A reserve regiment of the 82nd, having taken over the 28th's front, spent the next day under galling fire in swinging its line up level with the other regiments. Again a charge, running the gamut from the bluffs and in face of machine-gun nests in the village itself, entered Cornay at 11 A.M.; again we were slowly forcing our way up the heights where in places the men could climb only by drawing themselves up by bushes and dwarf trees. Reduced in number by the incessant drain of casualties, beginning to feel the exhaustion from three days' fighting and nights practically without sleep, they thought that this time they could hold their gains; but at dusk a German counter-attack launched right across the river bottom from Fléville to Cornay under a barrage of shells and machine-gun bullets, and by infiltration from the heights into Cornay, where our men fought from house to house in a confused struggle against odds, forced those of the advanced groups who did not remain to die in their tracks to fall back upon their reserves, who stood fast. The Germans depended much upon that counter-attack, and they made it at a time when the losses and exhaustion of the 82nd, of which they were fully aware, might well have led them to think that this young division would break under a sharp blow. Far from breaking, the 82nd, having savagely and promptly repulsed the counter-attack, was, despite its casualties, further to extend its front that night by taking over the eastern bank of the river from the 1st Division.
October 10th was to see the culmination of the movement in the trough of the Aire, when the 77th, the pressure on its flank released, was to begin its final sweep through the Forest. It was to be a day of such retribution for the 82nd as the 28th had had in the taking of the Taille l'Abbé; hills and woods are the landmarks of divisional histories in this battle. The dead of the 82nd were intermingled with the dead enemy on the slopes and in Cornay, and in that stretch of the river bottom which in its exposure resembles more closely than the background of any other charge in the Meuse-Argonne battle the open fields which Pickett's men crossed in their rush up the slopes of Seminary Ridge. The gallant officers who led these men knew that they would follow, and Major-General George B. Duncan, who had taken command of the division before the battle, was serene and resourceful in his confidence.