The wooded front of the Fifth Corps--Where the Germans discounted the chance of an attack--Particularly by a division that had never been under fire--The Pacific Coast men through the woods for a five-mile gain--And, its artillery up, keeps on for nearly as much more--Into a dangerous position which cannot be held--The "hand-made" attack of the Ohioans--Surprise carries them in a rush through the pathless woods--Three days of unsupported advance against counter-attacks--Open country for the advance of the 79th up the valley to Montfaucon--And open country beyond toward Nantillois and the whale-back--The 79th "expended." Cameron's Fifth Corps, which made the central drive head on to the whale-back, relied, in mastering the distance it had to cover on the first day as the "bulge" of the Army movement, upon the freshness of its troops, whose inexperience would be only another incentive to hold up their end. No aspect of the plan of our command was more audacious or more thrilling than the decision to expend in one prodigious ruthless effort the energy of the 37th, 79th, and 91st Divisions and their impatience for action accumulated in their long period in training camps. [Illustration: MAP NO. 5 DIVISIONS IN THE SECOND STAGE OF THE MEUSE-ARGONNE BATTLE, OCTOBER 1ST-31ST.] It was in this that we defied accepted standards; in this that we carried to the seemingly quixotic limit our confidence in our ability to transform on short notice citizens into soldiers who would go bolt from the drill-ground into a charge that was to take an elaborate trench system as the prelude of from five to six miles of advance in the days of mobile interlocking machine-gun fire. Anyone who was surprised that they did not go as far as they were told to go on the first day had forgotten the power of modern weapons in defense, and was oblivious of the military significance of the ground which the Corps had to traverse. The right division, the 79th, had before it a comparatively woodless stretch following the Esnes-Montfaucon road among the hills to Montfaucon, but the other two divisions faced the German trenches at the edge of a deep belt, or rather mass, of woods as dense as the Argonne, which, though broken by only one open space of a breadth more marked than a roadway, had sectional names--Montfaucon, Véry, Béthincourt, Cheppy, Malancourt,--each taken from the name of the nearest neighboring town. The store which the Germans set by these woods had been shown by their stubborn resistance to the attacks of the French for their possession in 1915.