that contrasted strangely with the unending thunder-roll of the heavy guns.