At dawn on October 5 German artillery commenced firing. After hours of this, Gerrie wrote a report for his battalion commander: "The situation is critical. A couple more barrages and another counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot and we just can't go on. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions. The enemy artillery is butchering these troops. We cannot get out to get our wounded and there is a hell of a lot of dead and missing. There is only one answer the way things stand. First either to withdraw and saturate it with heavy bombers or reinforce with a hell of a strong force, but eventually they'll get it by artillery too. This is just a suggestion but if we want this damned fort let's get the stuff required to take it and then go. Right now you haven't got it."

Written from a shell hole under fire by a man who hadn't slept in two days, it is a remarkable report, accurate and rightly critical of the fools who had got him into this predicament. It moved right up to the corps commander, who showed it to Patton and said the battalion commander wanted to withdraw. Never, Patton replied.

Over the next three days Third Army threw one more regiment into the attack, with similar ghastly results. The lowliest private could see clearly what Patton could not, that this fort had to be bypassed and neutralized because it was never going to be taken.

Patton finally relented. Still, not until October 13 were the GIs withdrawn. About half as many returned as went up. This was Third Army's first defeat in battle.

The only good thing about a defeat is that it teaches lessons. The Driant debacle caused a badly needed deflation of Patton's hubris. That led to a recognition of the need to plan more thoroughly, to get proper equipment. The next time, Third Army was going to get it right.

NORTH OF Luxembourg, at Eilendorf, just outside Aachen, Captain Dawson's G Company was holding its position on the ridge astride the Siegfried Line. By October 4, G Company had repulsed three German counterattacks and endured 500 shells per day from 105 howitzers. The Germans came on in division strength, but again Dawson's company beat them back, with help from the artillery and air. "We had constant shelling for eight hours," Dawson remembered. "We had twelve direct hits on what was our command post."

An officer in Dawson's battalion, Lieutenant Fred Hall, wrote his mother on October 6, "This action is as rough as I have seen. Still the hardships are borne with little complaint." Hall told his mother, 'Tn the lower echelons of command, faced with the realities of the situation, the feeling is that the war will not be over before the spring of 1945 at the earliest."

Because of the weather, planes could not fly, tanks could not manoeuvre, soldiers marched only with the greatest difficulty. Patton was stuck. Antwerp was what Eisenhower wanted, but Montgomery failed to open it. According to reports coming to Eisenhower, the Canadians trying to overrun the Schelde estuary were short on ammunition because Montgomery persisted in trying to widen the Market-Garden salient in Holland and had given priority in supplies to the British Second Army.

Eisenhower ordered Montgomery to put his full effort into opening the Schelde. But not until October 16 did Montgomery give priority to the Canadians. Not until November 8 were they able to drive the Germans out of the estuary. Then the mines had to be cleared and the facilities repaired. Not until November 28 did the first Allied convoy reach Antwerp's docks. By then the weather precluded major operations.

Under the circumstances, an obvious strategy would have been to abandon any offensive moves, create defensive positions facing the German border, go into winter camp, and wait for the supply situation to improve and the weather to clear. But Eisenhower gave no thought to winter quarters. With the V-2s coming down on London, with thousands dying daily in concentration camps, he could not. With the Red Army pushing into Central Europe, with the unknown factor of how the race for an atomic bomb was progressing, he could not.

Eisenhower urged his subordinates to offensive action. The campaign that resulted was one of the toughest of the war. The strategy was just to attack to the east. The terrain in the centre of the American line-the Eifel mountains and the rugged Ardennes and Hurtgen forests-dictated that the main efforts would take place to the north and south of these obstacles. To the north. First and Ninth armies would head towards the Rhine along the axis Maastricht-Aachen Cologne. The major obstacles were the Siegfried Line, the city of Aachen, and the northern part of the Hurtgen. To the south, Third Army would continue to attack through Lorraine and advance towards the Saar River.

To CARRY out those missions, the American army needed to overcome problems aplenty. For the first time since early August, when they had fled the hedgerow country, the Germans had prepared positions to defend. One of the first tasks they accomplished as they manned the Siegfried Line was to put S-mines-Bouncing Betties-in front of their positions. Thousands of them. When triggered by a trip wire or foot pressure, they sprang a metre or so into the air before exploding. The canister contained 360 steel balls or small pieces of scrap steel. They were capable of tearing off a leg above the knee or inflicting the wound that above all others terrified the soldiers.

Lieutenant George Wilson had joined the 4th Division at the time of St. Lo. By early October he had been in combat for nine weeks, but he had not yet seen an S-mine. On October 10, when he led a reconnaissance platoon into the Siegfried Line east of Malmedy, Belgium, suddenly they were everywhere. Engineers came forward to clear the mines and use white tape to mark paths through the fields. They set to probing every inch of ground, gently working trench knives in at an angle, hoping to hit only the sides of the mines. They began uncovering-and sometimes exploding-devilish little handmade mines in pottery crocks, set just below the ground. The only metal was the detonator, too small to be picked up by mine detectors. They blew off hands.

A squad to Wilson's right got caught in a minefield. The lieutenant leading it had a leg blown off. Four men who came to help him also set off mines, and each lost a leg. Wilson started over, but the lieutenant yelled at him to stay back. Then the lieutenant began talking calmly to the wounded men around him. One by one he directed them back over the path they had taken into the minefield. One by one, on hands and knee, dragging a stump, they got out. Then the lieutenant dragged himself out.

Wilson had seen a lot, but this was "horribly gruesome. Five young men lying there, each missing a leg." After the war he declared that the S-mine was "the most frightening weapon of the war, the one that made us sick with fear."

Behind the minefields were the dragon's teeth. They rested on a concrete mat between ten and thirty metres wide, sunk a metre or two into the ground to prevent any attempt to tunnel underneath them and place explosive charges. On top of the mat were the teeth themselves, truncated pyramids of reinforced concrete about a metre in height in the front row, to two metres high in the back, staggered in such a manner that a tank could not drive through. Interspersed among the teeth were minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes virtually impenetrable by artillery and set in such a way as to give the Germans crossing fire across the entire front. The only way to take those pillboxes was to get behind them and attack the rear entry. But behind the first row of pillboxes and dragon's teeth, there was a second, often a third, sometimes a fourth.