"I plunged forward over the broken field," he told me, "and there I came across my artillery captain. I called an aid and we took him back--he of the bright new boots that had so recently been polished.... I got back into the game. All the time our boys shot ahead and the racket was incessant. Once, when I bumped my way across the German trenches, I paused long enough to stick my nose down into one of their dugouts. It was easy to see that the enemy had not anticipated the attack. For in that dugout--it was wonderfully neat and nice, with its concrete walls and floors and ceiling and its electric lights--was the breakfast still upon the table; the bread, the sausages, and the beer. I could have stayed there an hour and enjoyed it pretty well myself. But there were other things to be done. I got out into the shell-plowed fields once again. Across that rough sea of mud an engineer regiment was already building a road, which meant that we could get a Red Cross ambulance right to the very front. I walked back to Limey--or rather I stumbled over the rough fields--and there found one which had come through from Toul that morning, loaded to its very roof with bandages and chocolates and cigarettes. And I found that Triacourt had fallen. It still lacked some minutes of noon. The job for which our Division had been given two days had been accomplished in six hours--but such hours.
"We drove without delay into Triacourt--a fearfully slow business every foot of it, with every inch of the hastily constructed road crowded with traffic. But we got through and in the early afternoon were in the main street of the little town which the French had watched hungrily for four years and seemingly had been unable to capture. The women and children of the place came out into the sun-lighted street and rubbed their eyes. Was it all a dream; these men in tin helmets and uniforms of khaki and of olive drab? No, it could not be a dream. These were real men, fighting men. These were the Americans, the Americans of whom rumors had even run back of the enemy lines. They found their voices, these women, for the Germans had taken the men of Triacourt as prisoners.
"'_Bons Américains!_' they shrieked, almost in a single cry. And we saluted gravely."