ns.
Though fatally injured, they were still living, and I shall never
forget the pitiful looks on those ashy gray faces as they looked up
into my face with eyes like those of sheep about to be slaughtered.

At No. 3 Canadian Field Ambulance we found that 2,600 Canadian
casualties had already passed through during the three days since the
gas attack. We heard there that Major Mothersill, Medical officer of
the Eighth Battalion, had been lying out in front of the lines for two
days, unable to move and apparently paralyzed. It was one of those
personal experiences which brings the war home to us with startling
reality, for I had made a tour of his area with him just a few days
before. You hear of the loss of a thousand men and it affects you very
little, but if you know personally a single one of the thousand, the
news of his death may give you the blues for days. The loss of a
million unknown Russians does not really mean as much to one as the
loss of a single friend.

On our return trip we passed a large number of London busses loaded
with wounded; they were all sitting-up cases and were a very happy
looking lot. It was an odd sight to see bus after bus tearing down
that long, straight road, with the tall trees on either hand, each bus
with rows of soldiers seated on the upper deck, with heads and arms
bandaged, looking about at everything with the greatest
interest,--like tourists rather than men who had just come from the
very gates of hell. They waved hearty greetings to the French
artillery which was then pouring up the side roads.

As the French 75's bumped along the roads, drawn by rat-tailed, wiry
horses, they looked like pale blue, painted wooden guns, instead of
what they were--the deadliest weapon that the war had till then
produced. An officer who watched them the following day gallop onto
the field, unlimber and start firing, told me that the way their fire
covered that front was an absolutely uncanny sight. With mathematical
precision the shells would begin to drop at one end of a field and cut
out a belt across it from side to side, the belt growing as each
explosion threw up a splash of dust from the showers of shrapnel;
having completed the belt they would begin another a few yards farther
back until the whole field had been covered and not a soldier hiding
anywhere in it left alive.

On the day of the first gas attack there were soldiers everywhere back
of the line; that day as we drove home there w