Why, one day Thaw and I captured a Dutchie in a wood where we were hunting squirrel--as a necessary addition to our diet--and, believe me, when we brought him into camp he must have thought he was at home, for they all began jabbering German to him as friendly as possible, and every one was quite sad when he went off in a train with a lot of other prisoners bound for some fortress in the West of France.
But that was only a detail, and now I'm telling you about our arrival in the trenches. The last hundred miles we did in five days, which is some of a hurry; but none of the Americans fell out, though we were all mighty tired at the end of the last day's march. Worse still, that country had all been fought over, and there were no inhabitants left to give us food and drinks as we had had before at every resting place, which helped us greatly. Along the roadside lots of trees had been smashed by shell fire, and there were hundreds of graves with rough crosses or little flags to mark them, and every now and then we passed a broken auto or a dead horse lying in the gutter.
At the end of the fifth day we got our first sample of war--quite suddenly, without any warning, as we didn't know we were near the firing line. We had just entered a devastated village when there came a shrill whistling noise like when white hot iron is plunged into cold water, then a terrific bang as a shell burst about thirty yards in front of our columns, making a hole in the road about five feet deep and ten in diameter, and sending a hail of shrapnel in all directions. One big splinter hit a man in the second rank and took his head off--I think he was a Norwegian; anyway, that was our first casualty. No one else was injured.
Our boys took their baptism of fire pretty coolly, though most of us jumped at the bang and ducked involuntarily to dodge the shrapnel, which, by the way, isn't very dangerous at more than thirty yards, though it does a lot of harm at shorter range. Personally, I wasn't as scared as I expected, and most of the others said the same. At first, one is too interested to be frightened, and by the time the novelty has worn off one has gotten fairly used to it all--at least that seemed to be our general opinion.