With no thought except to keep on going, when the Ohioans emerged from the woods into the open, they pressed on toward the commanding positions of Montfaucon on their right. The fact that there was nothing like a practicable road for their transport through the woods behind them now developed a handicap which they appreciated keenly in their eager appetites and the thought of shields for the next days' attacks. Though tanks and artillery were of no service in the woods, they were needed now. The tanks assigned to assist the Ohioans as they came into the open did not arrive until the evening, when they were short of gasoline. The artillery, by the use of snatch ropes, managed to bring up one battalion of guns to the south of the ravine. When rain began to fall, it made the woodland earth soft, hampering the efforts of the engineers, who themselves labored without food all the day and all through the night and all the next day without pause, as they dug and chopped away roots and cut saplings for corduroys in making a passage through that four-mile stretch of forest---and _forêt_ it was though called a _bois_--which separated the fighters from their beleaguered supplies. Signal corps carts, so necessary to lay the wire for the communications which would enable the infantry to send in reports and receive orders promptly, and the small arms ammunition carts, which would keep soldiers who were without their shields from being without cartridges as well, were forced through by dint of an arduous persistence in answer to the urgency of the call. Rolling kitchens with warm meals could do no more rolling than if they were hotel kitchens. Ambulances had to wait at the edge of the forest for wounded brought three and four miles on stretchers or plodding on foot or hobbling on canes and crutches made from tree limbs.