Around 1890, the Army acquired large parts of the Antietam Battlefield. It realized it didn't really know in detail what happened there during the Civil War battle in 1862. However, it had good records on both Union and Confederate veterans to whom it was sending pension checks, so it figured out which ones had at Antietam and sent them a packet of material with questions about their experiences and maps on which to sketch their locations during the battle. The Army got a surprising number of responses, in the thousands as I recall. Its historians reconstructed the battle from the voluminous material. A few years later, it acquired the Gettysburg battlefield and did the same for it. As I recall, Dwight Eisenhower was commandant at Gettysburg and oversaw the effort. He did such a good job that at the end of WWI, he was sent to Europe as General Pershing's deputy for a monuments and cemetery commission.
Regardless of whether this is the reason, the Army paid great attention to the history of World War I. When I was researching Dad's participation in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, I went through boxes and boxes of documents about the battle that the Army had saved and that are now at the National Archives in Washington. These included a 65-page battle order the Division had mimeographed off and distributed to all subordinate commanders before the battle, "after action" reports and "lessons learned" reports collected from the officers, and battle maps. The map below was prepared by Army historians after the war to show the sector assigned to the 35th Division on September 26, 1918. The colored lines were drawn on by the historians. The red ones are the sector sides on left and right. The blues ones mark the planned lines of advance. I added "Buzemont" at the bottom to indicate the hill where Dad's machine gun company was located when the battle started at 5:30 a.m. The map shows Vauquois, Cheppy, and the other towns.
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