When McGuffy got back we started for Baccarat. It was a stormy night, black as ink, and we had to go over roads which the bombardment of the early evening had torn up. It took two hours to go eight miles. When we arrived we found an anxious group of "Y" workers discussing the probability of our having been blown to pieces or captured by the Boche, and they were just about to send out a searching party.
No soldiers ever had anything on the boys from the Buckeye State. They had been sent to the Alsatian border to hold the line against a threatening foe. Persistent rumors told of a German drive on this sector. Nothing but our men and guns and a few hastily constructed wire entanglements stood in their way. And the German army had a name for sweeping right through such open country and taking what it wanted. But many things caused Fritz to stop and think. The German raiding parties were failures. Only two out of a score succeeded in getting the Americans. That meant that the Yankee out-posts were not only on the job but also that they were absolutely fearless and able to capture single-handed superior numbers of the enemy.
Then, one night just as the Germans seemed to be concentrating on a dangerous salient, eighty of our big guns in a couple of hours coughed up twelve hundred tons of gas and spit it in the faces of an enemy that dared to think it could fool with Uncle Sam's boys from Ohio. For two days after, the Boche were carrying their dead out of that area.
No more threats of a German drive were heard in that sector, but reports came frequently of Boche prisoners and deserters who offered to surrender whole companies of Huns if they could only be guaranteed that the Americans would spare their lives.
Major H, a friend of old college days, was a staff officer of the 37th Division and was as brave as he was big. His clear brain and military genius laid out our machine-gun nests. He had studied carefully every foot of ground and planted machine guns wherever they could command an enemy advance or night raid. The direct and crossfire of these guns were so coordinated that many guns could play upon a dangerous enemy approach. It was a most exciting chess game which was being played with real armies and men.