We were driving back from the front. The earth was covered with a
blanket of snow. Everything was white. We were moving cautiously
because with the snow over everything it was hard to tell where the icy
road left off and the ditches began; and those ditches were four feet
deep, and a big truck is hard to get out of a hole. Then there were no
lights, for we were too near the Boche batteries.

"Halt!" rang out suddenly in the night, and a sentry stepped into the
middle of the road.

I got down to see what he wanted.

"There are fifty truck-loads of soldiers going into the trenches
to-night, and they are coming this way. Drive carefully, for it is
slippery."

In a few moments we came to the first truck filled with soldiers, and
passed it. A hundred yards farther we came to the second one, loaded
down with American boys. Their rifles were stacked in the front of the
truck, and their helmets made a solid steel covering over the trucks.
One by one, fifty trucks loaded with American soldiers passed us. One
can hardly imagine that many American boys anywhere without some noise,
but the impressive thing about that scene was that not a single word,
not a sound of a human voice, came from a single one of those fifty
trucks. The only sound to be heard breaking the silence of the night
was the crunching of the chained wheels of the heavy trucks in the
snow. We watched that strangely silent procession go up over a
snow-covered hill and disappear. Not a single sound of a human voice
had broken the silence.