ier caliber shells were commencing to
tell; number 3 gun was struck and part of the crew wiped out. Our
telephonist 'phoned headquarters for the weightier women to get busy,
telling them of our plight, and inside six minutes the ladies of larger
girth, the 9.02 howitzers, started debating the question with Fritzie so
vigorously that inside of thirty minutes not a single reply was to be
had from their guns.

"Stand down!"--and cleaning our guns, gun pits and carrying ammunition,
busied us. In the midst of our work a dizziness seized my head,
accompanied with a choking in the throat and lungs, and before I could
cry out or warn my pals, I dropped. I had unconsciously imbibed the
potion when I removed my mask to relight the feed lamps, and it is one
of the peculiar effects of this dose that it is some time after its
inhalation that the harmfulness becomes apparent;--so it was with me. I
was lifted onto a stretcher and carried to the dressing station near
what is known as the Sunken Road. The ground around the station was
dotted with men suffering from attacks of a similar nature; there were
56 of us in all.

The doctor's examination was brief,--"Gas," and I was laid alongside my
brothers in misery. We were ordered to keep absolutely quiet and on no
account to leave our stretchers; but while lying there the unwelcome
messages from the German guns began coming in our neighborhood; and the
ever terrifying sound of their explosions brought the nerves of the men,
already on edge, over the border line of reason, and a number of them
struggled up from their cots and started running away, forgetting or
ignoring the doctor's orders. The poor fellows paid dearly for it; some
of them dropped in their tracks, dying, where they dropped; some died
after they were brought back to the station, and some gave up the ghost
when in England they lost the last remaining tissue of their lungs, due
to the effect of their running. "I mustn't budge!" I kept repeating to
myself, for my own nerves were at the jumping-off point and I thought
the veins in my head would burst if I had to endure those
explosion-roars another minute. Happily they ceased as suddenly as they
began.

There is no kind of suffering endured in the battle front that has such
a horror for the men as the gas; it is that fighting for breath that
takes the life out of a fellow, and, God! how it chokes. Out of that
bunch of 56 gassed men, only six came out whole.

The following