There was a recess in the battle in the vicinity, with stretches of several seconds when the countryside seemed quite peaceful. Then for another quarter of a minute, only a single machine-gun might be firing with deliberately precise intervals between shots. Suddenly the whole pack broke into full cry at the sight of quarry on the ridge which forms the southwestern approach to the town from the Montfaucon woods. We must have this ridge before we took the town. As I looked in this direction, I saw a line of our men appearing above the crest, each figure sharp against the light blue sky. Their intervals seemed at first as exact as the teeth of a comb; then the teeth began to drop out as figures fell. For a few seconds longer the survivors strove against the blasts before they drew back and faced right and moved along under cover of the slope, apparently seeking a less exposed portion of the crest for another attempt. The machine-gun fire died down into spiteful irregularity until the line wheeled again toward the crest. Their heads were hardly above it when, with the unity of an orchestra answering the conductor's baton, the diabolical whirring rattle began again with all its previous volume. Evidently quite as many guns had this portion of the ridge under their fire as the other. This time the men did not persist. In proper tactical wisdom they disappeared from the sky-line as quickly as a woodchuck dodges into his hole. We had now definitely developed the strength of the enemy at this point. Possibly we had located some of his machine-guns. At least, a battalion commander had learned enough to realize that he must undertake a deliberate method adapted to the situation for silencing them, which of course meant delay in pushing forward toward the day's objective the pencilings in one small section of the Headquarters map. Yet it was such details as this, revealed to me in a pantomime of vivid and stark simplicity and brevity, which taken together made the whole for that abstraction to the soldier which is called the High Command. "Is Montfaucon taken?" was the question of Headquarters when I arrived there in the evening. Some reports indicated that it was. This part of the line was the most extended, and its communications accordingly the most uncertain. There were other pencilings on the map which also had to be erased. If we had not gained all our objectives, this was not saying that we had not been astonishingly successful. Having, as it were, set out ambitiously to take the whole solar system between dawn and darkness, one of the planets still held out, with the fixed star of Buzancy heights in the distance.