While we are with the 28th, we shall follow its career through the Aire valley to the end. On the 8th neither the general situation in relation to the neighboring divisions nor its exhaustion warranted a general attack by the 28th; but it did not neglect a little chore, which gave it retributory satisfaction, in cleaning up the last of the machine-gun nests and any vagrant Germans remaining on the hateful Abbé. Its goal won, its honor avenged, it was now to have the rest which it had as fully earned as the name of the "Iron Division," which it was now being called. It was relieved on the night of the 8th-9th by the 82nd. In a marvelous endurance test of twelve days, in which the men had gone without cooked food under continual rains, the Pennsylvanians had suffered 6,149 casualties, while 1,200 officers and men had been sent to hospitals, ill as the result of the terrible strain and exposure. They had advanced over six miles. They had taken 550 prisoners and 8 guns in their plodding gains against fearful odds; and do not forget, as they will tell you, that they had also taken two German locomotives, most useful for bringing up supplies on a captured section of railroad which the engineers had repaired. The engineers particularly, and all the Pennsylvanians, were proud of that railroad--the 28th's own trunk line; but the proudest thought of these emaciated Guardsmen, as they marched away, was that they had not had to leave the conquest of the Taille l'Abbé to a fresh division. They had taken it themselves. Now Hills 223 and 180, which the 82nd had captured in its first day's fighting on the 7th, were as detached forts, nearer the eastern wall than the western, in a broad stretch of the valley. Their crests looked over a rolling stretch of bottom lands to the bluffs of the Forest's edge, which were so steep that the naked earth broken by landslides held only scattered dwarf trees and shrubs. Torrents dashed down the ravines during heavy rains. Scaling rather than assault was the word to describe an attempt at their mastery. Artillery was hidden on their crests, and machine-guns on their crests and in the favoring intricacies of the slopes. Northwest from Hill 180 the village of Cornay nestled at the foot of an escarpment flung out from the Forest almost to the river's bank. This promontory made of the stretch of bottom a kind of bay. While commanding in rear and flank the farther advance of the 1st on the opposite river wall, it could also turn a flanking fire on any charge across the bay toward the bluffs in addition to the plunging frontal fire from the bluffs. Cornay must be taken in order to gain the valley as far as Fléville. On the way across the bay, either to Cornay or to the bluffs, any charge must cross the Boulasson creek, which was unfordable at points. Thus this bay was a _cul de sac_; but a visible one. The All-Americas knew what to expect on their way to the heights.