The only negotiations in his province and in that of the Allied armies were of the kind they had been using for four years: the kind which had brought the Germans to their present state of mind. The prospect of peace should make us fight all the harder, as a further argument for the enemy to yield speedily. Not until the day of the armistice did our preparations diminish, at home or in France, for carrying on the war on an increasing scale of force. Throughout October and the first ten days of November our cablegrams to Washington continued to call for all the material required for four million men in the summer of 1919. Indiscreet as it would have been to encourage the enemy by confessing to our paucity of numbers and lack of material in the summer of 1917, we might lay all our cards on the table in the autumn of 1918. Liggett's attack of October 14th was our last effort which could be called a general attack before the final drive beginning November 1st, which broke the German line. The general attack of September 26th had broken through the old trench system for deep gains; that of October 4th, with the driving of two wedges on either side of the whale-back, had taken the Aire valley and the gap of Grandpré, and brought us up to the Kriemhilde Stellung, or main line of resistance of the whale-back; that of October 14th aimed to drive a wedge on either side of the Romagne heights, taking the Kriemhilde, the two wedges meeting at Grand Carré farm in their converging movement to deliver the heights into our hands. Thus Army ambition was soaring again. If it had succeeded, we should have been up to the Freya Stellung, another fragmentary trench system, the second and inferior line of resistance of the whale-back, and we might not have had to wait another two weeks for victory. The progress of the other armies summoned us, as it had at every stage of the battle, to a superhuman effort to reach the German line of communications, which might now mean a complete military disaster for the enemy. The 32nd was still facing the Côte Dame Marie and the town of Romagne in front of the loop in the Kriemhilde. On its left was the 42nd, which had just relieved the exhausted 1st and was to drive the western wedge through the trench system of the Chatillon ridge and on through the Romagne Wood and the large Bantheville Wood.