## The Argonne Forest: Terrain and Tactics
The Argonne Forest in which Johnson and Roberts were posted on the night of May 15, 1918, was one of the most tactically significant terrain features of the Western Front.
The forest covered approximately 50,000 acres — roughly 200 square kilometers — of dense woodland in a rough, hilly terrain. It was bounded by the Meuse River on the east and the Aire River on the west, running roughly north from the town of Vouziers toward the Belgian border. The forest’s density made it resistant to the kind of artillery-dominated warfare that characterized the open terrain of the Somme and Flanders; it was terrain where infantry, moving carefully through cover, could achieve surprise in ways that the more exposed sectors did not allow.
Both sides had dug into the Argonne from the war’s early months, and by 1918 the positions had been established for years. The specific tactical problem the forest posed was intelligence: in terrain where visibility was limited, both sides needed to know what the other was doing in ways that standard observation could not provide. Raiding parties were the solution — small groups that crossed the lines to capture prisoners and gather information.
The outpost where Johnson and Roberts were stationed — Outpost 20 — was one of the forward observation posts that the French military maintained in this sector. The bridge near which the outpost was positioned, by the BlackPast account, was a specific terrain feature that controlled movement through the area and that the Germans would logically want to know about.