The 82nd having taken over a portion of its line, the 28th had been able to concentrate its forces on the remainder. Though by all criteria the 28th should have been counted as already "expended," it had an access of energy at the prospect of attacking under more favorable circumstances the positions which had so long held it back. After building a footbridge across the Aire, the right regiment charged across the level toward the village of Châtel-Chéhéry, at the base of the heights. This time the Pennsylvanians meant to put more than patrols into the village. Lashed by gun-fire and whipped by machine-gun fire from the heights which had them seemingly at their mercy, units were riddled and their officers killed, with resulting dispersion as undaunted survivors sought for dead spaces and cover. The colonel in command fell mortally wounded by a machine-gun bullet while directing his men. His soldiers avenged him not only by taking and holding Châtel-Chéhéry, but that night they took Hill 244, the ridge following south to the Taille l'Abbé, silencing its galling fire on the river bottoms. So much for the right. The left regiment was again to attack the Taille l'Abbé. This, being farther south, and toward the rear, than Châtel-Chéhéry, which was in turn south of the 82nd's front, further illustrates the anomalous tactical situation and the interdependence of all the diverse and treacherous elements of ground and dispositions in the problem of supporting the driving of the 1st's wedge. In the course of their arduous ten days' effort to carry out the original plan of "scalloping" the Forest edge to protect the frontal attack of the 77th through the Forest, the Pennsylvanians had developed a sinuous line around the slopes which in places ran at right angles to our battlefront as a whole. It was a line with outposts holding ravines, and groups clinging to vantage points of all kinds, who, in their fox-holes, were the present masters of their destiny, isolated from communication by day and approachable only by silent crawling under cover of darkness. This process of infiltration had bent a shepherd's crook around the Taille l'Abbé. All the whittling of ten long days came to a head in the attack of October 7th, whose ax's blow cut deep into the Forest to La Viergette, past the south flank of the Taille l'Abbé, whose defenses must now crumple under the additional pressure from the north.