As the 79th had open country to traverse, it ought to go fast. With adjoining divisions clearing the walls of the valley leading up to Montfaucon, it was supposed to be marching over a boulevard compared to the route which the 37th had in the Montfaucon forest. Indeed every division was given the idea that all it had to do was to keep deployed and moving according to schedule. As for the distance itself which the 79th had to travel, any golfer may measure it as two and a half times that of an eighteen-hole round, with a quarter of the distance through traps and bunkers, and the rest altogether in the rough of a surpassingly hilly course, while he carries a rifle and a soldier's pack and ammunition. In the immediate foreground was a belt of weed-grown shell-craters, their edges joining, the passage being further complicated by the ruins of two villages--Haucourt and Malancourt--within the area of the trench system. On the left, over the moist slippery weeds of the shell-craters, the men could not keep pace in the mist with the barrage, which had been made specially rapid in order to urge them to the rapid movement required; but this delay did not prove important. From Montfaucon the German observers could see the wave of khaki figures distinctly as they came down the slope toward the valley. It was a sight to thrill any veteran with professional admiration of the drill-ground precision of these young soldiers in dipping and rising with the folds of the ground. There seemed not enough superfluous fat among the division's privates to have given a single war profiteer that rotundity with which we associate the corpulency of a parvenu's fortune. They were pantherishly lean, trained down to elastic sinews and supple muscles. In every eye there was a direct and eager glance, quick in response to any order. Looking at these thousands of athletes, with their clean-cut and intelligent faces, one was not surprised that the Army command thought that to such men nothing was impossible. For the first three hours they made a parade of their daring mission as a flying wedge. They had only to continue to march, each man guiding by the man on his right and left, while the sun shone genially, and war, once they were through the trench system, was little more than a stroll across country in excellent company. The observers on Montfaucon might not gratify the appetite of their eyes by sending over barrages of shell-fire into such a distinct target. All the Germans' available artillery force, which was slight at that time, must be concentrated elsewhere. Let those American amateurs come on! There was trouble in store for them.