On the 23rd December, after a very quiet night, an entirely new plan of attack came in from an unnamed specialist who suggested that the gas (words cannot render their weariness of the accursed thing at this stage!) should be let off quite quietly without any artillery fire or unusual small-arm demonstration, at about four in the morning, when the odds were most of the enemy would be asleep, and that of those on duty few would ever have heard the sound of escaping gas. As the expert noted, “It requires a quick decision and a firm determination to give an alarm at 4 A. M., unless one is certain that it is not a false alarm, especially to a Prussian officer.” The hope was that the slow-waking and highly-to-his-superiors-respectful Hun would be thus caught in his dug-outs. The artillery would, gas or no gas, only give a general warning, and the suggested barrage (the first time, oddly enough, that the word is employed in the Diary) in rear of the enemy trenches would prevent his reserves from coming up into the gas-zone, “where there is always a chance that they may be gassed in spite of their gas-helmets.” So all the commanders held yet another conference, and agreed that the gas should be loosed at 4.30, that the barrage in the rear should be abandoned and a bombardment of the enemy’s parapet substituted for it, and that no patrols should be sent out. The companies were duly warned. The wind was not. The enemy spent the day shelling points in the rear till our guns retaliated on their front line, which they returned by shelling our parapet with small stuff. One piece they managed to blow in, and turned a machine-gun on the gap. They also made one flooded dug-out a shade less habitable than before. The wind stayed true south all night, and the rain it brought did more damage to the hovels and huts than any enemy shells; for the Chaplain and the Second in Command were half buried by “the ceiling of their bedroom becoming detached. The calamity was borne with beautiful fortitude.” (Even a second in command cannot express all his sentiments before a Chaplain.)