You send your gas officer up to test. You go up yourself and generally know as much as the gas officer. Our general experience was that the first gas casualties we had were the gas officers. You decide that, as nothing has developed up to this time, it is probable that if any attack is planned by the Huns it is not intended to take place this morning. You get your men out of the heavily gassed areas and try to determine where is the best place for them to be well protected, to cover practically the same territory, and not to be too much exposed to the gas. By this time they have been sweating in their gas masks for three hours or more with the usual number of fools and accidents contributing to the casualties. You carefully redispose them while a desultory bombardment by the Germans adds to the general joy of life. You get them redisposed. The wind changes, the gas is carried to the position where they are. You have to change them again. To add to the general complications, the chow which was brought up last night is spoiled. It has been in the gassed area and the men must go hungry until the next evening. You come back to your dugout and find that in some mysterious way the gas has gone down into the dugout, so you prop yourself in the corner of the trench and carry on from there. Altogether it is a happy and joyful occasion. Your one consolation rests in the fact that your artillery is now earnestly engaged in retaliating on their infantry.
Speaking of artillery, there is one thing that always used to fill us, the infantry, with woe and grief. A paper would come up, reading, "Nothing to report on the (blank) sector except severe artillery duels." "Severe artillery duels" to the uninitiated means that the opposing artillery fights one with the other. This, however, is not the custom. Your artillery shells their infantry hard and then their artillery shells your infantry hard. This is an artillery duel. The infantry is on the receiving end in both cases.
Our artillery was particularly good. General Summerall, who commanded, I have been told, preached to his men that the primary duty of that arm was to help the infantry, and that to do this properly in all war of movement they should follow the advancing troops as closely as possible. Once I saw a battery of the Seventh F. A. wheel up and go into action not more than two hundred yards from the front line. We, on our part, endeavored to call uselessly on the artillery as little as possible.
At times our own artillery would drop a few "shorts" into us but this is unavoidable and the infantry felt too strongly what had been done for them to pay much attention.
In one of the German dugouts we captured, a lieutenant told me he found a sign reading, "We fear no one but God and our own artillery."
Sector matériel is something that always adds interest to the life of the officers in trench warfare. Sector matériel consists of all varieties of articles, from tins of bully beef and rusty grenades to quantities of grubby, illegible orders and lists, and mangled maps. These remain in the sector and are turned over by each unit to the next succeeding. Theoretically a careful inventory is made and each individual article checked each time.
Moreover, to keep the higher command satisfied, there must be maps—legions of maps. These maps do not have to be accurate. Indeed, they cannot possibly be accurate, but they must be beautifully marked in red, blue, yellow, and green with a pretty "legend" attached. The higher command never knows if the maps are correct, but they do know if they are not beautifully marked. In each sector there must be, first, a map indicating where all the trenches are. You, as commanding officer, are probably the only person who knows and you are too busy to put them down. Then there must also be maps indicating work in progress. Very generally they like a map to be turned in every day showing what work has been done during the night. How they expect anyone to do this is beyond anyone who has done it. Further, maps must show abandoned trenches; still further, there must be what is known to the high command as maps indicating "alternate gas positions." "Alternate gas positions" are impossible to indicate. Everything depends on which way the wind is blowing and what place is gassed. But the higher command wants these maps and it is simpler to placate them than to fight with them. I had a fine artillery liaison officer, called Chandler. He had had some training in topography and he kindly agreed to take over the map question. When a message came up from the rear demanding a map showing alternate gas position, he would get out his stack of blue pencils and make, with exquisite care, the nicest and most symmetrical blue lines. He would number them in black, arrange a margin between, putting green marks and yellow marks and red marks for other units; fold them up and send them back. It was quite simple for him. He did not have to consult anyone, it wasn't necessary to reconnoiter the ground; the map would go in with the morning report and all would be happy.
Another sport indulged in by the higher command was to change the main line of defense and re-allot the defense system of the sector. To be really qualified to do this, you should on no account have any knowledge of the actual terrain. Indeed, I think in all my experience I never received a defense map from the higher command where the individual making the map had been over the ground. All that you do, if you are the higher command, is to get a beautiful large scale map, draw broad lines across it and then dotted lines to indicate boundaries. For nearly a month I defended a sector where the map was entirely wrong. Two patches of woods were represented as in a valley, whereas they were on a hill. This worried neither the higher command nor me. The higher command did not know that the map was wrong; they had sent me their beautiful little plans. I sent them equally beautiful ones without debating the matter, and all were satisfied.
I remember one general who commanded the brigade of which I was a member. His hobby was switch lines. A switch line is simply a trench running approximately perpendicular to the front, where a defensive position can be taken up in case the enemy breaks through on the right or left and whereby you form a defensive flank. The old boy would come up, solemn as a judge, and ask me where my switch lines were to be put. With equal solemnity I would explain to him. After talking for a half an hour he would ask confidentially, "Major, what is a switch line?" With equal solemnity I would explain to him and conversation would cease. Three days thereafter we would go through the same thing again. The old fellow had heard someone talking about a switch line once and somehow felt that it counted a hundred in game to have one.
Another indoor sport of the high command was a report for plans of defense. A plan of defense consisted of maps and long screeds indicating just where counter-attacks were to be launched when parts of the front line were taken by the enemy. They were beautiful things, pages and pages long. They were as gay in color as Joseph's proverbial coat, and when things broke, circumstances were always such that you did something entirely different from any of the plans.