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Somehow our quarters at Francheville were not ready for us on the 7th.  We stayed overnight at the nearest town, Coulommiers, at the Grand Hotel of the Bear de l'Ours).  It was still in business in 1955, according to the Michelin guidebook of that year.  Michelin gave it a low rating, and it was not much better in 1918.  Next day we moved out to Francheville, where all our planes eventually arrived.  The whole squadron was billeted in the buildings of one farm.  They made a rectangle around a central big courtyard.

Francheville was a few miles south of the Marne.  Upstream, the Germans were on the north bank at Chateau-Thierry.  The front on which we operated ran from there six or seven miles northwestward, past Vaux, Torcy and Belleau Wood.  Those were places where the Second American division had done good service in June.  That division had been relieved by the 26th, a New England National Guard outfit.  The convoy in which I had crossed in September of 1917 had carried over part of that division.  It was one of our best.  In the Chateau-Th9erry region neither side had an organized trench system.  The front there had not been stabilized long enough for much digging.  The infantry of both sides had dug "foxholes", known in earlier wars as riflepits.  They were simply pits in which a man could by crouching or kneeling get his head below ground level.  Here and there short trenches had been dug to connect one foxhole or one shellhole to others.  Foxholes were often started from shellholes, which saved some digging.

At Francheville we were about 20 miles from the front, twice the conventional distance for trench warfare.  It was planned that way.  The Germans were expected to make another drive toward Paris.  We would be in their path, and no one could predict when we might have to move in a hurry.  All our equipment not in daily use was kept packed and loaded on our trucks.  The gasoline tanks of our planes were kept filled.  The Observers' guns, which ordinarily hung in the armorers' shop between flightts, were loaded and mounted on the planes, with extra magazines of ammunition.

The Germans on July 15th began their last offensive of the war.  They did not, as we had expected, strike westward toward Paris.  They crossed the Marne at Chateau-Thierry and for a stretch eastward from there.  They captured the hills that overlook the Marne from the south.  They pushed in that direction.  They drove back the French and one American division (the 5th, I think).  By noon we were informed that the allied command did not know how far the Germans had penetrated.