In the trench system before the Forest, the "Liberty" men of the 77th met comparatively slight resistance, their chief trouble being to maintain the uniformity of their advance through the fortifications and across the shell-craters, over the tricky ground of sharp ridges and gullies littered with torn tree-trunks and limbs. The division staff had in vain sought opportunities for flanking maneuvers. A straight frontal attack must be made. "There's the Forest. Go through it!" paraphrases the simple orders of the division commander. This put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the young platoon and company commanders. They knew that they could depend upon one thing. There was nothing but forest ahead of them. They need not concern themselves with any open fields, though they would have their share of swamps and ravines, which would not lessen the difficulty of keeping their units in line through the thickets.
If the French "scalloping" on the left of the Forest, and the 28th Division "scalloping" on the right of the Forest, did not drive in their protecting wedges, a cross-fire would hold the 77th's flanks back while its center, driving ahead, would be caught between the infantry and machine-gun fire from the Germans on either flank. If the French and the 28th fully succeeded in their mission, then, as we already know, all the 77th would have to do would be to "mop up" any Germans who failed to withdraw in time from the pressure on either side. According to this plan the 77th was to have an easy time. The plan failing to work out, the 77th had anything but an easy time.
The Forest was held, as it frequently had been, I understand, by Landwehr troops. Some of the old fellows, who were not sturdy enough for real warfare, had spent months and even years there. They considered that they had the squatter right of occupation to the Argonne. There were theaters, rest camps, and well-appointed hospitals, with enough verboten signs along the paths to alleviate homesickness in a foreign land. Isolated in their peaceful solitude, where they could be cool in summer and comfortable in winter, they took the interest in adding to the comforts of their sylvan surroundings of a city man in his new place in the country. Positive artistry was achieved in the camp of the German commanding general. The walls of his office and sitting-room were wainscoted, with a snug ante-room where orderlies might attend and messengers might wait. The heating arrangements literally afforded hot water at all hours. A spacious dining-room was supplied from a commodious kitchen. If the French began putting over heavy shells, interrupting the German officers at their chess game or in reading the Cologne Gazette, it was only a few steps to a stairway that led to an electric-lighted chamber so deep in the earth that it was perfectly safe from a direct hit by the largest calibers.
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.
On the first day the 77th had practically reached its objectives, on the second it was to suffer the same loss of momentum as other divisions. The "scalloping" on the edges of the Forest, however valorous, could not keep up to schedule. If the Forest boundaries had been straight lines on a plain, the result might have been different. Liaison over the escarpments in the valley of the Aire and the hills and ravines on the left became a nightmare. Still the orders were "Push ahead!" to battalions or companies which were not up. If under this spur they advanced beyond their flanks, then the flanks were to "push ahead!" Thus in a process of see-sawing platoons and companies continued to make progress. The units in the middle of the Forest saw nothing but trees and underbrush. All the world was forest to them. Those who found themselves on the edge looked out on stretches of the great battlefield under puffs of shell smoke, and to the going and coming of aeroplanes in another world, and possibly were forced to seek shelter in the Forest by bursts of machine-gun fire to which they were exposed from other divisional sectors.
So it was not surprising that the men of the 77th, immersed in the Forest depths, should think that they were fighting the whole battle. They knew nothing of the "scalloping" tactics. Their horizon was confined to a few square yards. To them the Argonne had no appeal of a holiday woods. Sylvan glades, which the poet might admire, meant stumbling down one side and crawling up the other, with ears keen for the whipping sound which might signify that they were in an ambush. They might not stop in for a nap at the rest-camps. They were not sleeping in those beautiful wainscoted quarters, but on the dank ground in the deep shadow of the trees which kept the sunlight from slaking moisture after the rains. The rolling kitchens were held up in the rear where the trucks cut deep in the saturated woodland earth, and hurdled over tree-trunks between sloughs, while the Forest made the darkness all the more trying as the weary engineers endeavored to hold up their end.