They were there to see the game through. The sooner it was through, the sooner they would go home. Veterans who had spent one winter in France did not want to spend another; those who had not did not care to try the experience. They had no more reason for liking France than a man who sleeps on the ground in Central Park in December, eating cold rations, under machine-gun fire, has for liking New York City. "I want to get back to the cactus!" as an Arizona man said. All were fighting to reach home and be free men again; freedom having a practical application for them. The longer they were in France, the more they felt that they were fighting for America. As Americans they were on their mettle. Such was the spirit that carried them as Americans through the Meuse-Argonne, which was the American army's battle. XXVIII THE MILL OF BATTLE Wet misery--"Penetratin'er and penetratin'er"--The men behind the lines--Back to "rest"--Replacements as bundles of man-power--Reliefs in the fox-holes--Before and during an attack--Dodging shells--A struggle to keep awake--And "on the job"--Will, endurance, and drive--The wedge of pressure. As the processes of the Argonne battle became more systematic, they became more horrible. They would have been unendurable if emotion had not exhausted itself, death become familiar, and suffering a commonplace. The shambles were at the worst during the driving of our wedges in the second and third weeks of October. The capacity to retain vitality and will-power in the face of cold and fatigue, and not to become sodden flesh indifferent to what happened, was even more important than courage, which was never wanting. The thought of ever again knowing home comforts became a mirage; a quiet trench sector, with its capacious dugouts and occasional shell-bursts, became a reminiscence of good old days. Paradise for the moment would be warmth--just warmth--and a dry board whereon to lay one's head until nature, sleep finished, urged you to rise. We were learning what our Allies, and the enemy too, suffered in the winter fighting of Verdun and the Ypres salient. The Europeans, we must not forget, were fighting in their own climate. They were used to having their oxygen served in the humidity of a clammy sponge pressed close to their nostrils; we to having our oxygen served in dry air. We suffered less at home when ice covered lakes and streams than in mists and rains in France at forty and fifty degrees. There is sunshine on snow-drifts and frosty window-panes in our northern States in midwinter, as well as on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico; but we never saw sunshine, as we know sunshine, in the Meuse-Argonne, though there were days which the natives called fair, when the sun was visible as through a moist roof of cheese-cloth. "I'd charge a machine-gun nest single handed, if I could first sit on a steam radiator for half an hour," one of our soldiers said.