The dark of a certain night fell on the waiting regiment.  Crickets sounded their note, a few silent birds winged furtively overhead.  Rolling kitchens brought up the one hot meal of the day, to be taken to the front by carrying parties.  Company commanders made a last reconnaissance of their positions.  For Private Cowan it was a moment of double waiting.  Waiting for battle was now secondary.  In a tiny slit trench on the forward edge of a railway embankment Private Brennon remarked upon the locomotion of the foreign frog.

“Will you look at ’em walk!” said Spike.  “Just like an animal!  Don’t they ever learn to hop like regular gorfs?”

Said Private Cowan:  “I suppose you saw that girl back there the other day?”

“Me and the regiment,” said Spike, and chewed gum discreetly.

“She’s a girl from back home.  Funny!  I’d never taken much notice of her before.”

“You took a-plenty back there.  You’ve raised your average awful high.  I’ll say it!”

“I hardly knew what I was doing.”

“Didn’t you?  We did!”

“Since then sometimes I forget what we’re here for.”

“Don’t worry, kid!  You’ll be told.”

“It’s funny how things happen that you never expected, but afterward you see it was natural as anything.”

* * * * *

At midnight the quiet sky split redly asunder.  German guns began to feel a way to Paris.  The earth rocked in a gentle rhythm under a rain of shells.  Shrapnel and gas lent vivacity to the assault.  Guns to their utmost reach swept the little valley like a Titan’s sickle.  Private Cowan nestled his cheek against the earthen side of his little slit trench and tried to remember what she had worn that last night in Newbern.  Something glistening, warm in colour, like ripe fruit; and a rusty braid bound her head.  She had watched, doubtfully, to see if people were not impatient at her talk.  A rattlepate, old Sharon called her.  She was something else now; some curious sort of woman, older, not afraid.  She wouldn’t care any more if people were impatient.

At four o’clock of that morning the bombardment of the front line gave way to a rolling barrage.  Close behind this, hugging it, as the men said, came gray waves of the enemy.  It was quieter after the barrage had passed:  only the tack-tack of machine guns and the clash of meeting bayonets.

“Going to have some rough stuff,” said Private Brennon.

For a long time then Private Cowan was so engrossed with the routine of his present loose trade that the name of Whipple seemed to have no room in his mind.  For four hours he had held a cold rifle and thought.  Now the gun was hot, its bayonet wet, and he thought not at all.  When it was over he was one of fifty-two men left of his company that had numbered two hundred and fifty-one.  But his own uniform would still be clean of wound chevrons.

Two divisions of German shock troops had broken against a regiment of American fighting men.