My first near view of the Boche trenches came one day when, waiting for our movie man at one of the huts, I went out "masked and helmeted" to a hill between our first and second lines. The peculiar "chills" and "thrills" of first sensations are indescribable. Cautiously and with some inward trembling I followed Private Van Voliet, of the 146th Infantry (Colonel Weybrecht's Regiment), across a shell-torn field where twisted wire entanglements told of former fierce encounters. We passed a Stokes mortar battery of the 147th Infantry concealed in low bushes. The boys, lying idly in their dog-tents, wove canes from willow branches wound with wire and capped with bullets. I was presented with a cane by Private Boothby and a swagger stick by Private Rhoades.
A five minute walk brought us to the "alert zone," where gas masks must be adjusted and ready for instant use. The guard at the crossroad allowed us to pass with the warning, "Keep under cover or you will draw the fire of the Boche snipers." So we crawled through a hole in the camouflaged screen which protected the road from German observers, and keeping behind clumps of bushes we peered through at the trenches just across the valley, in which Hun rifles lay cocked and primed for any American who would dare become a target. I confess I breathed easier when we got safely back to the "Y" hut.
For four nights in succession Boche planes had been trying to drop bombs on the rail-head where troop trains were being loaded near our Headquarters. On the fourth night, when returning from a front line hut with Secretary Johnson, who in America was a professor in Vassar College, we stopped on a high ridge overlooking the battle line. This was a favorite rendezvous on my return from night deliveries, as it gave a wonderful panoramic view of the whole front line for miles in either direction. The flashes of the guns, the dazzling brilliancy of the star shells, the long lines of varicolored signals as they went up from many camps and out-posts, and the flares dropped from scores of planes, passing and repassing in the darkness overhead, can never be forgotten. It was a nightly and wonderful Fourth of July celebration, enhanced by the weirdness and danger of actual warfare.