look, but marching with an easy step as if they knew what was coming.
It was the Rainbow Division that got to the outskirts of Sedan, the veterans of 175 solid days in the trenches, and of every big battle in which the Americans have been engaged.
Going up the road toward the Meuse and Stenay next morning we passed more troops marching. This time it was another division no less famous than the Forty-second—the First Division—first in France, first to fight, and by a great chance it happened that we passed the men of the Sixteenth Infantry.
The Sixteenth had just received the news and were cheering as men cheer who know what the war meant in agony and bloody sweat. Some of them were waving their muddy rifles high overhead.
Farther down the road was a little wood where was crouched the long, varicolored snout of a six-inch rifle, the crew of which were cleaning out the barrel. "We fired the last shot at 10:55," they said. It was Battery C of the Fifty-sixth Coast Artillery, formerly at Fort H. G. Wright, New York. Lieut. Harry C. Carpenter, of Norwich, N, Y., pulled the lanyard for their last shot.
Of course there will be a thousand claimants to the honor of having fired the last shot of the war for the American army.
