Those captains and lieutenants, the company and platoon commanders, who were carrying out the instructions, must each be a general in his own limited field. The less experience his seniors had in preparing practical instructions, the more he might suffer for his want of experience in leading men in battle. With the conquered trenches behind him, he had to make sure that his men were in hand, and if he had been allowed no time for reorganization behind his shield, that was an error; for barrages might move too fast, in expressing the desire of commanders for speed. At the same time, the line officer had to identify by the map the ground on his front which he was to traverse and the positions he was to take as his part in that twenty miles of pulsing, weaving, and thrusting line. When you are seated before a table in calm surroundings, trying to follow the course of one company in an advance, you realize the limitations of your 1 to 20,000 map. It ought to be 1 to 10. More elements than any layman could imagine entered into the problem of the location of the command post from which a battalion commander was to direct the movements of one thousand men, or a regimental commander of three thousand, in action. All this, of course, represents sheer fundamentals in thoroughgoing military science; but we must have the fundamentals if we are to appreciate the accomplishment of our young army in the Meuse-Argonne battle. A prominent hill was easily recognized. If a village were in the line of your attack, that was a simple guide; but in a region where, unlike our country of scattered farmhouses, the farmers all live in villages, there was a paucity of buildings which might serve as landmarks. One of our men expressed the character of the terrain by saying that with every advance it all looked alike--hills, ridges, woods, and ravines; yet when you came close to the part which you were to attack it seemed "different from any other and a lot worse." We had to cross brooks and swamps as an incident to conquering the other features of the landscape. If we missed any kind of fighting on the first day of the battle, it was in store for us in the later stages.