Having successfully accomplished one piece of work, the American Army received as its reward another piece of work. The reward consisted in the fact that the second task assigned to Pershing's men was, perhaps, the hardest possible at any point in the line. Since 1915 the Argonne Forest had been a rest area for the German Army. Everything had been done to make the position impregnable, and so it was in theory. But the Americans broke that theory and took the forest. So confident were the Germans of their tenancy that they had built all sorts of palatial underground dwellings. Barring light, there was no modern convenience which these dugouts (although that is no fit name) did not possess. Some had running water. All the most pretentious ones had feather-beds, and the big underground rooms were gay with pictures and furniture stolen from the French. The defenses of the positions in the forest included miles and miles of barbed wire, sometimes hidden in the underbrush, and again carried around tree-trunks higher than a man could reach. There were high concrete walls to stop the progress of tanks and deep-pit traps into which they might fall. And machine guns were everywhere. The Meuse-Argonne campaign, which falls into three phases, reads far differently than the taking of St. Mihiel. Except in its early stages this was no grand running, flawless offensive without a hitch worth mentioning. In the nature of things it could not be so. The Argonne was less susceptible to the laws of military strategy. Warfare in these woods became a struggle between small detached units. Much of the fighting took place in the dark and practically all of it in the rain. The American victory was a triumph of the bomb and the rifle, and perhaps the wire-cutter should be added, over the machine-gun. In many encounters the opposing units fired at each other from short ranges, and directed their fire solely by the flashes of the other fellow's machine-gun. War in the Argonne Forest was a cat-and-dog fight, and Germany was destined to play the cat's usual rôle, though she clawed her hardest. And yet though many of the phases of the Meuse-Argonne were primitive and elemental in their nature, sound strategy lay behind the campaign. General Pershing in his vivid report explains not only the necessity for the campaign but the objects which he sought and gained. St. Mihiel shook the confidence of the Germans, but neither that success nor those scored by other allied armies was sufficient to batter the Germans into defeat.