and Jerry accompanied the Y. M. C. A. man, and were very glad they were to buy, at a modest price, some cups of chocolate, and also some cakes of it to put in their pockets.

"These Y. M. C. A. and K. C. places are all to the merry!" voted Ned. "They were great back at Camp Dixton, but they're twice as good here!"

"And we'll look after you, as well as we can, when you get on the firing line," said their new friend. "You'll have to depend on the Salvation Army lassies for doughnuts, but we can give you smokes and chocolate almost any time. Have some more!"

He made the boys and their comrades so welcome that they hated to leave to go to roll call. But this must be done, and soon they were assigned to barracks, much the same as in Camp Dixton.

CHAPTER IX
ON THE FIRING LINE

The training Ned, Bob and Jerry went through in the French camp, though on a more intense scale and with greater attention to detail, was much like that which they had obtained at Camp Dixton, and that has been related at length in the volume preceding this. There were the same drills to go through, only they were harder, and in charge were men who had seen terrible fighting. Some of them were American army officers, sent back from the front to instruct the new recruits, and others were French and British officers, detailed to teach the raw troops who, at first, were brigaded with the veterans.

It was rise early in the morning, drill hard all day, attend some school of instruction in the evening, and then, after a brief visit perhaps to the Y. M. C. A. hut or one of the other rest tents, go to bed, to get up and do it all over again the next day.

But the boys never felt it monotonous, nor did they complain of the hard work. They knew it was necessary, and here on the very fighting ground itself--in wonderful France--there was a greater incentive to apply oneself to the mastering of the lessons of the war.

Then, too, they saw or heard at first hand of the indescribable cruelties and atrocities of the Huns. Ned, Bob, Jerry, and their comrades saw with what fervor the French and British were proceeding with the war, and their own spirits were inflamed.

No work was too hard for them, from learning to throw hand grenades, taught by men who had had them thrown at them, to digging trenches laid out after the fashion of those on either side of No Man's Land. Then came small 

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