Where German tanks, German aircraft and the bandit gangs ranging the district had failed, these vast woodlands with their war-wrecked, thaw-strangled roads succeeded. Food and ammunition trucks bogged down at the distant edges of the forests. Ambulances got stuck in isolated forest hamlets. The artillery regiment ran out of fuel, and its guns were scattered along the banks of nameless stream. With every hour he distance separating them all from the infantry became alarmingly greater.