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BEING THE NARRATIVE OF BATTERY A OF THE 101st FIELD ARTILLERY

Page 199

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response. "Those mopes in the S. O. S. never knew that there was a war." Ten o'clock and we march into a town, turn off the main road into a steep alley and finally halt in a huge, three-sided enclosure, a large farm, we decide, but it is too dark to see. The "soup-gun" trundles past us, leaving a trail of glowing sparks behind and halts in the shadow of the buildings. "Fall out, mess in twenty minutes," calls the "top", and amid a cheerful clattering of mess- kits, we rush off to our billets. The mess-line forms, moves and vanishes; lights appear in the billets; half an hour and the Battery is asleep, dreaming of Brest, St. Nazaire and Boston.

                Four days we stayed in this new home of ours, Erize-St. Dizier by name, four days of rest and rumor mongering. There were three stores and a cafe where the wants of the inner man might be satisfied with such epicurean delights as grapes, cheese, white wine, and an odd kind of cake which looked like chewing-tobacco and tasted faintly of shoe-dubbin. And one day the guns and caissons were mysteriously spirited away to a nearby railhead; on top of this, we turned in all our horses, save twelve. All the optimists of the Battery took heart again, while the pessimists sought cover in dark corners. But the day before we left, the pessimists again came into their own; for the Chicago Tribune contained a list of the divisions making up the Army of Occupation, and with sinking hearts we read " . . . will be composed of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 26th, 28th . . . "

                A march of reasonable length on a pleasant morning is no disagreeable task; in fairly good spirits we

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