y. He will probably
have bronchitis. But they've found out what they wanted to know--that
you can go to the assistance of men overpowered by the gas, if you put
on this mask, with less chance of finding yourself dead too when you got
there. They don't lose much time finding these things out, do they?

On Saturday I shall be going on night duty for a month.

_Monday, April 26th,_ 11 P.M.--We have been admitting, cutting the
clothes off, dressing, and evacuating a good many to-day, and I think
they are still coming in.

There is a great noise going on to-night, snapping and popping, and
crackling of rifle firing and machine-guns, with the sudden roar of our
9.2's every few minutes. The thundery roll after them is made by the big
shell bounding along on its way.

Two officers were brought in last night from a sap where they were
overpowered by carbon monoxide. Three of them and a sergeant crawled
along it to get out the bodies of another officer and a sergeant who'd
been killed there by an explosion the day before; it leads into a crater
in the German lines, and reaches under the German trenches, which we
intended to blow up. But they were greeted by this poisonous gas last
night, and the officer in front of these two suddenly became inanimate;
each tried to pull the one in front out by the legs, but all became
unconscious in turn, and only these two survived and were hauled out up
twenty feet of rope-ladder. They will get all right.

The wounded ones are generally in "the excited stage" when they
arrive--some surprised and resentful, some relieved that it is no worse,
and some very quiet and collapsed.

Captain ---- showed me his periscope to-day; you bob down and look into
it about level with his mattress, and then you see a picture of the
garden across the road. He has seen one made by Ross with a magnifying
lens in it so good that you can see the moustaches of the Boches in it
from the bottom of your trench. The noise is getting so beastly I must
knock off and read 'Punch.'

_Tuesday, April 27th._--Have been busy all day, and so have the guns.
When the 15-inch howitzers began to talk the old concierge lady at the
O.D.S. trotted out to see _l'orage_, and found a cloudless sky, and,
_mon Dieu_, it was _les canons_. It is a stupendous noise, like some
gigantic angry lion. The official accounts of the second dash for Calais
reach us through 'The Times' two days after the things have happened,
but the actual hap