All the headquarters and camps were under canopies of foliage which screened them from aërial detection. Battalions come here from the death and filth and misery of violent sectors settled down to a holiday existence in an environment associated with a vacation woods. Of course there was a war in progress, but they knew it only through sending out detachments to keep watch and maintain the trenches in repair. The Landwehr men saw enough shell-bursts to say that they had been under fire. Indeed, one was occasionally wounded. There was no need of trench raids for information in a mutually accepted stalemate. To fire more than enough shells to keep up the postures of war might bring retaliation which would interfere with smoking your pipe and drinking your beer at leisure. After this pacific routine had been long established and so much effort and pains had been spent in improvements, appeared these outsiders of the Liberty Division in the rude haste that they might show in a subway station at home. They had no respect for the traditional privacy of a gentleman's country estate. However, the irritated occupants were no passive resistants. They had thought out in precise terms how they would defend their fastness against any such outrageous lawlessness. They knew every road and path, and how to make use of their ideal woodland cover. They might not be strong in the front line, but as the military men say they were "echelonned deep." There was no line of resistance in the first stages of the advance, but many successive points of resistance, ready to receive the invader in turn, punishing him severely in his slow progress if he were not repulsed. But even they in their chosen positions, covering avenues where the foliage was not dense, could not see far. This developed close-quarters fighting from the start. As the Germans had particularly depended upon light railways in the Argonne, the roads, except transversal ones, had been neglected. This did not matter, so far as it concerned bringing up the artillery. There was no maneuvering artillery in the thick woods. Even if there had been, it could not get any angle of fire for shells which would burst short of their targets against tree-trunks. It was exclusively an infantry fight except for the machine-guns and the baby _soixante-quinze_ or 37-millimeter guns, in which the heads of the Americans bobbed through the thickets in search of the hidden heads of the defenders. A platoon commander might not keep watch of his own men in the maze--let alone see what the platoons on his flank were doing.