by Theo Emery
Worried anew that Levering could tarnish the bureau, Bielaski had ordered DeWoody to quietly investigate Levering. DeWoody dispatched investigators to Ohio and around the financial corridors of New York City to gather facts about Levering. The reports that came back were dismaying, peppered with words like “crook” and “totally unfit” and “unworthy of trust.” “Not to be employed by the government,” one former business partner said. “A man whose word should not be taken,” another man said. “If ever there was a crooked crook that Levering was one,” said a third. “A bad nickel,” said a fourth. Though the agents had not substantiated that Levering had committed any crimes, their findings were less than flattering. DeWoody wrote to the chief:
From one or two experiences I have had with him, noting his inclination to do rather reckless and sensational things, and his subsequent inaccurate statements in attempted explanation of same, my only thought is that if he is regularly appointed as a special agent of the department, and by any chance does commit some indiscreet act, the questionable reputation that he has borne in the past in the minds of many men is going to be raised against the judgment of the Bureau in having appointed such a man.
As the constellations of chemical warfare outposts continued to grow, it had become ever more cumbersome to keep so many agencies and individuals informed and involved. More than a half-dozen different offices and military organizations had a hand in the work, each with different responsibilities and different chains of command. The Bureau of Mines handled research; the U.S. Army Medical Department produced gas masks; the Ordnance Department manufactured explosives and shells; the Signal Corps had a role in flares, smoke screens, and smoke candles; the Corps of Engineers was responsible for the gas and flame regiment; and the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe deployed the soldiers on the battlefield, with their own separate and parallel gas service. Though more than a dozen copies of reports went to Europe alone each week, to the AEF lab and the various commanders on the ground, scientists on both sides of the Atlantic complained that vital information was not reaching them. As if that wasn’t enough, the Ordnance Department, the Bureau of Mines, the navy, the Department of Justice, and Thomas Edison were all enmeshed in the work at Jones Point, which was insulated in its own bubble of secrecy.
The feeble Office of the Gas Service helped little. When the office was established in the fall and Colonel Charles Potter put at its head, it had been designed to unify and coordinate the various military and civilian departments that had a hand in gas warfare. Neither Potter nor his deputies in the Office of the Gas Service or the Chemical Service Section had provided the kind of vigorous leadership that Fries and other military chiefs hoped for; instead, it was passive, a toothless bureaucracy. After Potter was canned in the winter, a succession of directors with little military experience followed.
There was a growing recognition within the domestic gas service that the sprawl and disorganization was hindering its work—at a May meeting about procurements, Colonel Bradley Dewey admitted that gas mask production had reached a crisis point. The service couldn’t keep promises made to the army. There was duplication in work. Deadlines weren’t being met. Things would have to change.
A shake-up was ahead. On March 1, one of the ships returning from France had brought Major General Peyton C. March back to the United States. A tall, commanding figure, March had served as an artillery chief to Pershing. The general was a soldier’s soldier, lean and sinewy, with battlefield experience. He also hated government red tape.
Recalled from France to serve as army chief of staff, he was charged with establishing order in the chaotic army structure, but while he was overseas, the general had also heard complaints about the gas service. This scattered domestic structure with no one in charge was an intolerable situation. March had someone in mind to straighten out the tangle. A soldier who had already set his boots in France and an engineer with unequaled experience in creating order from chaos.
On Saturday, May 18, an odd news item appeared in the middle of the Washington Herald’s Army and Navy News section. A kind of gossip column for the military, the section was a roundup of news tidbits from the ranks, anecdotes about heroes and deserters, and announcements about military rule changes. Buried in the column, a four-sentence item made a passing reference to the former head of the First Division having been in Washington. “Major General William L. Sibert, United States Army, having completed the duty for which he was ordered to this city, will return to his proper station,” the item read.
Sibert’s “proper station” was Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been relegated to an out-of-the-way outpost as chief of the Southeastern Division. Even before he returned from France, his sudden dismissal spurred a cascade of articles speculating about the “big Army shake-up” in France. Many hinted that the demotion resulted from some unspecified grievance that Pershing harbored toward Sibert. But after the initial flurry of reports, Sibert had been largely out of the public eye.
Sibert said nothing publicly about his fall from grace. He took up residence at the Villa Margherita, an Italian Renaissance–style hotel on Charleston’s southernmost tip, across the harbor from Fort Sumter. His exile didn’t dull a ferocious sense of purpose in the war. In a rare public appearance, he spoke in April to ROTC graduates at Camp Warden McLean in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His ringing words to the cadets carried a bellicose edge.
“Never will the brotherhood of man be a reality: never will the sword be forged into plowshare. Man is a fighting animal. There will always be wars. The only way to attain right is through might. Let America be prepared and mighty if she would champion the cause of right among nations,” he told the graduates in what a reporter called a “grim summation of history.” They were fiercely belligerent words for a man whose career was built upon civil engineering, not bloodshed.
Goliath’s dismissal from the AEF just short of his retirement age had been widely seen as the sunset of his military career. But his mystery visit to Washington was likely the launch of a third act. On May 11, 1918, Sibert had quietly received a new appointment as chief of the moribund Office of the Gas Service in the National Army.
Sibert left Charleston and moved to Washington, taking a house on De Sales Street NW, near Dupont Circle. When the War Department announced Sibert’s assignment, the story that went out on the wires reporting his appointment was published verbatim in many newspapers across the country. “While in France with Gen. Pershing he had every opportunity to study the uses to which gases have been put by the allied armies and the Germans and is regarded as peculiarly suited for the new post,” the wire article read.
Fries was pleased when he heard the news of Sibert’s reappointment toward the end of May. With Sibert at the head of the domestic service, Fries would have a commanding officer who had been in France, an engineer and a soldier who understood the war and the challenges of the gas service. The promotion gave Fries more confidence that the War Department would move ahead with consolidating the gas service, finally getting Fries the kind of results he wanted. “The gas service has been getting recognition, though there have been a few times when it felt it wouldn’t become what I felt it should be.”
Sibert immersed himself in the mechanics of the gas service, including the Research Division. There was little disagreement over whether the baffling, interlocking responsibilities for gas warfare needed reorganization. The question was what to do with the war gas investigations under the Bureau of Mines. Van Manning had felt that the research was his bureau’s domain since the earliest days of the war, when he was one of the few voices urging action about gas. Now Manning wanted to maintain a proprietary grasp on the research and keep it out of the hands of the military. Scientists thrived on collaboration, he felt, and the creative energy fueling their achievements would suffocate under War Department command and control. Fries and Sibert, however, saw military control as an essential matter of efficiency required for clear lines of communication. Fries had been eggin
g on the army to take over the research work since fall; the War College, too, wanted a centralized, all-military organization, calling the current mishmash of departments and agencies “thoroughly illogical.” Sibert was now a powerful lobbyist for that position.
Baker asked for a conference to discuss the matter on Saturday, May 25. General March, Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell, and General Sibert all attended. Marston Bogert, the assistant director of the gas service and Sibert’s predecessor, was there as well. Officials who couldn’t attend sent proxies, such as Assistant Secretary of the Interior Alexander T. Vogelsang representing Secretary Lane, who was traveling, and Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Bacon, Amos Fries’s director of the AEF’s Gas Research Laboratory in Puteaux, who had also returned from France. Van Manning also attended, taut as a trip wire and ready to deploy every rhetorical weapon he had to defend his technical men from the military.
If Baker harbored a flicker of hope that the issue could be resolved amicably, Manning promptly snuffed it out. He exuded a kind of paternal pride in this organization he had nurtured from birth, and he made it clear that he did not intend to let it go without a fight. The director launched into a lecture on the bureau’s achievements, insisting that he was more responsible than anyone for the success of the chemical warfare work. Delays weren’t his bureau’s fault, Manning complained; slowdowns came from the development side, which the army ran. Transferring work to the military would suggest that his bureau had fallen down on the job, when he insisted he had yet to hear a single word of reproach regarding inefficiency or failure to respond to War Department requests.
When Baker asked Sibert to make the case for military control, he presented one simple reason: a more efficient organization. Manning’s retort was that the research would be most efficient outside of the military. He was willing to accept consolidating the service under the army; he just felt that the research work should be exempted, because civilians preferred to work with other civilians, and not under military direction.
An embittered tone crept into Manning’s arguments; his leadership challenged and his authority threatened, he hinted that his former supporters had abandoned him. He was deeply suspicious of Sibert and suspected that Bogert had coached him on questions to ask in front of Baker.
The men went around and around as Manning and Sibert argued past each other. They bickered over responsibility for improvements to the soldier’s gas masks, who was to blame for delayed reports that never reached France, and whether the existing structure delayed results. By the end, nothing had been resolved. It was almost 5:00 p.m. when Baker adjourned the meeting. After almost two hours, the men were no closer to agreement than when they’d started.
After Manning and Sibert and the others had filed out of Baker’s office, Assistant Secretary Vogelsang stayed behind. Baker gave the impression that he didn’t agree with his generals’ arguments over the need to transfer control of the war work to the army. In the now-empty office, the secretary admitted as such to Vogelsang and said that he would try to convince Sibert to maintain the status quo.
It would be a hard task, Vogelsang said. Sibert was a stubborn man.
One of the most stubborn men in the country, Baker replied.
Chapter Eleven
“He Who Gasses Last, Gasses Best”
Night fell over Chaumont as Addison joined a crowd gathering on the gas experimental field where Companies C and D were preparing a demonstration of Livens batteries and Stokes mortars. It was June 6. The weather in France had been beautiful—dry and warm, with little rain. Poppies blanketed the countryside; sometimes Addison pressed the blossoms inside letters to mail home to Margaret. As soldiers streamed onto the field in the dark, Addison saw this was no small affair; almost three companies had assembled, and Addison spotted high-ranking officers from general headquarters. When everything was ready, the men pushed the plungers on the exploders. Addison watched the projectors belch flame and smoke skyward, the shells streaking upward into the night air, detonating in the distance and sending billowing clouds of gas over the fields.
Not every member of the regiment attended the show. Some Company B platoons had departed for advance billets, but Higgie stayed behind. He had spent the afternoon fixing Livens drums at the ammunition dump up the road and hadn’t been summoned for the demonstration; instead, he ate supper and retired to his bunk to read. Higgie had been struggling since he received crushing news from home. On May 29, he had stretched out on his bunk to relish a batch of letters that had arrived. The very first one he opened delivered the worst kind of shock—his mother had died on May 4. The letter was dated three weeks before. The soldier in Higgie melted away, and the brokenhearted twenty-one-year-old threw aside the other letters, curled up in bed, and sobbed. After dinner, he went for a walk alone in the woods, unable to believe that his mother was dead all those weeks and he hadn’t even known it. During the night, he drifted in and out of sleep, talking out loud and waking again and again in the darkness to wonder if it was all a dream.
The experimental field demonstration marked a year and a day since Higgie had registered for the draft in Lawrence. He didn’t need fireworks to celebrate the anniversary. He’d soon be setting off his own shows. Companies A and B had received orders they’d been waiting for: they would be launching their first gas attacks independent of the British. Higginbottom’s Company B would be setting off one thousand Livens projectors in the French sector of Toul. Company A would follow a few miles away and a few hours later in the American sector with nine hundred projectors.
After reveille the next morning, Higginbottom was told to get his pack ready in the afternoon. He left at about one-thirty and rode to the advance dugouts at a French camp about two and one-half miles from the front near Fey-en-Haye. The dugouts were tucked into the side of a hill, with iron roofs and wire beds and electric lights. They weren’t clean, but they were roomy, with a couple of nice tables. Higginbottom and a bunch of other soldiers played cards until late that night. It was very quiet when he finally rolled into bed.
He slept late—there was no reveille this close to the front. That night, Higgie went out to the batteries to dig in projectors. There were Algerian colonial soldiers in the carrying party—he marveled at how they balanced the projector barrels on their heads. Preparations for the upcoming show lasted for days. Sometimes bullets sang over his head as he worked. The midsummer nights were short; the men had to work quickly between dusk and dawn. Even after the batteries were in place and the projectors ready, the show was postponed several times because the wind wasn’t right or the weather hadn’t cooperated. The men carped about the delays, blaming red tape at headquarters.
Higgie sometimes attended Addison’s Sunday prayer services. Addison’s training hadn’t prepared him much for the reality of pastoring in a combat zone. At night, huge rats scurried through his billet; one night, a sniffling rodent scampered up on Addison’s bed as he slept. One Sunday before a service, German antiaircraft guns opened up on French planes overhead. Shell bursts blossomed in the sky, and bullets rained down, one of them hitting a soldier in the back. When the firefight slowed, Addison assembled a group of fifty men down the road and passed out hymnals, and the men sang lustily on the roadside and listened to Addison’s sermon. Afterward, he went up to the trenches and peered out over no-man’s-land, wondering about the Germans who he knew were looking back at him in the dark. Higgie attended the following Sunday’s service, listening to Addison’s sermon “Christianity in Warfare.” Shells began to fall in the middle of the sermon, and the singing didn’t go well, but the service continued through the din. “It’s interesting, holding services under these conditions,” Addison mused.
On Tuesday, June 18, an officer arrived from Langres to report that conditions looked favorable for the attack that night. When the alert sounded after dinner, Addison went back to his billet to prepare. Zero hour was 10:30 p.m. The chaplain was nervous and excited; it was a big night, his first real gas show. He p
ut on his trench coat, belt, and helmet and got his gas mask. He started off for his position at about 8:30 with two captains.
It was another beautiful evening. As dusk fell, rain clouds gave way to a clear sky. A half-moon rose, bathing the battlefield in silver light. German observation balloons floated silently above. Addison waited in a dugout, listening to a French soldier phone in the latest wind readings to the officers in charge of the show. There was little to do. It seemed strange to Addison to stand there in the quiet stillness of the evening sky, knowing that in seconds, all hell would let loose from every direction. Across the line, men’s lives would be snuffed out in a curtain of fire and gas.
As zero hour approached, Higgie crouched in his trench. With the clear sky and bright moon, it was dangerous for the men to venture out into the open to wire up the projectors and pull the pins out of the shells. Finally, at 10:00 p.m., Higginbottom’s platoon got word to go to the batteries. He scrambled up to the trench, trying to stay out of sight of the observation balloons as he unspooled the wire to the fuses. When he reached the projectors, the pins had been put in so tight that he couldn’t get them out. Higgie was wrestling with the pins when someone yelled to get out of the way. Over the buzzerphone wires stretching back to the command, word had come from the officers in charge: one minute to go. Heart pounding, Higginbottom scrambled up and out of the trench, getting clear as the projectors fired in a deafening roar just a few feet away. The shells launched so close to Higginbottom that he felt like they almost took him with them over to the German side.