With all this equipment to a man, and forty-eight men to each small box car, it doesn’t demand much imagination to picture our journey.  We could not sit down.  If we attempted it we sat on some one, and then there was a howl.  We tried all manner of positions, all sorts of schemes.  In the daytime we sought the roof of the cars, or leaned far out the open doors.  If the country had not been so lovely, and if all our experiences had not been new and out of the ordinary, there would have been more grousing.

The second day on the train—­we were three days and three nights—­while passing through a city near Rouen, we had a glimpse of our first wounded French soldiers.  It seemed as though war came home to a lot of us then for the first time.  I was fairly sick at heart when I saw one Frenchman with both arms bound up, and with blood pouring over his face.  I understood that these wounded men were coming back from the battle of Soissons.  From the glimpses we caught of them in their train they seemed a funny lot of fighting men, these poilous, with their red breeches, their long blue coat pinned back from the front, the little blue peaked cap, and their long black whiskers.  I was horrified at the whole sight.  For the first time I asked myself, “What in the world are you out here for?”

There must have been many of the boys who indulged in the same vein of thought, to judge by the seriousness of the faces as we proceeded and left the French hospital train behind.

On the evening of the third day, as we pulled slowly into the station at Strazeele, we could hear in the distance the steady rumbling of the big guns at the front.

CHAPTER IV

ARE WE DOWNHEARTED?  NO!

“Hush, boys,... we’re in enemy country!” our second in command whispered ominously.  We shivered.  The sound of the guns seemed to grow louder.  Captain Johnson repeated his warning: 

“Not a word, men,” he muttered, and we stumbled out of the station in silence that could be cut with a knife.  Sure enough the enemy was near.  He couldn’t have been less than twenty-two miles away!  We could hear him.  There was no disposition on our part to talk aloud.  Captain Johnson said:  “Whisper,” and whisper we did.

We trekked over mud-holes and ditches, across fields and down through valleys.  We had many impressions—­and the main impression was mud.  The main impression of all active service is—­mud.  It was silent mud, too, but we knew it was there.  Once in a while during that dark treading through an unfamiliar country one of the boys would stumble and fall face down.  Then the mud spoke ... and it did not whisper.  There were grunts and murmurings, there were gurgling expletives and splutterings which sent the army, and all fools who joined it, to places of unmentionable climatic conditions.  We were in it up to our necks, more or less literally.