out Gibraltarlike into the valley. Finally, on the extreme left was the 77th, National Army from New York (now under command of Alexander), facing the heart of the formidable Argonne Forest. Some of these divisions had more difficult obstacles than others to overcome. Their relative position in line was due less to a strategic arrangement, with any view to their experience or to their exhaustion in relation to their objectives, than to the relation of their positions to the roads by which they had had to travel in reaching the front. Up to this time the 4th, the 77th, and the 28th had probably seen the most fighting. They had just come from the Château-Thierry operations and in common with all the other divisions, were short of transport and had to make forced marches. All the men of all the divisions had either been sleeping in box cars on railroad trains or they had been in the miserable crowded billets of small villages, getting what rest, after marching at night, they could during the day, in the midst of the rumble of traffic. No corps, divisional, regimental, or battalion commander, no chief of one of the staff sections who had anything to do with the direction of traffic, could say quite how this was accomplished, except by sleepless vigil and grim, sweating effort, but the fact was that the miracle had happened; for on the night of September 24, 1918, every division was in position, with a thin fringe of the French remaining in the front line in order to prevent the Germans, if they took any prisoners, from identifying the number of American divisions which were present. Marshal Foch had now postponed the attack until the 26th; this gave the men a day in which to rest as much as they could, and a little more time for the artillery and staff to make its preparation. General Pershing, who was to direct the battle in person, had taken up his headquarters in the city hall of the village of Souilly on the "sacred road" from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun where the French commanders had planned the defense against the great German offensive of 1916.