Good-_night_, Fritzie!" The whole scene reminded Tom vaguely of the hasty, quiet picking up and departure of the circus in the night which, as a little boy, he had sat up to watch.

There were the tanks, half a dozen of them (and he knew there were more elsewhere), covered with soldiers and waiting in the darkness like elephants.

Troops were constantly departing, for the front trenches he supposed.
Though he had never yet been before the lines, his experience as a rider and his close touch with the fighting men had given him a pretty good military sense in the matter of geography--that is, he understood now without being told the geographical relation of one place to another in the immediate neighborhood.

Dispatch-riders acquire this sort of extra sense very quickly and they come to have a knowledge of the lay of the land infinitely more accurate than that of the average private soldier.
Tom knew that this village, which was now the scene of hurried preparation and mysterious comings and goings, was directly behind the trench area.

He knew that somewhere back of the village was the artillery, and he believed that the village of Cantigny stood in the same relation to the German trenches that this billet village stood to the Allied trenches; that is, that it was just behind the German lines and that the German artillery was still farther back.