“We are going to clean them out there in F 6 tonight, and straighten our line.  The thing that bothers us is that little village stuck up on the hill, where the enemy machine guns have a strong position.  I want to get them out of there before the Battalion goes over.  We can’t spare too many men, and I don’t like to send out more officers than I can help; it won’t do to reduce the Battalion for the major operation.  Do you think you two boys could manage it with a hundred men?  The point is, you will have to be out and back before our artillery begins at three o’clock.”

Under the hill where the village stood, ran a deep ravine, and from this ravine a twisting water course wound up the hillside.  By climbing this gully, the raiders should be able to fall on the machine gunners from the rear and surprise them.  But first they must get across the open stretch, nearly one and a half kilometers wide, between the American line and the ravine, without attracting attention.  It was raining now, and they could safely count on a dark night.

The night came on black enough.  The Company crossed the open stretch without provoking fire, and slipped into the ravine to wait for the hour of attack, A young doctor, a Pennsylvanian, lately attached to the staff, had volunteered to come with them, and he arranged a dressing station at the bottom of the ravine, where the stretchers were left.  They were to pick up their wounded on the way back.  Anything left in that area would be exposed to the artillery fire later on.

At ten o’clock the men began to ascend the water-course, creeping through pools and little waterfalls, making a continuous spludgy sound, like pigs rubbing against the sty.  Claude, with the head of the column, was just pulling out of the gully on the hillside above the village, when a flare went up, and a volley of fire broke from the brush on the up-hill side of the water-course; machine guns, opening on the exposed line crawling below.  The Hun had been warned that the Americans were crossing the plain and had anticipated their way of approach.  The men in the gully were trapped; they could not retaliate with effect, and the bullets from the Maxims bounded on the rocks about them like hail.  Gerhardt ran along the edge of the line, urging the men not to fall back and double on themselves, but to break out of the gully on the downhill side and scatter.

Claude, with his group, started back.  “Go into the brush and get ’em!  Our fellows have got no chance down there.  Grenades while they last, then bayonets.  Pull your plugs and don’t hold on too long.”

They were already on the run, charging the brush.  The Hun gunners knew the hill like a book, and when the bombs began bursting among them, they took to trails and burrows.  “Don’t follow them off into the rocks,” Claude kept calling.  “Straight ahead!  Clear everything to the ravine.”

As the German gunners made for cover, the firing into the gully stopped, and the arrested column poured up the steep defile after Gerhardt.