There might be many small salients, but none of threatening importance in our new line. Despite the uneven battle experience of our divisions, all had done their part magnificently. Our gains were more than a mile on our flank to four miles in the center, where we had made the bulge toward the summit of the whale-back. How far had we expended our momentum in our initial onset? What was the traffic situation? What of the morrow? IX THE ATTACK SLOWS DOWN The call goes back for artillery--And at night for the rolling kitchens--The staff interferes with sleep--Our part meant no stopping--Keeping at the roads during the night--Montfaucon on the second day--Then drive for the whale-back--Enemy resistance holds our exhaustion--Settling down in the rain to slow progress. Moving on their feet, with each man's course his road through the trench system and across the country beyond, the infantrymen, as they hourly increased their distance ahead of the part of the army moving on wheels, were calling oftener for artillery than for reserves. They needed shells to destroy machine-gun nests, to silence enemy batteries, and to make barrages to support their farther advance as resistance began to develop. There were equally urgent appeals for machine-gun battalions to meet the German machine-gun opposition in kind. Their spray of bullets, in indirect fire over the heads of the men in a charge, was another form of shield, the more desired when the protection of the artillery was lacking. The machine-gunners, who called themselves the "Suicide Club," were soldiers both of the wheel and the foot. Their light carts did not have to wait on the stout passageway over the trench system which even the light artillery required. Yet some of them had been marooned, to their inexpressible disgust; for it was their part in an emergency to press on to the firing line through the shell-fire which may sweep the roads back of the infantry. The place of the artillery was as near the actual front as orders and traffic jams would permit. How the artillery chafed on the leash! Not only duty but the gunner's promised land was beyond the barrier of the trench system which stayed his progress. Open warfare called to him from the free sweep of the landscape. The seventy-fives had come into their own again as mobile living units which would unlimber in the fields close behind the moving infantry, instead of playing the part of coast artillery behind fortifications. There would be no need to bother about camouflage. They would move about so rapidly that the enemy could not locate them; or if he did--well, that was all in the game. Their protection and the protection of the infantry would be in the blasts overwhelming the enemy's fire.