VI

WE BREAK THROUGH

French gunners at home in the landscape—Sleep by regulations in spite of suspense—"Over the top" not a rush—Difficulty of keeping to a time-table—Even with a guiding barrage—What barbed wire means—And the trench mazes beyond—Moving up behind the infantry.

The Pacific Slope, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and New York thus had the honor of the initial attack in our greatest battle, in which men from every state in the Union were to have a part before it was won. In that area of rolling country from Verdun to the Bar-le-Duc-Clermont road, which had been stealthily peopled by our soldiers, the swarming of their khaki was relieved by scattered touches of the blue of the Frenchmen who had come to assist us. Though ours was the flesh and blood which was to do the fighting—every infantryman was an American—the French were filling the gaps in our equipment which we could have filled ourselves, as I have said, only by delaying the Meuse-Argonne offensive until the spring of 1919 as we had originally planned.

Under their camouflage curtains in an open field, or in the edge of a woods, or under the screen ofbushes which fringed a gully, the groups of French gunners seemed at home in a landscape that was native to them while it was alien to the Americans. When at rest their supple lounging attitudes had a certain defiance of formal military standards, as if French democracy were flouting Prussian militarism. When the order for firing came, the transition was to the alertness of the batter stepping up to the plate, and their swift movements had the grace and confidence of professional mastery which had long put behind it the rudimentary formalities of the drill-ground. They seemed a living part of the infantry, their pulse-beats answering the infantry's steps. Never were guests more welcome than they to our army. We could not have too many French guns—or cannon, as our communiqués called them in recognition of the unfamiliarity of our public with military terms—playing on the enemy's trenches and barbed wire in the preliminary bombardment which blazed a way for the charge.

I have known the suspense preceding many attacks while the darkness before dawn was slashed by the flashes from nearby gun mouths and splashed by the broad sheets of flame from distant gun mouths. There is nothing more contrary to nature than that the quiet hours of the night should be turned into an inferno of crashes and, at the moment of dawn, when the world refreshed looksforward to a new day, men should be sent to their death. The suspense before the Meuse-Argonne attack was greater than before the Somme attack, when the British new army, after its months of preparation and nearly two years of training, was sent against the German line; it was greater than before Saint-Mihiel, our own first offensive.

At Saint-Mihiel we had hints that the enemy would oppose us with only a rearguard action. Our mission would be finished with the first onslaught; we had only to cut the salient; the result was measurably certain, while in the Meuse-Argonne it was on the knees of the gods. The Germans could afford to yield at Saint-Mihiel; they could not in the Meuse-Argonne, where, if informed of the character of our plan, they might make a firm resistance in the first-line fortifications or at such points in them as suited their purpose in seeking to draw us into salients, to be slaughtered by enfilade fire as the French were in their spring offensive of 1917.

After the preliminary bombardment began at midnight, our American Army world, as detached in its preoccupation with its own existence, as much apart from the earth, as if it were on another planet, waited on the dawn of morning, which was the dawn of battle. The stars which were out in their distant serenity had a matter-of-fact appeal to generals to whom a clear day meant no quagmires toimpede the advance. It was the business of all except the gunners and the truck-drivers, or of those speeding on errands to tie up any loose ends of organization, to try to force a little sleep. Even the infantry, with the shells screaming over their heads, were supposed to make the most of their inertia in rest which would give them reserve strength for the work ahead.

This was in keeping with the formula which had been studied and worked out through experience. No one not firing shells could be of any service in smashing in strong points or cutting barbed wire. Particularly it behooved high staff officers and commanders to lie down, with minds closed to all thoughts of mistakes already made or apprehensions of future mistakes, in order to be fortified with steady nerves, clear vision and stored vitality for the decisions which they would have to make when they had news of the progress of the action. The plans for the attack were set; they might not be changed now; the attack must be precipitated. Aides protected their generals from interruption, and arranged that they should have food to their liking, and as comfortable a bed as possible. No genius composing a sonnet or a sonata could have been more securely protected in his seclusion than a corps commander. The rigorous drill which had formed the men in the front line to be the pawns of superiorwill was applied to keep the superior will in training for its task.

General Pershing kept faith with the formula, and many others followed his example, though junior staff officers worked through the night. They were plentiful, and "expendable," as the army saying goes, as expendable in nervous prostration as were in wounds and death the young lieutenants who were to lead their platoons into the hell of machine-gun fire. Waiting—waiting—waiting while the guns thundered were the ambulances beside the road, the divisional transport, the ammunition and engineer trains, the aviators with their planes tuned up and ready, the doctors and nurses at the dressing-stations and evacuation hospitals, and the reserve troops in billets. Officially through his orders everyone concerned knew only his own part, but all knew without asking that an unprecedented ordeal was coming.

It was easier for French and British veterans, familiarized by other offensives with the roar and the flashes of artillery, to relax than for Americans who were having the experience for the first time. With sufficient practice one may learn to sleep with a six-inch howitzer battery in an adjoining field shaking the earth. Many times during the Meuse-Argonne battle I have seen our own veterans giving proof of such hardihood; but on this night of September 25th it was not in human nature for all thethousands who were to have no sleep the next day or the next night to summon oblivion to their surroundings. Those who fell asleep slept with nerves taut with anticipation and in the consciousness of a nightmare, in which the rending thunders were mixed with reflection upon their own arduous efforts and their part in the future. Everyone was a runner crouched for the pistol-shot, as he awaited the dawn. The great test for which all had prepared individually and collectively for two years was coming tomorrow.

With the first flush of thin light the observation balloons had risen in stately dignity from the earth mist, and the planes had taken to the sky and swept out over the enemy lines: the combat planes seeking foes and the observers to watch the progress of the charge or enemy movements or the location of batteries or of machine-gun nests which were harassing our infantry. Mobilization by the aviators for the offensive had not been hampered by the problems of one-way and two-way roads. They flew over from Saint-Mihiel the afternoon before or on the morning the battle began.

At 5.30, just as a moving man would be visible a few yards away, from the Meuse to the western edge of the Argonne, where we had ourliaisonwith the French who advanced at the same moment, our men left the old French trenches and started for theGerman trenches. Everyone is familiar with the phrase "going over the top," yet despite the countless descriptions everyone who saw an attack for the first time remarked, "I didn't know it was like that!" The system of the advance on the morning of September 26th accorded with the accepted practice of the time. In their familiarity with the system soldiers and correspondents have taken it for granted that what was common knowledge to them was common knowledge to all the world. Only when they returned home did they realize their error, and learn that ignorance of fundamentals ingrained in army experience had made their narratives Greek to all who had not been in action.

The average man is slow to yield his idea that a charge is an impetuous sweep. It sounds more real to say that "the boys rushed" than to say that they advanced with the sedateness of a G. A. R. parade on Decoration Day, which is more like what really happened. Indeed, they simply walked, unheroic as that may seem; and from high ground, or better still from a plane flying low, an observer saw to the limit of vision right and left men proceeding at a set and regular pace. The more uniform and the more automatic this was, the better. On closer view every man, except in height and physique, was a duplicate of the others, in helmet, in pack, in gas mask, in every detail of uniform, even in the wayhe carried his rifle with its glistening bayonet, which was the only relief to khaki on the background of somber-tinted earth.

Every man, every platoon, and on through the different units to divisions and corps, was moving on a time schedule. A competition between companies to "get there" first would have resulted from the start in a hopeless tangle. If not literally, it may be said broadly that each company was to be at a given point on the map at a given hour; and if one company, or battalion or regiment, for that matter, outdistanced another, it was because it had kept its schedule and the other had not. In case it became "heady" and was on its objective in advance of schedule, it ran the risk of "exposing its flanks." At least that is the theory of the staff in its essence. An ideal army, according to the staff, would be at a given line on the map at 10.30, at another at 11.30, and so on. This might be possible if there were no enemy to consider, although it would require an adept army, as everyone who has ever drilled recruits well appreciates. He knows how long it takes to train them, and to learn how to direct a small force in carrying out satisfactorily a practice skirmish evolution over slightly uneven ground. The gregarious instinct of itself seems to break uniformity by drawing men into groups in face of infantry fire in battle for the first time, as well aseagerness to close with the enemy and gravitation away from the points of its concentration. Shell-bursts scatter them, casualties make gaps which lead to further disorganization.

Could our army have had reproduced for its edification the confusion of the battle of Bull Run or of Shiloh, it would have realized the purpose of all the painstaking drill, the monotonous and wearing discipline, which made the well-ordered movement possible. Its very deliberateness in maintaining the coördination of all its units gave it a majesty in its broad and mighty sweep, which was more like the sweep of a great river than the cataract rush of the small forces of the old days, which the public still continued to visualize as a charge. I thought of it too as in keeping with the organization of modern life, in the trains entering and leaving a great city station or the methodical processes of a vast manufacturing concern.

How did our men know whether or not they were keeping their schedule? Did they look at their watches as they counted their steps? They had a monitor at first in the rolling barrage, that curtain of fire which preceded them. This was their moving shield which the guns far in rear provided for their guidance as well as protection. If they came too close to the barrage, they were exposed no less than their enemies to death from its hail.

We may have a comparison in marching behind a road sprinkler, with orders to keep just out of reach of its spray, which will be obeyed if the spray consist of nitric acid instead of water. The more guns the stronger the shield. We could never have an excess of guns as Grant had at the outset of the Wilderness campaign, when he sent many batteries of the short-range pieces of those days to the rear for want of room on a narrow front in which to maneuver them. Cæsar applied the first barrage in France in his tactical use of the shields of his legions, who owed their success to systematic training no less than we in the Meuse-Argonne. His men had to carry their own shields; the modern soldier has enough to carry without carrying his.

Suspense was most taut, it was agonizing, as every soldier knows, in the waiting hours ticking away into waiting minutes before the charge. As the final minute approached, the veteran, as a connoisseur in death's symbols, might find assurance in the strength, and apprehension in the weakness, of the supporting barrage laid down on the enemy trenches. Those of our men who had not been in battle before could have no such prescience. They did know that when they left their trenches the full length of their bodies would be exposed. They would march, rifle in hand, without firing, while only the shield of the shells from friendly guns screaming over their heads—thegreater the volume, the sweeter the music—could silence the fire of rifles and machine-guns which had them at merciless point-blank range. Instantly they climbed "over the top," anticipation became realization. One ceased to listen to his heart-beats. The emotion became that of action. Suspense became objective, merged in responsibility for every man in watching where he stepped as he moved toward his goal, and for every captain and lieutenant in directing his company or platoon.

The most careful maneuvering on fields at home was poor preparation for No Man's Land, which is like nothing else in the world except No Man's Land. Millions of soldiers know it through long watches over its dreary lifeless space, and more vividly through crossing it in a charge. For four years it had been the zone of death where no soldier from either side ventured except at night on patrol or in a raid or general attack. All this time shells had been pummeling it. The rims of craters, of sizes varying with the calibers of the shells, joined each other; old craters had been partly filled by later bursts. This continued pestling of the soil with nothing to press it down but the rain made it the more spongy in wet weather and the looser in dry weather. The heads of the men bobbed as they advanced, stepping in and out of craters, and wove in and out as they passed around craters. Therims often gave way with their weight, or they slipped on the dew-moist weeds that fringed them or upon some "dud" shell hidden in the weeds, as their attention was diverted from the ground under foot by the burst of an enemy shell or of one from their own guns which fell dangerously short.

As our artillery, in order to preserve the element of surprise, had not "registered" with practice shots, it was firing strictly by the map; and, though its accuracy was wonderful, inexperienced gunners manning guns which had not had the allowances for error recently tabulated, were bound, in some cases, to send their shells wide of the mark. The big calibers might fail to destroy "strong points" that held machine-gun nests, or a battery of seventy-fives fail to cut the section of wire which was its assignment. For these mistakes the infantry must suffer. It is the infantry which always pays the price in blood for all mistakes; and the transfer of an officer to Blois or the demotion of a general officer would not bring back their dead.

Their immediate concern, as that of every infantryman had been in every charge throughout the war, as they crossed No Man's Land, was the wire entanglements. All the original wire, four years' exposure to the weather making its rusty barbs the more threatening, was still there in some form or other, though it had been ruptured or further twistedby previous bombardments whose craters only added to the difficulties of passage. Breaks had been filled by new wire, which rather supplemented the old than took its place. Additional stretches had been put out at intervals to reinforce the defense of vital points. A half-dozen strands will halt a charge in its tracks; here was a close-woven skein, from three and four to twenty yards in depth. Where the depth was greatest, it was most likely to have a continuous uncut stretch which the enemy had marked as a target for fire upon the arrested attackers.

According to photographs of selected areas, which show a few bits of wire sticking out of a choppy sea of fresh earth, every square yard of which has been lashed by shell-fire, it would seem that artillery was accustomed to do as thorough mowing as a reaper in a field of grain. Even with treble our volume of artillery fire, taking treble the length of time of our bombardment, and with every shell perfectly accurate on its target, we could hardly have accomplished any such blessed result. The best that could be expected was that lanes would be opened at frequent intervals.

A break in the uniformity of advance appeared at once when one platoon or company had a clear space on its front while its neighbors had not. Suppose that for five hundred yards of distance the guns had completely failed and for five hundred yards oneither side they had succeeded: then you had two exposed flanks sweeping forward into the trenches beyond, possibly against the enfilade fire of machine-gun points especially established for this opportunity.

Where the guns had not done the work for them the men must do it themselves. If they had the torpedoes at the end of long sticks, resembling exaggerated skyrockets, they might thrust these into the meshes and explode them to gain the destructive effect of shell-bursts. If the artillery had made some breaks, they might, in their impetuosity to keep up with the rest of the line, try to pick their way. What young soldiers can accomplish in this respect is past all comprehension by elders who try to follow in their steps. The first wonder is how they were able to go through at all, and the second is how they had any flesh on their leg-bones after they had gone through. Their main reliance was on the hand wire-cutters, which had not been improved since Cuba and South Africa.

All the while that the soldier was snipping the strands and bending them back as he crawled forward, he was usually too near the trench to have any protection from the barrage, while from the trench he was a full-size target at short range. War offers no more diabolical suspense than to this prostrate soldier in his patient groveling effort, when machine-gun fire is turned in his direction. He is in the positionof a man lashed to a bulls-eye. Bullets sing as they cut strands of wire around him. He feels a moist warm spot on his leg or arm and knows that he is hit. Perhaps he tries to apply the dressing to the wound; but more likely he refuses to expose himself by any movement which will attract the gunner's attention. He may be hit again and again before the inevitable final bullet brings the last of his ghastly counted seconds of existence. The bones of men who were killed in this way—"hung up" in the wire—are all along the wire of the old trench line from Switzerland to Flanders. Or perhaps, when that patient wire-cutter has taken death for granted, the machine-gun suddenly diverts its spray to other targets, and he is safe.

Such was the nature of the barrier of entanglements which had to be conquered by these young divisions of ours before they ever began fighting. Beyond its fiendish and elaborate skeins was a trench system equally elaborate in all its appointments for the real resistance. German officers and soldiers in occupation had taken all the interest in improvements, and the more as it concerned the safety of their own skins, of the most fastidiously scientific and progressive superintendent of a manufacturing plant. The latest wrinkles in the development of defensive warfare were promptly applied. After each trench raid or enemy attack, weak points thathad appeared were corrected. Generals who came on inspection ordered changes suggested by their study of the ground. Regiments new to a sector brought fresh ideas and industry. Work was good for German soldiers, who were kept digging and building for four years in perfecting the security of these intricate human warrens.

Any trench system, after allowing for an enemy's success in clearing the hurdle of the wire and in penetrating the trench system, and even for his successful occupation of considerable stretches of the front line, relied upon "strong points" and second lines in the maze of fortifications to make the gains futile, or only the prelude to a more costly repulse than if the attack had failed in its first stage. Let it be repeated that not one out of four of our soldiers had ever before stormed a first-class fortified line. They and their officers knew the character of its mazes only through lectures, pictures, maps, and imagination; but they were perfectly certain of one thing, and that was that their business was to clean the Germans out, and for this they were equipped with proper tools. In other words, when you saw a German emerging from a deep dugout where he had taken refuge from the bombardment, or appearing round a traverse, either kill him or gather him in.

The ardor and ferocity of our youth in a furious offensive mood was never more compelling in itsresults. Caution was not in our lexicon. If strong points held out, the thing was to go through them. There was no time to lose. The first wave must go on according to schedule, leaving those who followed to do the mopping up of details. Our faith was in our valor and destiny. In our progress the first-line fortifications were to be only another hurdle after the wire.

In the course of this famous day, in seeking a personal glimpse of every aspect of the action, I was at Army, Corps, and Division Headquarters as the news came in, and I was three miles beyond the trenches with our advance against the machine-gun nests. Such a morning sun as is rare in this region eventually dissipated the thick mist which had been in our favor in concealing our attack from enemy observation, and against us in preventing our observation of the movement of our own units. It kept on shining, which was still more rare, in all the genial pervading warmth which we associate with its generous habit in this season at home, until midday found the air singularly luminous—luminous for this region—and the sky a soft blue. The generals could not have asked more; and to the medical corps it meant a blessing for the wounded. Judging by the weather that ensued during the remainder of the battle, the point that the sun of the Argonne exhausted all its beneficence on the first day and had toretire behind clouds to recuperate, in order to keep up the reputation of "sunny France" for future tourist seasons, seems well taken.

Not only was the infantry advancing, but all the rest of the army, no longer obliged to court concealment under the cover of the night, had come aggressively into the open, the stealthy processes of preparation having given place to the thrill of battle joined. Where all efforts on preceding days had been directed toward a stationary theater, now all were directed to a traveling theater. A mighty organism of human and metal machinery, which had been assembling and tuning up its engines, had thrown in the clutch and was in motion.

Considering the volume of shells being fired at the Germans, the columns of motor-trucks loaded with ammunition now had an intimate appeal. The front had become a magnet drawing every thought toward it, with every waiting ambulance and vehicle expectant of an order to start forward. At the rear there was less traffic on the roads than during the period of preparation; but forward, close to the trench lines, roads that had been empty two days before were crowded. Machine-gun battalions in reserve and batteries of artillery which had carried out their assignment in the preliminary bombardment, and were moving forward to new positions where they could support the advance, were demandingright of way over divisional transport, which was clear as to its duty to keep as close to the infantry as orders would permit. The signal corps, unrolling their wires, also wanted precedence in order that division headquarters might have information; and the engineers had taken precedence over everybody with the compelling argument that unless roads were built no traffic could move forward.

It was a familiar enough picture. To the jaded observer of war every glimpse only reproduced some scene which was part of a routine of which he was so weary that it made him desire, if for no other reason, the realization of the supreme hope that this should be the final offensive of the war. The great thing, though all the equipment and all the system seemed age-old because of their associations, was that the personnel was new. A new knight had slipped into old armor, and taken up the sword from a tired if experienced hand. D'Artagnan had arrived from Gascony to add his young blade to the blades of the three Musketeers. On the part of everybody there was still the boyish enthusiasm of the beginner in a game.

Hundreds of officers who had been to staff schools, or enduring the S. O. S. in fractious impatience, now for the first time were at the front—the front of the Great War; and with them were all the men of the supply units, motor drivers, ambulance drivers, engineerbattalions, military police, whose one thought was a sight of that "big show."

The French gunners looked on smiling, as a middle-aged woman smiles over the enthusiasm of the débutante. Given the hour of attack, they knew by experience how long it would be before the first wounded and the first prisoners would come down the road. Soldiers who had never seen a German at close quarters perhaps had taken the prisoners; a young intelligence officer might be having his first experience in questioning them. To the French the prisoners looked like all the "sales Boches"; but we were discovering their characteristics afresh. Later came the severely wounded on stretchers which were slipped into the ambulances which bore them away. By nine o'clock in the morning we knew that except for a few strong points which could not hold out we were through the wire and through that elaborate trench system and out in the open, and still going on.

A successful surprise—The importance of traffic control in maintaining the advance—The "show" in the air—How the engineers built roads—And traffic blocked them—And colonels showed the traffic police how.

The veteran accepts his long service as a guarantee of efficiency; the novice is patient under instruction and open to suggestion. Our desire to do everything in the book, our painstaking individual industry under a meticulous discipline, and our willingness as beginners to learn had served us well before the battle in the concealment of our strength and plans from the enemy. There were so many of us and we were so swift in our onset that we gave the enemy the benumbing shock which on many occasions the newcomer, springing aggressively into the arena, has inflicted by a rain of blows upon a hardened adversary who has appraised him too lightly.

If the Germans had made the most of their fortifications with their customary skill, the dam might have held against the flood; for it is the touch and go of impulse that decides in the space of a second between docile hands up begging for succor and afury of resistance to the death. Suddenly brought to face overwhelming formations, the answering sense of self-preservation prevailed in the German trenches before the German officers and non-commissioned officers, had they been in the mood, could overcome the mass instinct of their men.

The French on our left had presumably met more resistance than we in the first-line fortifications. Their attack was doubtless more professionally skillful than ours. Had they failed, for no other reason than that they had fewer men to the mile, the cost of a repulse would have been less for them than it would have been for us. The Germans knew that the French were massing west of the Argonne, and apparently accepted their attack as serious, while they thought that we would make only a demonstration. We had been right in our anticipation that they would not consider, for one thing, another major offensive by our army feasible so soon after Saint-Mihiel; or, for another, that Marshal Foch, while he was carrying on extensive operations in northern France, would have the temerity or the forces to undertake in addition such an extensive effort as that of September 26th.

Despite the honor in which open warfare was now held, a first line was still a first line, with its wire, deep dugouts and strong points, and all the approaches accurately plotted by the artillery throughlong practice in fire. A part of it might be readily taken at any time by thorough artillery preparation, but the victors in the early offensives had suffered enormous toll of casualties from shell-fire in organizing their new positions. Though the short artillery preparation, without registering, had proved efficacious against the Germans on July 18th and August 8th, when they were holding shallow trenches in ground which they had won in their spring offensives, it had not as yet been tried by the Allies—I may mention again—over any such length of front against the old trench system as in the Meuse-Argonne. It is only fair to say that we were not opposed in strong force, but, make any qualification you choose, by conquering twenty miles of first-line fortifications we had won a signal triumph which must have been a distressing augury to the German command.

After our "break through" there was little answering artillery fire. We had drawn the teeth of immediate artillery resistance by going through to the guns. We had captured many guns; others were forced to fall back to escape capture, and they, or any that were hurried forward, would have had to fire, not at a settled trench line, but at infantry deployed and on the move. Meanwhile our infantry must be driven to the utmost of its capacity to make the most of the headway that we had gained.

We had also to consider the dispersion and the fatigue which bring loss of momentum in an attack, just as a tidal wave spends itself in flowing inland. The farther our infantrymen went, the farther our transport must go to provide them with rations and ammunition. Thus the ability of our organization to continue the advance after the "break through" included the indispensable factor of efficient arrangements at the rear. As a division has twenty-seven thousand men, its daily food requirements are equal to those of a good-sized town, without including small arms and artillery ammunition and other material. People at home who were surprised at the length of time it took a division to march by on parade, without its artillery or transport, will have some idea of the road space required for a single division fully equipped for action and in motion.

Behind the old trench system traffic movement had settled into a routine, under the direction of policemen at the crossings, resembling that of a city. In our mobilization for the attack we had brought, aside from corps and army troops, nine divisions into the Meuse-Argonne sector. This led to the pressure which would appear in suddenly trebling the traffic of a city. Though the roads were insufficient, they were kept systematically in repair; quantities were known; we were forming up on a definite line of front. After the attack was begun,the defensive force was falling back upon its established and dependable arrangements. The offensive force—and this cannot be too clearly or vividly stated—had to build a city, as it were, by establishing new depots and camps, repairing old roads and building new roads, while traffic control in the area of advance was subject not only to the calculable requirements of a great street parade in a city, but to the incalculable requirements of a great fire and other emergencies which switch concentrations from one street to another.

From a ridge in the midst of the old trench system in the center of our line, the nature of our task appeared as a picture, which my observation in threading my way through the streams of traffic in the rear filled in with detail. Ahead, except for occasional groups and lines appearing and disappearing in the wooded, undulating landscape, our advancing infantry seemed to have been dissipated into the earth. Their part after they were through the fortifications I shall describe in another chapter. The bridge between them and the rear was for the moment in the air, where Allied and German planes in prodigal numbers came and went on their errands of combat and observation. In the jam on the roads back of the trenches, thousands of men, of waiting machine-gun battalions and of stalled artillery, and drivers and helpers attached to traffic of all kinds, werelooking aloft at a "show" which was worth the price of being packed in darkened transports, and almost worth the price of enduring army discipline.

If they might see nothing of the battle going on behind the ridge, they had grandstand seats for the theatrics of war in the air, staged on the background of the blue ceiling of heaven. I was not to see the like of this scene again in such bright sunlight. The most jaded veteran never failed to look up at the sound of machine-gun firing, which signaled that the aces might be jousting overhead. Would one be brought down? There might be only an exchange of bullets between planes in passing; then one might turn to give chase to the other; or both begin maneuvering for advantage. In shimmering flashes the sunlight caught the turning wings of planes that tumbled in a "falling leaf" when at a disadvantage, caught the wings of planes that were crippled and falling to their death.

Duels were forgotten when a German plane with no Allied plane across its path swept down toward the huge inflated prey of an observation balloon. His telephone told the observer in the basket that it was time to take to his parachute. The sight of the figure of a man, harnessed to a huge umbrella, leisurely descending from a height of a thousand feet, divided attention with watching to see whether or not the gas within the thin envelope overheadbroke into a great ball of flame. If not, it was brought down to take on its passenger again; and it could be lowered with incredible rapidity for such an immense object, as the wire which anchored it was reeled in on the spinning reel on the motor-truck. There was something very modern and truly American about a motor-truck in a column of traffic towing a balloon.

Most fortunate of all the spectators were the men with machine-guns for aërial defense mounted on trucks. They both observed and participated in the game. Many of them were in action for the first time with a new toy. They did not propose to miss any opportunity to make up for having come late into the war.

"Haven't you learned the difference between an Allied and a German plane? You're shooting at an Allied plane," an officer called to a machine-gunner.

"Yes, sir," was the reply, and he stopped firing.

"Why didn't you tell him you couldn't hit it anyway?" remarked a passing wounded man, after the officer had passed on. "But don't worry. If they miss the plane, the bullets can still hit somebody when they fall."

Entranced as they were by the spectacle, all the men who had to do with the moving of the wheels of all the varieties of transport which overflowedthe roads were only the more eager to press forward. The air was not their business. Their duty was over the ridge toward the front. The artillerists had particularly appealing reasons for impatience, as we shall see. They were using rugged language, which relieved their steam-pressure without changing the fact, which was being burned into the consciousness of the whole army, that as surely as a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, a road is no stronger than any slough which holds up traffic.

The engineers had no time to spare for observing blazing balloons. Their labors in the old trench system, in contrast to the florid drama of the air, were a reminder of how completely earth-tied the army was, and how small a part of its effort was above the earth, even in the days when communiqués paid much attention to aces. For a mile or more every road in the immediate rear of the old French trenches had been in disuse for four years while it was being torn by shell-bursts. For the distance across No Man's Land, it had become part of the sea of shell-craters. On the German side of No Man's Land were more trench chasms, and another stretch which had been blasted in the same fashion as the French side.

Shoveling would fill many of the holes; but shoveling required labor when we were short of labor,and time when every minute was precious. It was increasingly evident every minute, too, that trucks that carry three tons, and six-inch mortars, and heavy caissons were not meant to pass over any piece of mended road that had its bottom two or three feet below the surface. They insisted upon finding the bottom and remaining there until pulled out by other traction than their own.

The division engineers were supposed to keep on the heels of the infantry, which they did with a gallantry which made amends for the inadequacy of their numbers and material. Their efficacy was dependent upon these two features and upon the prevision of the division command in mastering the problem beforehand. There were critics who said that some division staffs evidently expected their artillery and rolling kitchens to take wing; but the division staffs produced by way of answer the unfailing list of written orders on the subject, which could not be carried out. If the infantry were repulsed or checked, the engineers might share some of the fighting, as they had on more than one occasion. There seemed to be a universal apprehension, the engineers said, that an engineer might have a chance to sleep or rest, which would obviously ruin his morale. If, after the infantry had passed on, the enemy concentrated the fire of a battery on the road-builders, they were not supposed to be divertedfrom their labor, but to be prompt in filling new shell-craters.

The lack of material ready on wagons for immediate movement to the front left them to gather what material they could on the spot. They could not use barbed wire, and in places that seemed the only thing in sight. They tore out trench timbers, which often proved rotten from four years in moist earth, they gathered stones where stones could be found and used these to make something more solid than loose earth turned by the shovel; and they sent hurry calls to the rear for trucks of material, which themselves might be stalled on the way forward in the jam of waiting traffic. The more sticks and stones filled in a bad spot, the more were needed as the earth underneath continued to yield. When a truck-driver saw that the truck in front, which belonged to his convoy, had passed through a rut, he determined that where his leader could go he could follow, and he drove ahead, cylinders roaring with all their horse-power. When he was stuck, he spurred them to another effort. Meanwhile his wheels were probably sinking, and he had delayed the mending of the break in any satisfactory way while the truck in front backed up to put out a towline, and all hands in the neighborhood added their muscular man-power to cylinder horse-power. The Germans had raised in the shell-torn earth of thetrench system another barrier than that of their fortifications to a swift drive for their lines of communication.

Their own limited opportunities in "passing the buck" did not exclude the engineers from easing their own mental, if not physical, burden by remarking with acid intensity that a little better traffic control on the part of some of the people who were complaining would help matters. No one who had been along the roads could deny that this point was well taken. If not the experience of other offensives, our traffic demoralization at Saint-Mihiel should have been a warning to us, though most of the men who had learned their lessons in that sector were still occupied there. We had the admirable example of the British transport, which, after confusion in the Somme battle resembling ours at Saint-Mihiel, had developed in practice under fire a system which seemed automatic.

The number of guns and ammunition-caissons and the length of a column of divisional transport were calculable quantities. Their order of precedence behind the infantry was largely a settled formula. The number of roads and their state of repair must be known not only on the map but by practical observation. Some were narrow country roads, which would accommodate only "one-way" traffic, and others would accommodate traffic going both ways.Having all these factors in mind, the program must include the disposition of labor battalions where they would be needed in making prompt repairs, when heavy trucks cut up roads, especially one-way dirt country roads.

We had written out extensive instructions for traffic regulation, which were to be enforced by military police who were new to the task and insufficient in numbers. The same thing happened to the military police on September 26th as happened to the New York City police during the parade of the 27th Division, when the crowd broke through the police lines into the line of march. In this instance, when aggressive commanders of artillery and convoys saw an opening, they made for it without regard to traffic regulations, though their ardor may have meant only delay in the end.

Thus the military police had paper authority which they could not enforce. Their minds were kept in confusion by the confusion of personal directions they received from volunteer experts. They were overwhelmed in rank; and respect for rank had been drilled and drilled into them. A colonel is a colonel and a mighty man; a lieutenant-colonel is a mightier man than a major, who in turn outranks any captain in charge of a section of road. What was the use of proclaiming a road "one-way," when a staff officer appeared and declared it "two-way"?What was there to do when another staff officer appeared with an outburst against the disobedience of regulations that had interlocked traffic going both ways on this same one-way road?

This is not saying that the personal initiative of a passing senior officer was not serviceable, when he confined his effort to breaking a jam, without reorganizing the system in one locality, and thereby throwing it out of gear in other localities. With the best of intentions, colonels fresh from home who had not seen a large operation before were particularly energetic. Some of their remarks stirred memories of Philippine days when the transport of an expeditionary battalion was in difficulties. The burden of the world was on their shoulders. When they gave an order, they wanted no suggestive "But, sir——" from any captain or major, though they complained that reserve officers lacked both initiative and discipline. As each colonel departed in the blissful consciousness that it had taken a trained soldier to "straighten things out," the traffic officers, in the interval before another appeared with contradictory orders, might indulge their sense of humor with the reflection that numerous "fool colonels" must be wandering about France with a free hand in impressing their rank upon juniors.

The biggest "fool colonel" or general was he who, to avoid walking, took his car in the early partof the day across the freshly made road over the trench system, thereby delaying the carts of machine-gun battalions. When his car was stalled, he received about as much sympathy as the driver of a truck stalled on a road which did not belong to his division. Not being a colonel, the driver might be made the public object of language which did not consider rank or human sensibilities.

In no result was the fact more evident than in our traffic direction that in making a large army we must crack the mold of a small army. In time our capacity for organization would make a new mold. Meanwhile, though it might be applied at cross-purposes, our American energy, adaptable, tireless, furious, and determined, must bring results. The many broken-down trucks in ditches beside the road were only the inevitable casualties of a prodigious effort. Let the infantrymen keep on advancing; we would force their supplies up to them in one way or another.

Out in the open—The enemy limited to passive defense—And relying on machine-gunners—Their elusiveness—Problems of the offense—Slowing down—Up with the infantry—Why dispersion—Liaisonup, down, and across—How keep the staff informed?—The spent wave before Montfaucon.

What of the infantry lost to view in the folds of the landscape? They were confronting the originals of the hills, woods, and ravines, whose contours on paper had been the definite factor in making plans, while the character and resistance of the enemy had been the indefinite and ungovernable quantity. As the day advanced, irregular pencilings, reflecting the reports of the progress of the fighters, moved forward on the maps of the different headquarters toward the heavy regular lines of the objectives which were the goals of our high ambition.

The loss of the first-line fortifications to the Germans could not be considered as serious as in an offensive in the first years of the war. Even as early as the Verdun battle, proponents of the mobile school of warfare, who had never been altogether silenced by the engineering school, had advocated a yielding elastic defense, which, after drawing theCrown Prince's Armies away from their depots, would counter by a sudden attack of the gathered French forces; but such a maneuver was too daring and contrary to the thought of the time, with its dependence upon rigid defense. Infantry had fallen into the habit of feeling "undressed" and helpless unless in trenches. When the soldier was forced into the open, he had hastened to hide his "nakedness" in a shell-crater, or instantly, in the very rodent instinct that he had developed, set to digging himself a pit. Since the German offensive of March, 1918, all the practice had been to wean the infantry away from settled defenses to the supple use of light artillery, trench mortars, and machine-gun units. Happily, as we know, the basic training of our infantry had been in keeping with this idea.

In the palmy days of German numbers and vigor, the German High Command might have met our Meuse-Argonne offensive by the prompt marshaling of reserves for a decisive counter-attack against our extended forces with inadequate roads at their backs; but if Ludendorff realized the errors which our fresh troops might commit from inexperience, we realized, on our part, that he was too occupied elsewhere by Allied attacks to consider any considerable aggressive action on our new front, where his tactics must have in mind, obviously, the protection with a minimum cost of men and material of his lines of communication,in order to assure a successful withdrawal from northern France and Belgium. With our attack developed, his subordinate in the Meuse-Argonne sector, in carrying out this policy, would choose the points where he could gain the best results by concentrating the fire of the artillery at his command, and then depend upon the expert German machine-gunners for defensive warfare in the open, supported by such fragmentary defense lines as might be hastily constructed.

According to the German intelligence report of our operation at Saint-Mihiel, our staff work had been immature, while our line officers did not know how to make the most of our gains. Without considering that at Saint-Mihiel we were under orders to stop on our limited objectives, and granting the Germans their view, no one will deny them the credit of knowing how to make the most of their tactical opportunities. The bellows of our accordeon was being drawn out as theirs was drawn in. With every hundred yards of advance our men were farther from their communications. Reports were accordingly the longer in reaching headquarters, and orders for future moves the longer in reaching the line, while those of the Germans, as they fell back on their communications, were prompt.

It was not the first time that they had lost first-line fortifications. They knew by experience as wellas observation what had happened to their first line under the powerful initial assault; and they knew what they had to do, in full dependence upon a staff system trained in practice to meet this as well as the other vicissitudes of war. The failure of their men in the front line to stand to the death was an irritating exhibition of deteriorating morale, which must be taken into consideration not only by the subordinate but the higher commands. Scattered and demoralized individuals and groups, filtering back in retreat, might be re-formed, or passed through advancing reserves to the rear for reorganization. Fresh machine-gun units, which had almost the mobility of infantry, could be readily placed at points already foreseen as most suitable. One machine-gun might hold up the advance of a company of infantry. The enemy was fully familiar with the details of a landscape studded with ideal machine-gun positions, the choicest being the edge of a woods on a hillside overlooking an open space.

Some of our officers and men had met German machine-gun practice in open warfare in the Château-Thierry campaign and at the British front. As others knew it only under the limitations of trench warfare, the resistance which they now must face was familiar to them only through instruction. The German machine-gunner, having learned as the survivorof many battles the art of self-preservation at his adversary's expense, would wait all day and all night and even longer without a shot, until his target appeared in the field of fire assigned to him; wait as a Kentucky feudsman waits behind a rock for his enemy to appear on a road. Each gun was only one in a well-plotted array covering all the avenues of approach which any attacking force must follow. The guns disposed in front might precede or wait on the guns in flank in opening fire.

There was nothing new or wonderful in this arrangement. Any soldier with a sense of ground and of natural combative strategy could work out a plan of interlocking fire; but the discipline and the training requisite to its proper execution, and the stubborn phlegmatic bravery which sticks to a machine-gun to the death, are not to be found at random on any page of a city directory or social register. The fact that a gun had begun firing did not mean that it could be immediately located. Sometimes when light conditions were right the flash was visible, unless the gunner had hung a piece of bagging, through which he could aim, to conceal the flash. The direction of the fire might be judged somewhat by sound, and also by observing the spits of dust in the earth or on the wall of a building. Judgment on this score was affected by the proximity of the passing bullets to the observer's person.

The more machine-guns were firing from different angles, the more difficult it was to locate any one of them by either method; and the more influential the human element. In the midst of their fire imagination easily multiplied the number of guns, which is one of the moral effects of their use. When a gun was located, the gunner might slip back behind the crest of a ridge, or he might have moved as a precaution, before he was located, to another position which had been chosen as his next berth, with pit and camouflage in readiness.

An experienced aviator—always there is that word "experience" which has no substitute—might detect a machine-gun nest if he flew low; but not as a rule in woods or in bushes, or even in the open when covered with green branches. There were many machine-gunners and relatively few aviators. If a gunner thought that an aviator who flew low had seen him, he might have taken up a new position before the aviator's information had brought down artillery fire. The machine-gunner was a will-of-the-wisp with a hornet's sting, which could be thrown a mile and a half. Usually the price of locating him was casualties to the infantry, and still more casualties before he was taken, if he stood his ground. If the Germans had not enough machine-guns back of their first line for a complete interlocking defense on the first day of the battle—andthey certainly had later—they aimed to place them where they could do the most good.

Naturally the American Army, studying its chessboard, had taken into consideration the counter-moves of the enemy which would result from its attack. Of course the passage through the entanglements would lead to the first dislocations ofliaison; the storming of the trenches to more; and the passage over the shell-craters to still more. After every offensive against the trench system, officers had studied how to avoid the slowing down of the attack after the first line was taken. This had led to passing the first wave promptly through the trenches and leaving a second wave to "mop up" by "breaching" dugouts and cleaning up points of resistance; and then to the system of "leap-frogging," in which, when the men in front had been weakened in numbers by casualties and lost their aggressive cohesion, fresh troops went through them to carry forward the attack. Reserves in passing through the lanes of the barbed wire and over the trenches and on to catch up with an advancing line also suffered from disorganization, which might be increased by strong concentrations of enemy shell and machine-gun fire.

A division commander had discretion as to how he would gain his objectives, which brings us into the field of tactical direction, as technical as it is vital to success. His dispositions were a test of his knowledgeof his profession, and his handling of the division after it was engaged of his qualities of generalship. In some instances villages and strong points were passed by the main line of advance, and left to be conquered by special attacking forces. Instructions had not only to be elaborate but practical.

Those captains and lieutenants, the company and platoon commanders, who were carrying out the instructions, must each be a general in his own limited field. The less experience his seniors had in preparing practical instructions, the more he might suffer for his want of experience in leading men in battle. With the conquered trenches behind him, he had to make sure that his men were in hand, and if he had been allowed no time for reorganization behind his shield, that was an error; for barrages might move too fast, in expressing the desire of commanders for speed. At the same time, the line officer had to identify by the map the ground on his front which he was to traverse and the positions he was to take as his part in that twenty miles of pulsing, weaving, and thrusting line.

When you are seated before a table in calm surroundings, trying to follow the course of one company in an advance, you realize the limitations of your 1 to 20,000 map. It ought to be 1 to 10. More elements than any layman could imagine enteredinto the problem of the location of the command post from which a battalion commander was to direct the movements of one thousand men, or a regimental commander of three thousand, in action. All this, of course, represents sheer fundamentals in thoroughgoing military science; but we must have the fundamentals if we are to appreciate the accomplishment of our young army in the Meuse-Argonne battle.

A prominent hill was easily recognized. If a village were in the line of your attack, that was a simple guide; but in a region where, unlike our country of scattered farmhouses, the farmers all live in villages, there was a paucity of buildings which might serve as landmarks. One of our men expressed the character of the terrain by saying that with every advance it all looked alike—hills, ridges, woods, and ravines; yet when you came close to the part which you were to attack it seemed "different from any other and a lot worse." We had to cross brooks and swamps as an incident to conquering the other features of the landscape. If we missed any kind of fighting on the first day of the battle, it was in store for us in the later stages.

Oh, that wordliaison! That linking up of the units of the attack in proper coördination! Is there any man of the combat divisions who does not know its meaning or who wants to hear it again? It nevercame into slang at home in the same way as camouflage; but it is a thousand times more suggestive of the actualities of war.Liaisonbetween the French and the American armies, between corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, squads, and individual soldiers.Liaisonbetween infantry and artillery and trench mortars and planes and tanks! If you did not have it, why, the adjoining commander might be as much to blame as you, at least, and you could say that he was altogether to blame. It may be said that the history of the war will be written in terms of positions taken, and of positions which were not taken because coöperating units failed to keep theirliaison. They were not up. When I mention that there were difficulties ofliaisonin writing of any division, I am not saying who was at fault, as no one person was, perhaps, more than another.

Other generals might be promoted and demoted, but GeneralLiaisonremained the supreme tactician. "Establishingliaison" was fraught with more heartaches and brain-aches than any other military detail. Men prowled through the night in gas-masks under sniping rifle and machine-gun fire and artillery fire, to ascertain if the unit supposed to be on their flank was there: perhaps to receive a greeting from an officer hugging a fox-hole, "Why aren't you fellows keeping up with us?"

Liaisonwas most difficult in woods, though the fighting was not necessarily always the severest there. Men naturally took to the paths instantly they advanced into woods, and these, if they were not stopped by machine-gun fire, advanced ahead of those in the deep underbrush. A stretch of unseen wire might arrest a part of the line, without the men inliaisonon the right and left, as they plunged through the thickets, knowing that it had been stopped. The sheer business of keeping any kind of formation was distracting enough, without the sudden bursts of machine-gun fire, which might be so powerful that there was nothing to do except to take cover and consider a plan for silencing or capturing the gun. Unless the casualties were so serious that it was suicidal not to halt and mark out a plan for capturing the nest, and as advancing was a sure way of locating machine-guns and a prompt way of overwhelming them, we swept on in the spirit of our instructions and impatience. Captured machine-guns littered the paths of our battalions, in tribute to the effect of our impetuous rush upon gunners who continued to forget their orders to stand to the death when they saw the tidal wave of our soldiers about to swamp them.

As the day wore on and the enemy began to recover from the shock of the surprise of our initial onset, we encountered an increasing volume and furyof machine-gun fire from hill to hill across valleys, sweeping down ravines, plunging from crests and by indirect aim over crests, from village houses and from both directions where village streets crossed. At critical points it was supported by concentrations of shell-fire. Along that road, at the edge of this patch of woods, along that stretch of river bottom, the German's artillery laid down barrages over a space already swept by bullets, to hold positions by which he set as much store in his plans as we in ours.

"Why aren't you getting on?" division commanders asked, or tried to ask—as communication did not always permit the message to arrive promptly—when the pencilings on the map were not keeping up to the schedule of progress toward the objectives. It was an easy question; the answer might be in the lack of resolution of a regimental or battalion commander, in the character of the resistance to his troops, or in their disorganization under new and severe trials. After further ineffectual efforts the battalion and regimental commanders might say that progress was impossible without reserves.

Should the division commander send them? Expending his reserves on the first day of a long battle might place him in a dangerous position in face of a later and graver emergency; but he had the wordof a subordinate that they were necessary. Had that subordinate in his first serious engagement become too readily discouraged? What was the extent of his losses? They were a criterion for judging his balance of assets for continuing the attacks, though they did not include the exhaustion of the men, their mood of the moment, or the disruption ofliaisonof their units.

The division commander might sit rigid with the front of Jove, which he thought was the chief item of the military formula, and say: "I want no excuses. Take the position!" Or he might keep on pressing in his reserves, in the determination that his division would be up on time; for Corps Headquarters were depending on him. The pencilings moving toward the corps objective were his record in the battle. If the pencilings were in a V-shape, that was bad. It meant that some of his elements were in a salient, in danger of being "squeezed."

Sometimes the pencilings were farther advanced than the troops. The wish being father to the thought, observers who saw a charge entering a woods took it for granted that it would go through the woods. Aviators sometimes mistook German soldiers in movement for our own; again they misread the maps, and placed our troops on a ridge ahead of their actual position. Company leaders might make the same mistake. The incentive to"get there" involved eagerness to send back word that you were arriving. A little group of gallant men who pushed through a wood or gained a crest might have been swept back by machine-gun fire by the time their proud report had reached division headquarters. Instead of having commanding ground as a "jumping-off place" for the next stage of advance, they might be hugging the reverse slope, exposed to fire from three sides immediately they showed themselves.

Regular as well as reserve officers who had never before been in action were to prove again that no amount of study of the theory of war, invaluable as it is, may teach a man how to keep his head in handling a thousand or three thousand men under fire. West Point cadet drill, Philippine jungle and "paddy" dikes, Leavenworth staff school, army post routine, and border service had no precedent of experience for the problems of maneuver which they now had to solve. It was all very well to say that the men were all right; but another thing was keeping your men together. I saw a regular colonel violating, in a singular reaction to amateurishness, the simplest principle of organization—the same that keeps subordinates informed of the location of a business superior—by having no post of command where he or an adjutant could be found with orders or reports. Some colonels remained steadily at theirheadquarters, without absenting themselves for personal inspection in any emergency; others moved restlessly about the field, trying to apply to three thousand men the personal direction of a platoon commander. Every subordinate who witnessed such an exhibition by a superior was bound to lose confidence in the command. I am not thinking of a lack of physical bravery when I say that there were instances of colonels and brigadiers voicing pessimism in the presence of subordinates. They might have become good judges or good philosophers, but they were not meant by nature, at least in their lack of battle experience, to drive home an ambitious offensive movement. Others had too much blind initiative; they were the kind that would drive head downward at a stone wall. Others were amazingly cool, determined, and efficient. These the men would follow against any odds.

Being human, our men who symbolized the pencilings on the map had muscles and nerves which were subject to fatigue. They had no visualization of their goals. If they could have been shown a flag on a mountainside, which they must reach before they "knocked off" for the day, the incentive for keeping on would have been more directly applied. All they saw was the slope or woods ahead of them. Their knowledge of the battle plan was limited to their orders to keep on going. After nights whensuspense and suppressed excitement had allowed them little sleep, they had been going all day from 5.30 in the morning—going through barbed wire and trenches, over uneven ground, as they fought their way not only under fire but under the strain of that wearing mental concentration of trying to remember and apply all they had learned in their training and in previous actions.

Physically, the task set for our troops had seemed almost superhuman. Many had taken enough steps to cover in a straight line twice the distance they had traveled. To the eye of a hurrying observer, these myriad figures, whether dashing toward a machine-gun nest, or ducking to avoid an outburst of fire, or coming wounded across the fields, had the attraction of the ardor and fearlessness of youth in battle, while they brought many thoughts which were as far from the battlefield as the homes that had sent them forth.

We might say "check!" to the Germans if we had taken Montfaucon at the end of the first day. Montfaucon was the highest point on our way to the Lille-Metz railway except the Buzancy heights. It was visible from the old first-line trench system at Malancourt and from the Mort Homme on the banks of the Meuse, and it looked forward over the ground of the projected second day's advance.

It happened that I knew by travel that day how far it was from Headquarters to the front line. I might feel as well as appreciate the reasons of the officer and the soldier for disappointing Headquarters when I came to the end of my journey, where the tidal wave, expending itself, had left a platoon of infantry, without touch with the units on their right and left, washed up in a sunken road on the reverse slope of a hill in front of Montfaucon. On the bare crest of the hill lay the bodies of comrades who had fallen when the watchful German machine-gunners aimed at the human targets appearing in bold silhouette on the sky-line. It would have been madness for a handful of men without support to continue on against such blasts of cross-fire. They had fallen back, bringing their wounded, to await orders. Apart from the opposition they had met, the irregular landscape over which they had advanced was sufficient explanation of their inability to keep theirliaison. It made islands of the hills as it diverted the tidal wave into the channels of the ravines. Scattered American soldiers were moving about the neighborhood like hunters, beating up Germans who had taken cover among bushes and in holes.

There was a recess in the battle in the vicinity, with stretches of several seconds when the countryside seemed quite peaceful. Then for anotherquarter of a minute, only a single machine-gun might be firing with deliberately precise intervals between shots. Suddenly the whole pack broke into full cry at the sight of quarry on the ridge which forms the southwestern approach to the town from the Montfaucon woods. We must have this ridge before we took the town. As I looked in this direction, I saw a line of our men appearing above the crest, each figure sharp against the light blue sky. Their intervals seemed at first as exact as the teeth of a comb; then the teeth began to drop out as figures fell. For a few seconds longer the survivors strove against the blasts before they drew back and faced right and moved along under cover of the slope, apparently seeking a less exposed portion of the crest for another attempt.

The machine-gun fire died down into spiteful irregularity until the line wheeled again toward the crest. Their heads were hardly above it when, with the unity of an orchestra answering the conductor's baton, the diabolical whirring rattle began again with all its previous volume. Evidently quite as many guns had this portion of the ridge under their fire as the other. This time the men did not persist. In proper tactical wisdom they disappeared from the sky-line as quickly as a woodchuck dodges into his hole.

We had now definitely developed the strength ofthe enemy at this point. Possibly we had located some of his machine-guns. At least, a battalion commander had learned enough to realize that he must undertake a deliberate method adapted to the situation for silencing them, which of course meant delay in pushing forward toward the day's objective the pencilings in one small section of the Headquarters map. Yet it was such details as this, revealed to me in a pantomime of vivid and stark simplicity and brevity, which taken together made the whole for that abstraction to the soldier which is called the High Command.

"Is Montfaucon taken?" was the question of Headquarters when I arrived there in the evening. Some reports indicated that it was. This part of the line was the most extended, and its communications accordingly the most uncertain. There were other pencilings on the map which also had to be erased. If we had not gained all our objectives, this was not saying that we had not been astonishingly successful. Having, as it were, set out ambitiously to take the whole solar system between dawn and darkness, one of the planets still held out, with the fixed star of Buzancy heights in the distance.

There might be many small salients, but none of threatening importance in our new line. Despite the uneven battle experience of our divisions, all had done their part magnificently. Our gains were morethan a mile on our flank to four miles in the center, where we had made the bulge toward the summit of the whale-back. How far had we expended our momentum in our initial onset? What was the traffic situation? What of the morrow?

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