It was the Southwesterners' first taste of machine-gun nests. They had no standards of previous experience for judgment as to the density of fire which would warrant a halt. Their orders were to keep on going; and they kept on. In front of them, as they crossed the open, was a wooded ravine. Our guns could not bombard it with any appreciable effect upon its nests, which were sending a tornado of bullets into the 36th's charge in addition to the shower of shells from the German guns. The Southwesterners who were meeting both bullets and shells for the first time did not fall back before this deadly combination of artillery and machine-gun fire, which would have dismayed hardened veterans at their best, until they had kept faith with Alamo traditions by losing a third of their numbers. The 2nd's engineers now came up for a fighting part in protecting our hard-pressed flanks. We withdrew our front to the town, which we held. Meanwhile, though the French had taken Médéah farm, the division's right was still well back of the line of Saint-Etienne. All day of the 9th was spent in re-forming our position after the see-sawing conflict of the 8th; but the Germans, far from showing any signs of withdrawal, made a counter-attack on the French beyond Médéah farm and on our Regulars, who repulsed it with their rifle fire. The race-horse division, which had been hurried from the mud of the Saint-Mihiel sector without time to rest, had been doing a steeple-chase for nine days. Physical exhaustion claimed it for its own. As it withdrew, with casualties of 4,771 and the capture of 1,963 prisoners from eight German divisions, the Regulars and Marines and the French of the Twenty-first Corps had the satisfaction of knowing that German guns had fired their last shot at the cathedral and the ruins of the city of Rheims. The Texans and Oklahomans who now took up the battle were assigned the tired artillery of the 2nd, as they had no guns of their own. They lacked horses, transport, and nearly everything a division should have, except rifles, which were in the hands of men who knew how to use them. On the morning of the 10th their reconnaissance in force showed that the enemy artillery and machine-gun fire was as powerful as ever. It was hardly in the books that an inexperienced division should begin a movement in the dark; but the French being ready to advance on the left, the 36th began an attack that evening.