Equally hard, and in many cases even more so, was the work of the gas officers on Division, Corps and Army Staffs, who handled the training in Divisions, and who also were required to recommend the use of gas troops, the use of gas in artillery shell and in grenades, and the use of smoke by the infantry in attack. However, the success of the Chemical Warfare Service in the field with these Staff officers was just as great as with the Regiment. To the everlasting credit of those Staff Officers and the Officers of the Gas Regiment from Colonel Atkisson down, both Staff Gas officers and officers of the Gas Regiment worked together in the fullest harmony with the single object of defeating the Germans. CHEMICAL WARFARE TROOPS Chemical Warfare troops were divided into two distinct divisions—gas regiments and staff troops. [Illustration: FIG. 13.—Firing a 155-Millimeter Howitzer. The men are wearing gas masks to keep out the enemy gas fired at them in Oct., 1918.] =Staff Troops.= The staff troops of the Chemical Warfare Service performed all work required of gas troops except that of actual fighting. They handled all Chemical Warfare Service supplies from the time they were unloaded from ships to the time they were issued to the fighting troops at the front, whether the fighting troops were Chemical Warfare or any other. They furnished men for clerical and other services with the Army, Corps and Division Gas Officers, and they manufactured poisonous gases, filled gas shells and did all repairing and altering of gas masks. Though these men received none of the glamour or glory that goes with the fighting men at the front, yet they performed services of the most vital kind and in many cases did work as dangerous and hair raising as going over the top in the face of bursting shell and screaming machine gun bullets. Think of the intense interest these men must have felt when carrying from the field of battle to the laboratory or experimental field, shell loaded with strange and unheard of compounds and which might any moment burst and end forever their existence! Or watch them drilling into a new shell knowing not what powerful poison or explosive it might contain or what might happen when the drill “went through”! And again what determination it took to work 12 or 16 hours a day way back at the depots repairing or altering masks, and, as was done at Chateroux, alter and repair 15,000 masks a day and be so rushed that at times they had a bare day’s work of remodeled masks ahead. But they kept ahead and to the great glory of these men no American soldier ever had to go to the front without a mask. And what finer work than that of these men who, in the laboratory and testing room, toyed with death in testing unknown gases with American and foreign masks even to the extent of applying the gases to their own bodies.