The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-11-03
among them asked what the word were, for the words were:

" 2 IlEill our country x bdANANSs
 On the land and on the sea-
 When the endless lines paused mo-
 ment in a town the men awoke the sleepy French inhabitants with selected
 bits from their repertoire, and the French
 responded with simple 'Vive fAmer-
 que, Viye les Americains"
 And so these happy warriors went to-
 wards the battle.
 Military police dashed along the roads on motorcycles. Guards at the cross-
 roads directed traffic. The thoughtless
 driver of an automobile who kept his
 lights burning got the call down of his
 life, and his number was taken also, so
 that he will lose q few days pay for
 this breach of the rules. They who rode
 without lights rlsktd accidents every min-
 ute. for the darkness was profound, the
 new moon had not yet appeared, and the
 stars were struggling weakly through
 mountain-thick clouds. Many truck
 rolled by with men sitting on the mud
 guards and waving white handkerchiefs
 to the drivers who could not see five feet
 ahead.
 In the greyness before dawn all these
 thousands of men, these thousands of
 trucks and thousands of guns were hid-
 den. How it was done must not be told, but done it was and done well. Every
 wrinkle on the face of nature did it's
 duty that week, every tree and forest, and we may also be thankful that the
 clouds hung low with rain and the sun did not expose our preparations to the enemy Our planes kept most of the German planes from crossing the lines, a few which did were shot down, and the others apparently were unsuccess- full in their missions, as the first quoted document would show.
 Every night for many nights the ad- vance in the rear continued, the regi- ment or division which slept by day in certain woods always arriving at another hidden shelter many miles to the north for the next day, until finally the guns found their emplacements and the men their final billets. And then
 The guns began 1t. Shortly after mid night the hinges of the salient burst Into intermittent flames. which increased In fury and volume. From the hills near Foul the troops and the awakened civil ians beheld the grandeur of our artil- lery preparation. The infantry had been lined up, stretches of white tape show ing them where the jumping off place was, and the officers keenly awaiting the jumping off hour, which was fore- shadowed by a quickenng of the bar rage, producing such crashing noise as is only equalled by Strauss in his Al pine Symphony where, presumapry, one of the Alps topples over.
 The tanks were on the edge of a tape line also.
 The aviators came out before the light and tuned up under the glow of old fashioned lamps
 All objectives were reached hours ahead of time. Messages soon came in begging for permission to bite off the second days objective. But it must not be imag ined that there was no resistance, for the Germans left their machine gunners behind, some in shell holes and others in concrete pill boxes, which the artillery had not demolished, and while many gunners surrendered, others, desperate be- cause they dared not retreat and be- cause they feared the Americans would kill them as their officers had told them Americans do with prisoners, fought it out to the last. But in one place at least the Yankees went forward after break ing the first resistance, in columns of four and with their rifles on their shoul- ders, and singing mockingly:
 "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier brought him up to be my pride and joy" They were very happy. They had ex- pected a heavy fight, days of it, like that battle and advance on the Chateau Thierry front when they went far but slowly, running into German shell fire every day, confronted by a dogged foe which demanded a payment of life for every yard it surrendered and exacting l it with gas and airplane bombs and machine gun fire as well.
 GIANT UNSEATED Nothing made the army happier l than the capture of Montsec. It may l now be stated that it was in this sec- 1 tor. northwest of Toul,} mysteriously referred to as Somewhere in Lor- raine," for the last nine months, that | our first troops went into line as a I division. It was here that the first en- counters took place. It was here that | Apremont and Seicheprey and Xivray | and other little battles were fought in the shadow of Montsec But Montsec always stared our men in the face, like a sullen giant shaking it's fist at us and daring us to unseat him. Division after division came into sector for it's training. It had been
 known as a quiet sector" but each division livened it up bit more until l the Germans were forced to keep bet | ter troops there. Every American di- I vision was shelled from Montsec, and | it was near this German stronghold 1 that Captain Barker of Providence
 and Lieut.. Hugh Scott of Wheeling, w. | Va, had the gun which they called "Batsy Sniper" to counter the fire l from the dominating hill.
 Surely & hundred thousand Ameri- cans learned to hate Montsec. They hated it not much because it hid the guns which shelled them by day and by night, but because it was the
 strongest point in the sector, because it was in enemy hands, and because 1t seemed to them impregnable, like the rock of Gibraltar That is why a hum dred thousand voices on the morning of Friday, the lucky 18th of September
 were saying either %we have Montsec"
 or asking if that was true. Today there
 are little parties of men on leave who
 go ur that hill. peering into the dug outs where there are still few Ger
 man dead, inspecting the gun emplacc- ments, marvelling over the concrete
 Notifications and the trenches and fields of wire which could have caused
 1o,000 casualties had the attack been frontal instead of on the distant Hanks.
 Nor is the rest of the salient thinly
 fortified. We have found pill boxes
 lines is many times that of the allies
 on the opposing side of No Mans Land. The Germans seem to have had
 unlimited miles of wire. They are also
 great diggers. They have dug for com
 fort and for security. Their dugouts
 are deep, wide, roomy and liveable,
 Electric lighting is feature in some
 of them. They had many kinds~of wire the usual barbs, multiple bar5s,
 'gooseberry" or just tangled masses
 of it. and wire which came on circular
 supports, as well as q heavy wire which probably was meant to hold up strong points built of stone. brick,