The Metropolitan Division in the Argonne proper--Six weeks without rest--Direct attack impossible in the Forest--Similar history of the Keystone Division--Pennsylvania pride--Its mission the "scalloping" of the Forest edge--The stalwart men of the 35th Division--Storming the Aire heights--Fine spirit of the Pacific Slope Division--A five-mile advance projected for the Ohio Division--North and South in the 79th Division--Never in line before, it was to strike deepest. Three National Army divisions were to be in the initial attack. It was a far cry for the men who a year before had tumbled into the training camps at home, without knowledge of the manual of arms or of the first elements of army etiquette and discipline, to the march of trained divisions forward into line of battle in France. On the extreme left of the line was the Liberty Division, from New York City. The metropolitans were given the task of taking not a town, but a forest, with which their name will be as long connected as with our largest city. Its left flank on the western edge of the Argonne Forest and its right on the eastern, the 77th had a long divisional front of over four miles; but it would have been unsatisfied if it had had to share the Forest. The Forest was its very own. The public at home seemed to have the idea that the whole battle was fought there. If it had been, the 77th would have had to share credit with twenty other divisions, which had equally stiff fighting in patches of woods which were equally dense even if they were not called forests. If the Forest were stripped bare of its trees, it would present a great ridge-like bastion cut by ravines, with irregular hills and slopes of a character which, even though bald, would have been formidable in defense. Its timber had nothing in common with the park-like conception of a European forest, in which the ground opens between tree trunks in lines as regular as in an orchard. If the Argonne had been without roads, the Red Indians might have been as much at home in its depths as in the primeval Adirondacks. Underbrush grew as freely as in second-growth woods in our New England or Middle States; the leaves had not yet begun to fall from the trees. It had not been until September 15th that the 77th had been relieved from the operations in the Château-Thierry region. A new division, fresh from training at the British front and in Lorraine, it had gone into line in August to hold the bank of the Vesle against continuous sniping, gassing, and artillery fire; and later, after holding the bottom of a valley with every avenue of approach shelled in nerve-racking strain, it had shown the mettle of the Americans of the tenements by fighting its way forward for ten days toward the Aisne Canal. It had been in action altogether too long according to accepted standards, though this seems only to have tempered its steel for service in the Argonne.