They were billeted in stables and slept on straw. There was a shortage of overcoats, shoes, motorized vehicles, and ambulances.

The troops trained five hours in the morning and the same in the afternoon.They learned to wear gas masks and to practice the trench warfare of the French, with emphasis on Chauchat and Hotchkiss guns, bayonets, grenades, barbed wire, and the shovel.

Joseph and his Company C, 150th Machine Gun Battalion became combat ready. They knew reliability of their machine guns would be proven in combat. They knew, as well, that their machine guns were high priority targets by the enemy.

The machine gun was seen as the most devastating weapon of the war.

Anthony Livesay, in his book Great Battles of World War I (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1989), page 106, has this to say about them.

All the combatant armies went to war with machine-guns. Initially there were only two to a battalion, but as the weapon's capabilities in defense and attack were realized, more and more were issued and soon whole units were armed with only these fast-firing automatic weapons.

There were two basic types of machine-gun. One was a tripod-mounted, water-cooled gun with a belt feed containing 250 rounds, of which the British Vickers and German and Russian Maxim were examples. The other was an air-cooled weapon, of which the French Hotchkiss and the American Lewis were representative. Both of these had magazines, that of the Hotchkiss held 30 rounds, of the Lewis 47. Most machine-guns had a cyclic rate of fire of 500-600 rpm, which necessitated a great number of ammunition carriers.

The tripod-mounted weapons were heavy; indeed the Austrian Schwarzlose had, in addition to barrel and tripod, a third load, the metal shield. The Schwarzlose could also be fired from a monopod, turning it into a light machine-gun.

British Soldiers wearing gas helmets,
as they man a Vickers machine-gun
near Ovillers.

The deadly fire of the German Maxim
caused 90% of the casualties
on the Somme on 1 July 1916.

The Russians towed their machine-guns on small wheeled carriages. Early German Maxims had their own gun carriages, while the British broke their guns into two loads - barrel and tripod - carried either by mule or the men themselves.

Joseph's division continued rigorous training under miserable conditions during the bitterly cold and snowy winter of 1918, and the wet spring that followed. By the end of spring they were seasoned troops, and in April, May, and June they fought valiantly in the trenches at Baccarat. In June the 150th Machine Gun Battalion moved to Champagne.

On 7 July, General Gouraud issued an order informing the troops that soon the battle would begin,"In a cloud of smoke, dust, and gas...No one would step to the rear." Both the French troops and the American Rainbows were expected to die in place to stop the Germans and save Paris. For the Rainbows, the Champagne Defense began on 15 July 1918.

In his book The Rainbow Division in the Great War, 1917-1919, James J. Cooke relates:

During the bombardment [on 15 July], the doctors and nurses moved what wounded they could to a dugout. Their lieutenant described the scene in a letter home, "Well, we got down into the dugout and my dear mother such a shamble I never hope to see again. A long black tunnel lighted just a little by candles, our poor wounded shocked boys there on litters in the dark, eight of them half under ether just as they had come off the tables their legs only half amputated, surgeons trying to finish and check blood in the dark, the floor soaked with blood,the hospital above us a wreck, three patients killed and one blown out of bed with his head off."

Cooke describes the mission and movement of the Rainbows:

The mission for the 42nd Division was a defensive one in Champagne, the Rainbow coming under the 4th French Army, commanded by one of the most colorful characters and experienced soldiers France produced during the war - General Henri Joseph Eugene Gouraud.

He immediately took a liking to the men of the Rainbow and they to him. The one-armed general with flamboyant style and bushy beard would serve as honorary president of the Rainbow Veterans Association until his death in 1946.

The Rainbows had the French 170th Infantry Division on their left and the 13th French Infantry Division on their right. They had a rectangular piece of Champagne to defend that was about five miles wide and ten miles deep. Running through the middle was the blasted macadam road to Chalons-sur-Marne. On either side of the road, Gouraud placed battle-tested French battalions. These experienced veterans, he correctly believed, would help the Americans. Gouraud trusted his National Guard doughboys; they held a critical piece of terrain that most believed would be a major German objective.

Gouraud's battle plan called for the normal front-line trench to be abandoned, except for a few platoons of French soldiers who would deceive enemy observers into reporting that the trench was occupied as normal. The first German artillery barrage would then fall on nearly empty trenches. As the Germans moved forward, they would pass over the blasted trenches into a killing zone between the front trench (the sacrificial trench) and the second line, where unscathed infantry, heavily supported by machine gins and artillery, would be waiting.