There was no levity in Gill’s manner nor speech and the others appeared to share his feelings, though Jennings’ statements generally caused a laugh. However joyful the squad may have felt over the resounding evidence of a new drive, they all sensed that the final hour or so before their probable delivery must hold for them the question of survival. They knew that their leader’s foreboding was correct; they would be furiously attacked by some of the re-established Huns, and in greater numbers than before, for then men had been needed to hold the line elsewhere. Therefore, it was a quiet and serious lot of young fellows that looked to their weapons and lay behind the rocks of the little basin as the continued sound of firing came slowly nearer and nearer. CHAPTER XVII THE WORLD’S GREATEST BATTLE CONSIDERING the numbers engaged, the severity of the defense, the difficulty of dislodging a foe entrenched with nature’s aid, and the dash, energy and destructive work of the offensive, the fight for the Argonne has no equal in the records of mankind. This has been the verdict of many witnesses; not alone those with the desire to give praise to their fellow Americans, but alien critics also have affirmed it. History has recorded many bloody encounters of modern times. Waterloo, the Bloody Angle, Pickett’s charge--these are but a few instances of the pluck and bravery that men will show when facing an equally determined enemy. The greatest war has furnished innumerable evidences that men are no less courageous than in former times. As we have seen, it was a trick of the Germans, practiced over and over again, to vacate a position under pressure and at night, when the victors had paused to reinforce and count results, to come back again, occupying much of the ground they had vacated during the day. But the Americans soon discovered this ruse and looked for it; they also followed the Huns more closely and held all of the ground taken from them. Greater dash, a more complete disregard for danger which amounted in many cases to individual foolhardiness, causing at the same time the enemy to feel that he was up against foemen that outclassed him in that sort of thing, had much to do with the winning streak that the Yanks maintained. The Germans fooled themselves into thinking that they were above defeat where the great forest, its ravines and hills, afforded them such protection, but this was the sort of thing that the Americans--many of them hunters, sportsmen, woodsmen, mountaineers, or with vacation experiences in such places and having the hereditary instincts of ancestors who were pioneers--now welcomed.