At the end of three months, he was shipped to France.  There his seemingly aimless studies at the training camp were put to active use.

* * * * * * * * * *

At the foot of the long Flanders hill-slope the “Here-We-Come” Regiment, of mixed American and French infantry, held a caterpillar-shaped line of trenches.

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall.  On the left were two French regiments.  In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the contour of the German first-line trenches.

The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British troops on either side of them—­the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend what was known as a “quiet’ sector.  Behind the hill, and on loftier heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted.  Somewhere in the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.

It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings of the Here-We-Comes.  For, with no warning at all, those entire surroundings were about to be changed.

Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad Huns.  And though none of the defenders knew it, this “quiet” sector had been chosen for such a minor blow.

The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended front trenches.  For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting there aimlessly.  They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth.  And those “eyes” had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had discerned and had duly reported it.

The attack might come in a day.  It might not come in a week.  But it was coming—­unless the behind-the-lines preparations were a gigantic feint.

A quiet dawn, in the quiet trenches of the quiet sector.  Desultory artillery and somewhat less desultory sniping had prevailed throughout the night, and at daybreak; but nothing out of the ordinary.

Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet.  A shell had burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth.  Otherwise, things were drowsily dull.

In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,—­formerly of Uncle Sam’s regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry.  The Frenchman was slow in learning poker’s mysteries.