American Army had to make its way, one can only feel the deepest
sympathy for the losses sustained by the fresh and eager troops. The
Argonne forest itself had long been recognised as impenetrable to
frontal attack, and on the Argonne side of the American twenty-mile
front, along the western edge of the valley of the Aire, the ground is
still heavily wooded and often very hilly. As one of the ablest
military critics, himself a soldier of great distinction, expressed it
to me: "Foch had set the Americans an uncommonly hard task!"

But if there was some failure in those matters where neither bravery
nor natural intelligence can take the place of long training, and
experience in the field, there was no failure in ardour or in spirit.
In spite of heavy losses, General Pershing never failed to push on.
Starting from a line on the northern edge of the great Verdun
battle-field, Montfaucon, the German headquarters during the Verdun
fighting of 1916, was captured in three days. Then came severe
fighting against fierce counter-attacks, and great difficulties with
transport over shell-torn ground and broken roads, difficulties
increased by bad weather. But on October 4th the gallant attack was
renewed, and by October 10th, owing to the combined effects of the
British drive in the north and the pressure on both sides of the
Argonne, from General Gouraud on the west and the Americans on the
east, the enemy fell back and the famous forest was cleared.

The third and last phase of the fighting began on the 23rd of October.
The enemy was now weakening rapidly along the whole of his line. For
while the American Army had been stubbornly fighting its way north
from Varennes to Grandpre, where it stood on November 1st, the British
Armies, in the great Battles of Cambrai-St. Quentin, Ypres, and
Courtrai, had not only captured the Hindenburg line and some fifty
thousand prisoners, but had brought about--without fighting--the
evacuation of Laon and the retreat of the Germans to the line of the
Aisne; the German withdrawal, also, to the Scheldt, involving the
freeing of Lille and the great industrial district of France; and
finally, in concert with Belgian, French, and some American units, the
clearing of the Belgian coast, and the recovery of Ostend, Zeebrugge
and Bruges. The end, indeed, was rushing on. Co-operation was
everywhere maintained, and blow followed blow. "During this period"
(6th to 31st October), says the British Commander-in-