As a result they not only disagreed with the German view, but took counsel of their conviction in strategy which was to lull the enemy in his own conviction of his security and of their amateurishness. They had time to work out the plan by thorough instruction in every detail. In the first stage of the advance they had to descend a steep slope and cross the Forges brook. There they were to halt on a road on the other side of No Man's Land, to form up for the final act any units that had been delayed or become mixed. Being an accurate, card-index kind of division, the 33rd's records show that the road was reached in fifty-seven minutes, and that at the end of twenty minutes every man was in his place according to schedule. With the left regiment swinging past the Forges Wood, this might have exposed its flank, if the action of the right had not been properly timed; for everything depended upon each unit carrying out its part in the team-work punctually. Charging up to their hips in slime and up to their necks in water, the Illinois men proved that the swamps were not impassable. They took duckboards from the trenches and threw them over the stretches of barbed wire which protected the Wood where the swamps did not. Just as the defenders of the Wood were turning their machine-guns on the targets on their flanks, the right regiment "jumped" them in front. This gave them an opportunity for to-the-death resistance by firing in two directions; but they were too confused in the shattering of all their preconceptions to make use of it in face of those mud-plastered Americans springing bolt into their midst. They yielded readily. The swinging left had put the Juré Wood behind it, and, with only broken elements of the enemy now in its path, the 33rd had its whole line on the bank at noon. The right hinge of the Army secure, the maneuver had been so beautifully made and it was such a complete success that it attracted less attention than if the division had been obliged to endure the very hard fighting which skill and foresight had prevented. As the booty of its swift combing advance, the 33rd had taken 1,450 German prisoners, who wondered just what had happened to them and why, and seven 6-inch howitzers, two 110-millimeter guns, twenty pieces of field artillery, not to mention some trench mortars, fifty-seven machine-guns, a light railway, and a well-stocked engineer depot. The 33rd's own loss was 2 officers and 34 men killed, and 2 officers and 205 men wounded, and not a single man missing. To put it in another way, this division with its fondness for figures as the real test of military prowess, had captured nearly six Germans for every casualty of its own. This was certainly waging thrifty and profitable war.