Battalions were in position for a given number of days, varying with the character of the position held, when they were relieved for a rest in billets. While in occupation they endured an amount of shell fire varying immensely between different sectors. A few men were on the watch with rifles and machine guns for any demonstration by the enemy, while the rest were idle when not digging. They sent out patrols at night into No Man's Land for information; exchanged rifle grenades, mortars and bombs with the enemy. Each week brought its toll of casualties, light in the tranquil places, heavy in the wickedly hot corner of the Ypres salient, where attacks and counter-attacks never ceased and the apprehension of having your parapet smashed in by an artillery "preparation," which might be the forerunner of an attack, was unremittingly on the nerves. It was a commonplace that any time you desired you could take a front of a thousand or two yards simply by concentrating your gunfire, cutting the enemy's barbed wire and tearing the sandbags of his parapet into ribbons, with resulting fearful casualties to him; and then a swift charge under cover of the artillery hurricane would gain possession of the debris, the enemy's wounded and those still alive in his dugouts. Losses in operations of this kind usually were much lighter in taking the enemy's position than in the attempt to hold it, as he, in answer to your offensive, turned the full force of his guns upon his former trench which your men were trying to organize into one of their own. Later, under cover of his own guns, his charge recovered the ruins, forcing the party of the first part who had started the "show" back to his own former first line trench, which left the situation as it was before with both sides a loser of lives without gaining any ground and with the prospect of drudgery in building anew their traverses and burrows and filling new sandbags. It was the repetition of this sort of "incident," as reported in the daily _communiques_, which led the outside world to wonder at the fatuousness and the satire of the thing, without understanding that its object was entirely for the purpose of _morale_. An attack was made to keep the men up to the mark; a counter-attack in order not to allow the enemy ever to develop a sense of superiority. Every soldier who participated in a charge learned something in method and gained something in the quality considered requisite by his commanders. He had met face to face in mortal hand-to-hand combat in the trench traverses the enemy who had been some invisible force behind a gray line of parapet sniping at him every time he showed his head. Attack and counter-attack without adding another square yard to the territory in your possession--these had cost hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Western front. The next step was to obtain the _morale_ of attack without wasting lives in trying to hold new ground.