The 32d Division, composed of Michigan and Wisconsin National Guards, had slipped into the front lines and, with regiments of the Rainbow Division, pressed the pursuit. The Pennsylvania regiments, with the 103d Engineers, and the 111th and the 112th Infantry leading, followed by the 109th and then the 110th, went forward in their rear, mopping up the few Huns they left in their wake who still showed fight.
It had begun to rain again--a heavy, dispiriting downpour, such as Northern France is subjected to frequently. The fields became morasses. The roads, cut up by heavy traffic, were turned to quagmires. The distorted remains of what had been wonderful old trees, stripped of their foliage and blackened and torn by the breaths of monster guns, dripped dismally. In all that ruined, tortured land of horror on horror, there was not one bright spot, and there was only one thing to keep up the spirits of the soldiers--the Hun was definitely on the run.
Drenched to the skin, wading in mud at times almost to their knees, amid the ruck and confusion of an army's wake, the Pennsylvanians trudged resolutely forward, inured to hardship, no longer sensible to ordinary discomforts, possessed of only one thought--to come to battle once more with the hateful foe and inflict further punishment in revenge for the gallant lads who had gone from the ranks.
All the time they were subjected to long-distance shelling by the big guns, as the Hun strafed the country to the south in hope of hampering transport facilities and breaking up marching columns. All the time Boche fliers passed overhead, sometimes swooping low enough to slash at the columns with machine guns and at frequent intervals releasing bombs. There were casualties daily, although not, of course, on the same scale as in actual battle.
Through Coulonges, Cohan, Dravegny, Longeville, Mont-sur-Courville and St. Gilles they plunged on relentlessly.
Close by the hamlet of Chamery, near Cohan, the Pennsylvania men passed the grave of Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, who had been brought down there by an enemy airman a few weeks before and was buried by the Germans. French troops, leading the Allied pursuit, had come on the grave first and established a military guard of honor over it and supplanted the rude cross and inscription erected by the Germans with a neater and more ornate marking.