Machine gun nests had been planted in every conceivable point of vantage from a camouflaged bush on the hillside to the concealed "lookout" in the tallest treetop. Cannon of every caliber had been placed throughout the woods and under the lea of each protecting hill or cliff. A system of narrow-gauge railroads sent its spurs into every part of the Forest, delivering ammunition to the guns and supplies to the men, even connecting by tunnel with some of the largest dugouts. The Boche had not held this stronghold undisturbed. The traditions of the battlefield, passed from lip to lip, told of numerous and costly offensives by the French and English, but always the same story of failure to take or hold the Forest. When the American offensive was ready to be launched the French were eager to gamble, first, that our dough-boys could not take the "untakable," and second, that if by any miraculous procedure they succeeded in breaking the German line, they could not _hold_ what they had taken. This did not mean that they doubted the courage or the ability of our men, but that they did have knowledge of the impregnable nature of the German stronghold. On that eventful morning near the end of September, the rainy season having started and the mud of the Argonne vying with the mud of Flanders, our guns began to cough and roar. For three terrific hours they spoke the language of the bottomless pit and caused the very foundations of the earth itself to quiver. Germans taken prisoner by our men afterward acknowledged that they had never heard anything so terrifying in their lives. Having sent over their letter of introduction, our boys followed in person with a shout and a dash. Over the top and through the wire entanglements of No Man's Land they fairly leaped their way. Hundreds of tons of barbed wire had been woven and interwoven between posts driven into the ground. These posts were in rows and usually stood about three feet out of the ground. The rows were four feet apart. Then through the trenches of the German front line they swept, and out across the open country which lay between them and the Forest. The marks of the four years' conflict were everywhere visible: the blackened and splintered remains of trees, the grass-covered shell-holes, the ruined towns and the wooden crosses, silent markers of the tombs of the dead. Besides these were the fresh holes in the fields and on the hillside where our guns had literally blasted the whole face of the ground. The shell-holes ranged from the washtub size made by the 75's to the great fissure-torn holes made by the big naval guns, and which would make an ample cellar for an ordinary dwelling house. I have seen horses which had fallen into these great holes shot and covered over because they could not be gotten out without a derrick.