I recollect that the first news we had at Army Headquarters in the Meuse-Argonne of the progress of the Second Corps said that our troops and the Australians had surrounded a division of Germans. In view of what happened, this report now has a tragic mockery. The plan of the attack was made by the Australian Corps. The 30th Division was to be on the right; it went into position on the forward ridge, which in its sector was not as exposed as in that of the 27th. When the New Yorkers went into position, they faced the unpleasant fact that the British whom they relieved had not advanced beyond their own old outpost line. This meant that they must make a preliminary attack on September 27th in order to gain their assigned jumping-off place for the main attack on the 29th. Their daylight charge went home in gallant fashion, but, exposed, when they reached the crest, to machine-gun fire and to the blasts of artillery fire from behind the tunnel, they fought all day on the Knoll and among the ruins of the buildings of Gillemont and Quennemont farms. In and out of trenches, "mopping up" machine-gun nests only to have others reappear from sunken roads and subterranean passages which were said to lead back to the canal tunnel itself, they paid heavy casualties for a persistence which left them that night and the next day hugging the slopes with the crest still unmastered. It was not on the cards that the main attack, which was only one of a sequence in the general offensive movement, should be delayed on this account. What was to have been taken in a small bite must now be taken in a big bite. The first ridge would be rolled under in the mighty wave which was then to sweep down the apron and through the barbed wire and trenches up the slopes and over the crest of the main ridge and of the tunnel and on into the open country beyond. The fighting vigor of our Second Corps, nursed in training for such a purpose, was to be expended in one morning's tremendous effort; and at noon the 3rd and 5th Australian Divisions were to pass through our two divisions and to continue the advance with all possible speed on the heels of the broken enemy. For the American was not the only ambitious staff when it took to marking objectives on a map. Most ambitious of all was Marshal Foch. Our two divisions had all the "Don Acks," or divisional artillery, of the Australians, a total, with the Corps artillery, of 438 guns, or one for every forty feet of their front, to make their shields; and beside an array of British tanks the only American heavy tank unit in France. With the American divisions' artillery brigades, which had never seen the British front, supporting other divisions in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, who shall say that there was not coöperation among the Allies?