The test consisted in delivering oral messages. One message was: "Major Blank sends his compliments to Captain Nameless, and orders him to move L Company one-half mile to the east, and support K Company in the attack." The officer who gave the message then moved up the hill and prepared to receive it. The third man up came in panting excitement, full of earnest desire to do well. "Captain, the major says that you're to move your men a mile to the east," he said, "and attack K Company." He peeled the potatoes for supper. The gas tests came late in August. The officers, believing that fear of gas could not be excessive, had done some tall talking before the masks were given out, and in the first test, when the men were to enter a gas-filled chamber with their masks on, they had all been assured that one whiff would be fatal. The gas in the chamber was of the tear-compelling kind, only temporarily harmful, even on exposure to it. But that was a secret. The men were drilled in putting their masks on, till the worst of them could do it in from three to five seconds. Both the French and the British masks were used, the one much lighter but comparatively riskier than the other. Officers required the men to have their masks constantly within reach, and gas alarms used to be called at meal-times, or whenever it seemed thoroughly inconvenient to have them. The soldiers were required to drop everything and don the cumbersome contrivances, no matter how well they knew that there wasn't any gas. There is no question that this thoroughness saved many lives when the men went into the trenches. When they masked and went into the gas-chamber the care they took with straps and buckles could not have been bettered. One or two of the men fainted from heat and nervousness, but nobody caught the temporary blindness that would have been their lot if the gas had not been held off. And after the first few entrants had returned none the worse, the rest made a lark of it, and the whole experience stamped on their minds the uselessness of gas as a weapon if you're handy with the mask. The first insistence on rifle use and marksmanship, which General Pershing was to stress later with all the eloquence he had, was heard in late August. The French said frankly they had neglected the power of the rifle, and the Americans were put to work to avoid the same mistake. In target-shooting with rifles the Americans got their first taste of supremacy. They ceased being novitiates for as long as they held their rifles, and became respected and admired experts. The first English Army, "the Old Contemptibles," had all been expert rifle-shots, and, after a period when rifle fire was almost entirely absent from the battle-fields, tacticians began to recall this fact, and the cost it had entailed upon the Germans. So the doughboys added rifle fire to their other jobs. About this time the day of the doughboy was a pattern of compactness, though he called it a harsher name.