Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/207

 (cadet) there named Lucot. When he learned that I was an American, he was just as anxious to talk to me as I was curious to examine the battery. He took me around to the officers' abri and introduced me to his captain and two lieutenants. After they had shown me several of the guns and carefully explained the mechanism of each and also of the machine which sets the time-fuses, they took me down into the deep munition dugouts where they pointed with great pleasure to a number of American made shells. Then they did something entirely unexpected. They invited me into dinner. I knew this would be a thousand times better than my menu of army bread, and since there was very little chance of blessés arriving at the post for two or three hours, I accepted at once. The meal was served in the captain's abri, with ten feet of carefully laid earth and logs between us and any Boche shells which might break outside. I was kept pretty busy through it all, trying to eat and answer their countless questions. They wanted to know how many troops we had in France, if our men would actually get into the trenches this fall, if their "75" wasn't better than our American three-inch gun and of course a lot of things about the Ambulance Service. When I had a chance I would question them about French and German time fuses or perhaps the range of different guns; but I didn't