French staff officers accompanied the four companies to the line and disposed them in the pockets left for them, in such a way that there were alternately along that part of the front a French regiment and then an American company. The disposition of the troops was completed well before midnight. The companies left behind had watched their fellows depart on this night adventure with longing, envious eyes, and little groups sat up late discussing the luck that fell to some soldiers and was withheld from others.
The men had had no sleep at all the night before and little during the day, but no one in those four companies, facing the Germans at last after so many weary months of preparation, thought of sleep, even had the artillery fire sweeping in waves along the front or the exigencies of their position permitted it.
Eagerly the men tried to pierce the black cloak of night for a first glimpse of the Hun lines. Now and then, as a star shell hung its flare in the sky, they caught glimpses of the river, and sometimes the flash of a gun from the farther shore gave assurance that the Boche, too, was awake and watching.
About 11.30 o'clock, the night was shattered by a ripping roar from miles of French batteries in the rear, and the men lay in their trenches while the shells screamed overhead. It was by far the closest the Pennsylvania men had been to intensive artillery fire, and they thought it terrible, having yet to learn what artillery really could be.
Days afterward, they learned that prisoners had disclosed the intention of the Germans to attack that night and that the French fire was designed to break up enemy formations and harass and disconcert their artillery concentration.
The Germans, with typical Teutonic adherence to system, paid little attention to the French fire until the hour fixed for their bombardment. Midnight came and went, with the French cannon still bellowing. Wearied men on watch were relieved by comrades and dropped down to rest.
At 12.30 o'clock, the German line belched forth the preliminary salvo of what the French afterward described as the most terrific bombardment of the war up to that time. The last German offensive had opened.
The gates to glory and to death swung wide for many a Pennsylvania lad that night.