During the final push I attached myself to the First Infantry Division in the front lines before Mateur.  That northern warfare was in the mountains.  We didn’t do much riding then.  It was walking and climbing and crawling country.  The mountains weren’t bif, but they were constant.  They were largely treeless, easy to defend and bitter to take.  But we took them.

The Germans lay on the back slope of every ridge, deeply dug into foxholes.  In front of them the fields and pastures were hideous with thousands of hidden mines.  The forward slopes were left open, untenanted, and if the Americans had tried to scale those slopes they would have been murdered wholesale in an inferno of machine-gun crossfire, plus mortars and grenades.

Consequently, we didn’t do it that way.  We fell back to the old warfare of first pulverizing the enemy with artillery, then sweeping around the ends of the hill with infantry and taking them from the sides and rear.

The big guns cracked and roared almost constantly throughout the day and night.  They laid a screen ahead of our troops.  By magnificent shooting they dropped shells on the back slopes.  By means of shells timed to burst in the air a few feet from the ground, they got the Germans even in their foxholes.  Our troops found that the Germans dug foxholes down and then under, in an effort to get cover from the shell bursts that showered death from above.  Our artillery was really sensational.  For once we had enough of something and at the right time.  Officers told me they actually had more guns than they knew what to do with.

All the guns in any one sector could be centered to shoot at one spot, and when we laid the whole business on a German hill the entire slope seemed to erupt.  It became an unbelievable caldron of fire and smoke and dirt.  Afterward, veteran German soldiers said they had never been through anything like it.