And during that trench existence, there was, he thinks, no conceivable
agony of body or mind which he did not see and experience. There was
the gas—“a crawling yellow cloud that pours in upon you, that gets you
by the throat, and shakes you as a huge mastiff might shake a kitten,
and leaves you burning in every nerve and vein of your body with pain
unthinkable, your eyes starting from their sockets, your face turned
yellow green.” There were the rats—“I see them still, slinking from new
meals on corpses, from Belgium to the Swiss Alps. Rats, rats, rats,
tens of thousands of them, crunching between battle lines while the
rapid fire guns mow the trench edge, crunching their hellish feasts.
Full fed, slipping and sliding down into the wet trenches they swarm
at night—and more than one poor wretch has had his face eaten off by
them attacking him in his sleep.”
[Illustration:
_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._