Campaigners who have been for a long time sleeping on doors and the hard ground, when they try a bed again find, as I found on one occasion, that it is so unnaturally soft that they lie down on the floor before they can sleep. The men of the 4th had become so accustomed to enfilade shell-fire that they would hardly have felt at home without it. If they had been receiving shells from the rear as well as from front and flank, I think that General Hines would only have set his jaw the harder, and his bull-dogs would have said: "We thought we'd be hearing from you. Now we know the worst. But you can't make us let go." When they took a piece of woods from the Germans, it was immediately gassed. Some of them thought little more of putting on their gas masks than a baseball player of putting on his mitt. Already a veteran division when they came into line, they had taken an excoriating course in practical warfare which made their previous experience comparatively that of a grammar school. There could be nothing new in store for them in the attack on October 4th; they could be under none of the illusions of fresh troops in their first plunge into the cauldron. Army ambition chose to make them another wedge--we were falling into the habit of wedges as the only means to progress--which was to take the Fays Wood; then the Forest Wood (Bois de Forêt), by crossing open ground under the enfilade of Brieulles and all the guns on the other side of the Meuse. This may have seemed a reasonable mission for them, as they were already so hardened to flanking fire. Indeed the flank of this division was exposed in its drive down the Meuse valley in much the same way as the 1st's on the Aire wall, with the difference that its right carried down the slopes falling toward the river in plain view of the heights on the other side. The 4th could be trusted to do not only its valorous but its professional best. In view of the galleries of guns overlooking the sector, it seems superfluous to say that it had not enough artillery support. The bull-dogs had given up calling for artillery assistance. They had been under superior artillery fire so long that they took it for granted that they would have to attack under support of artillery inferior to the enemy's when they drove their wedge into tiers of machine-gun nests; but they had in their favor their amazing capacity for judging where shells were going to hit and taking cover before they burst, for slipping out from under barrages without losing their heads, and thus keeping their formations, and for filtering in between concentrations. It was amazing how many German shells were required to make a casualty in the 4th; otherwise there would not have been enough men of the division left for a charge on the morning of October 4th, when their waves went forward with that suppleness of adaptability which is the difference between drill-ground and veteran precision.