All this time the 80th on the left, which was swinging past the trench, was suffering from flanking fire from the machine-guns which the 3rd was trying to overcome. On the night of the 12th, the 3rd relieved units of the 80th, extending its sector. This frequent realignment in divisional sectors only made more difficult the repeated re-forming of the lines within the sector due to set-backs and casualties. The next day the elements of the 3rd which had taken over in the Peut de Faux Wood found themselves, after a terrific outburst of shell-fire, facing a strong German counter-attack. They had resisted German attacks before this on the Marne. At one point they withdrew from the line of the barrage; but when the barrage lifted, and they looked the enemy infantry in the eye at close quarters, they never budged. There may have been faults in the command of the 3rd in this baffling problem of tactics on open slopes and ridges where communications were under the fire of artillery from both the whale-back and the heights across the Meuse, but there was no fault in the dependable infantry. Here, as along the rest of the front in the middle of October, we were learning that the enemy, having lost advantageous ground in the defense of the whale-back, was to hold the final heights with all the more stubbornness. In the successes from October 4th to 11th the 3rd had won one of the most conspicuous. After two weeks in line its endurance was not exhausted. It was now to begin preparing for the general attack of October 14th, which is another phase of the battle. Support on its right flank, which had been essential to its progress, had been given by the peripatetic Blue Ridge men. The veterans of Stonewall Jackson's flying columns would have felt at home in the 80th Division. We know how well it had fought for three days in the initial attack that broke the old fortifications. On September 28th, when the 80th had been "squeezed out" of the narrowing Third Corps sector, its artillery and one infantry regiment had also remained in the fighting with the 4th Division, while the three other regiments had been marched around to be in readiness to assist the 37th in repelling a counter-attack against the Montfaucon woods. Now the Blue Ridge men were returned to become the left flank of the Third Corps on familiar ground. For such rapid travelers Army ambition had set a no less rapid pace on the map than for the 3rd. They were to keep on driving until they were through the Kriemhilde Stellung between Cunel and the Meuse. It was not fair to call them a fresh division, unless hard fighting and hard marching were counted a warming-up exercise, and going without sleep a tonic.