When artillery, in course of being withdrawn from the Saint Mihiel front to go to the Argonne front, had their horses killed, the weary survivors who were now to draw the guns could not be forced through according to the usual schedule. They had to cross the streams of traffic running to the Saint Mihiel front. At night all the roads were solid columns of men and vehicles that had to keep at the uniform pace of the slowest of its units lest motor transport, which could go fifteen miles an hour, in trying to pass tractor-drawn heavy artillery that could go three or four, should become imbedded in the mud and thus stall the whole column for hours. Thus the unprecedented strain of the Meuse-Argonne Battle, which was to endure for six weeks, began with the difficulties of mobilization. During the Château-Thierry operations we had had summer weather, when men could sleep in the open with comfort, when it was easy to repair broken roads and when motor trucks which got off the road did not sink into the mud. Now we had already entered the period of chill fall rains which made the ground porous and wet marching soldiers to the skin. Instead of time for reflection and reorganization, in applying the lesions of the Saint Mihiel salient, every officer and man was straining his utmost to make sure by improvisation, when organization failed and by sheer sleepless industry, of meeting with forced smiles each new contingency as it developed. Our three corps in line were, the first under General Liggett on the left, the fifth under General Cameron in the center, and the third under General Bullard on the right. The corps headquarters were established only four days before the attack. Unfamiliar except in theory, and from what they had learned at Saint Mihiel, with the problems of directing an army in a prolonged battle, they had not a quarter of the time for preparations which they ordinarily should have received even if they had had long experience. They did not know the division commanders or the divisions which were to serve under them, and the divisions did not arrive until the last moment. Artillery brigades, fresh from the training grounds where they had only received their guns, marched up to be assigned to divisions with which they had never cooperated in action. Batteries that had no horses depended upon batteries that had horses to be drawn into position. The coordination of infantry units for the attack was dependent upon coordination by paper directions rather than previous association.