Being human, our men who symbolized the pencilings on the map had muscles and nerves which were subject to fatigue. They had no visualization of their goals. If they could have been shown a flag on a mountainside, which they must reach before they "knocked off" for the day, the incentive for keeping on would have been more directly applied. All they saw was the slope or woods ahead of them. Their knowledge of the battle plan was limited to their orders to keep on going. After nights when suspense and suppressed excitement had allowed them little sleep, they had been going all day from 5.30 in the morning--going through barbed wire and trenches, over uneven ground, as they fought their way not only under fire but under the strain of that wearing mental concentration of trying to remember and apply all they had learned in their training and in previous actions. Physically, the task set for our troops had seemed almost superhuman. Many had taken enough steps to cover in a straight line twice the distance they had traveled. To the eye of a hurrying observer, these myriad figures, whether dashing toward a machine-gun nest, or ducking to avoid an outburst of fire, or coming wounded across the fields, had the attraction of the ardor and fearlessness of youth in battle, while they brought many thoughts which were as far from the battlefield as the homes that had sent them forth. We might say "check!" to the Germans if we had taken Montfaucon at the end of the first day. Montfaucon was the highest point on our way to the Lille-Metz railway except the Buzancy heights. It was visible from the old first-line trench system at Malancourt and from the Mort Homme on the banks of the Meuse, and it looked forward over the ground of the projected second day's advance. It happened that I knew by travel that day how far it was from Headquarters to the front line. I might feel as well as appreciate the reasons of the officer and the soldier for disappointing Headquarters when I came to the end of my journey, where the tidal wave, expending itself, had left a platoon of infantry, without touch with the units on their right and left, washed up in a sunken road on the reverse slope of a hill in front of Montfaucon. On the bare crest of the hill lay the bodies of comrades who had fallen when the watchful German machine-gunners aimed at the human targets appearing in bold silhouette on the sky-line. It would have been madness for a handful of men without support to continue on against such blasts of cross-fire. They had fallen back, bringing their wounded, to await orders. Apart from the opposition they had met, the irregular landscape over which they had advanced was sufficient explanation of their inability to keep their _liaison_. It made islands of the hills as it diverted the tidal wave into the channels of the ravines. Scattered American soldiers were moving about the neighborhood like hunters, beating up Germans who had taken cover among bushes and in holes.