l 60, and, in spite of the respirators, most of them
pretty bad cases.

Being somewhat of a chemist, I managed to see some of these cases a few
days later. The hospital was so crowded that many cases were lying on
stretchers in the garden that lies at the back of all these hideous
perpendicular French houses, shielded from the weather by an awning
only. But the worst cases were upstairs in a long hall--some eighteen of
them, none of which had any hope. Reeking with chlorine, their faces a
livid purple or an even ghastlier green, they lay there on the
stretchers, each with a little bowl beside him, coughing his life away.
And gradually the body would become weaker, the poor tortured lungs
fail to clear themselves of the secretion that poured from their
outraged tissue, and the fluid would accumulate slowly--oh, so
slowly!--and the agonised victim died, not with the merciful swiftness
of a bullet, but by gradual drowning.

This was the death that the Germans--ashamed of their own
brutality--afterwards described as painless and merciful!

They may find justification for their crimes in Belgium, they may even
smooth over the sinking of the _Lusitania_, but it must always be
remembered that they, and they alone, are responsible for introducing
into warfare this most ghastly and hideous death. It is said that German
scientists spent years in perfecting this horror, practising its powers
on plant life in the desert parts of Australia.

And the neutral nations--what of them? Are they not after all
"accessories after the fact" and equally guilty? For, having sworn in
solemn convention at the Hague to abstain from the use of asphyxiating
gases, they entered no definite protest, though public opinion ran high
on the subject.

Silence gives consent, and the poisoning of your enemy by chemical gases
has now become the proper and chivalrous thing to do, and warfare has
an added horror.

But the Allied chemists were at work devising means of lessening and
preventing this danger, and already success was crowning their efforts;
a new pattern respirator was devised and being issued, and a solution
for dipping it in was already available. Dr. G----, of Queen's
University, then serving as a subaltern in No. 2 Company, had been
experimenting in private and devised a solution which varied only in the
proportion of one of its elements from that adopted by the British Army,
so we were probably the first brigade in the B.E.F. to receive