GASSED!
About a month after the Canadians had
taken Vimy Ridge we relieved the ----
Canadian Battalion in the town of Vimy, where
our battalion was in support to another
battalion holding the front lines some distance in
advance. Our Regimental Aid Post on our
previous stay in this town had been in the
cellar of a brewery near the railway station.
Since we had left the shelling in the neighborhood
had become so severe that this cellar had
been abandoned. It had caught fire and all
the woodwork had burned up. Out of curiosity
I visited this old cellar on our arrival at
Vimy and found it still hot as hades from the
heating up of the brick and cement. It was
absolutely uninhabitable. So we were forced
to search for other quarters.
The officers of No. ---- Canadian Field
Ambulance, with that camaraderie so prevalent
out there, invited us to share with them
a couple of old cellars to which they had gone
on deserting the brewery. We accepted gladly.
One of their two cellars they used as sleeping
and eating quarters, the other as a dressing
station where they were kept exceedingly
busy attending the wounded. The Germans
had the range of Vimy to a nicety, and with
true German love of destruction they poured
five hundred to a thousand shells into the ruins
daily. Whenever the Germans are driven from
a village, their practice is to ruin it by high
explosive shells sent from their new line of
defense. And these two cellars were about the
center of the Vimy target.
The previous day two officers of the field
ambulance were standing a few feet apart in
a little room off from the cellar used as
sleeping quarters. A table stood between them, on
which were two lighted candles. Suddenly
through the floor above came a four-inch shell,
just missing the table, and sinking into the
floor. Fortunately for the two officers it did
not explode--it was a dud. The rush of air
caused by the shell extinguished one of the
candles. The other remained lighted. It may
be understood easily that the officers felt a
bit unnerved. After staring at the hole in
the floor for some moments, Captain M----
picked up the lighted candle in one hand and
the extinguished one in the other and endeavored
to light one from the other. His hands
shook so that he could not make the candles
meet. After a number of vain attempts to
bring them together he gave it up. His
nervous system was so shaken that he was sent
to the rest station on two weeks' leave.
We arrived shortly after the shell had gone
through the cellar. Captain M---- himself told
us of it, and his humorous description of his
attempts to get the candles within six inches of
each other was ludicrous in the extreme.
After an appetizing supper eaten in the cellar
with the officers of the field ambulance, we
medical officers took turns attending to the
many wounded who were arriving. All went
well till eleven o'clock that night, when we
heard the whirr of gas shells coming in our
direction. As they burst close to us, we soon
smelt their penetrating, pineapple odor. The
Huns continued to pour them in large numbers
in our direction, and, as the town of Vimy is
in a hollow at the foot of Vimy Ridge, the
atmosphere soon became laden with the poison
gas which, being heavier than air, sinks to the
bottom of any hollows. The air in our cellars
became saturated with the filthy, death-dealing
gases in spite of the wet blanket which we hung
over the entrance to prevent their entering.
Had we been able to stay in the cellar and
keep the blanket tightly placed over the
entrance, our misery would have been much less,
but wounded were coming in from all directions
and we had to keep going in and out, in
turns, to the cellar in which we did our
dressings. The gas kept thickening every minute.
To add to the discomfort these gas shells
contained two gases. One entered the lungs,
causing congestion of their tissues followed by
inflammation, suffocation, and death if a
sufficient amount were inhaled; the other,
lachrymatory gas--called tear shell gas by the
soldiers--which not only inflames temporarily the
conjunctiva of the eyes, but is cursedly irritating
while it lasts.
Naturally we quickly adjusted our gas
masks. But, as it was fifty feet from one
cellar to the other, and we dared not flash lights
to pass over the stone and mortar of the fallen
walls, we found it necessary to remove our
masks for moving, as well as for the purpose
of tying up the wounds in an acceptable
manner. Thus, by midnight, our eyes were as red
as uncooked beefsteak and they felt as if they
had been sandpapered. Our lungs on each
respiration felt as though they were gripped
in a closing vise. The gas masks act by
filtering the inhaled air through a chemical, which
neutralizes the poisonous materials in the gases.
When we removed them we had severe attacks
of coughing which were relieved only by
breathing through the mouthpiece of the masks.
Hours dragged slowly by. Still the whirr
of approaching shells and the soft thud of their
bursting continued. Misery? Never
elsewhere had we experienced anything akin to
it--the inflamed eyes; the suffocation in our
lungs; the knowledge that inhalation of
sufficient of the gas would put us into Kingdom
Come. We knew that we could easily get out
of this poisonous atmosphere by climbing to
the top of Vimy Ridge, only a few hundred
yards behind us. But we did not, for that would
be deserting our posts.
All these things combined to make it the
most miserable, soul-torturing night we had
ever experienced. And, to add to it all, our
artillery was in a hollow nearby where the gas
was so thick that it prevented our gunners
from retaliating, making it all take, and no
give. We all learned that night what it felt
like to long to desert. We learned that there
are times when a man who is brave enough to
be a coward deserves sympathy. But, thank
God! there are few such men in our armies.
The brave man and the coward, both, at times,
experience the same sensation of fear, the
coward allowing the emotion to conquer him, while
the brave man grits his teeth and carries on.
For nearly five hours we endured this
misery, wondering when we would have
inhaled enough of the poison to put our names
among the casualties. One of the strange
things that struck me during that long night
was that I heard no word of censure or
condemnation of the Germans who were the cause
of our suffering. We cursed war in general;
we cursed Vimy and all that pertained to it;
we cursed the inactivity of our artillery; and
we cursed the gases; but the misery was taken
as one of the fortunes of war, and no one
wasted his breath in vain attempts to beat the
Germans with his mouth--as Lord Roberts
expressed it at the beginning of the conflict.
Often when I am five thousand miles away
from the firing line, sitting, perhaps, in a
smoking-car, and listening to the abuse of our
enemy, I think of this circumstance.
After nearly three hours of the wretched
gassing, I had been lying for some little time
in the upper of two bunks, wearing my mask,
feeling very much smothered, and wondering
if it were pleasanter to die quickly from the gas
or slowly from the mask. For the masks give
a most uncomfortable feeling of impending
suffocation. Finally, I decided that I
preferred the gas to the mask. I pulled it off,
swore softly to myself, and muttered that I
chose a quick death in preference to a slow one.
"Same here, doc," said a jolly voice from
below me. "I took off my bally mask some
time ago, and have been lying here wondering
how long you were going to endure it."
Looking down I saw the smiling face of
Captain S----, a chaplain, who had been there
the previous day, burying some of our brave
boys who had paid the greatest price that man
can pay. He was a most courageous chap,
always good-humored under any circumstances,
and the gas had not lessened his courage. We
joked for a few moments, then we tried,
without success, to argue courage into a little
cockney for whom this was a cruel initiation into
the firing line, and whose "wind was up," as
the boys express it when a man's nerve is about
all gone. I don't know what happened to the
little cockney in the end, but my last memory
of him was that he was still arguing that this
was no place for a white man, with which
sentiment we all agreed. Shortly we were glad
to reapply our masks, as the air became almost
thick enough to cut with a knife, and that vise
on our chests kept tightening.
Though the night seemed a thousand years
long, it finally came to an end just as our
nerves were at breaking point. The gas masks
had been on our faces for the better part of five
hours. What sighs of relief we gave as those
abominable shells ceased to come over, and in
their place we heard the crump of high
explosive shells! Dame Nature completed the
blessing by pouring down a drizzling rain which
dissolved the gases and cleared the air, the
rain then lying in opalescent pools in the
shell-holes.
How glorious God's fresh air seemed to us
after that atrocious experience! With what
pleasure we laid aside our masks, though they
had without doubt saved our lives! How
exquisite to feel that the grains of sand between
our eyelids and eyeballs seemed to be
absorbing! And what a satisfaction to know that,
despite the agony of it all, we had done our
bit like men; for the greatest gifts that God
can give are those necessary for the playing
of a man's part!
Day was breaking when two runners came
from the officer commanding B Company, to
tell me that he wanted me to come over to the
railway embankment, where his dugout was, to
see a number of his men who were suffering
severely from the gas. To come for me these
boys had to cross a field for three hundred
yards where the enemy were dropping Jack
Johnsons--immense high explosive shells. The
boys had nearly been caught by one of them,
and they thought it unwise to recross the
ground just then, as the shells were still
falling. I leaned against the ruins of this old
stone building, and watched the shells
exploding for some minutes.
Gas attacks have a most depressing and
demoralizing effect on everyone. I have never
made a trip with as little pleasure as that I felt
at the thought of this one before me. A medical
officer can, but very rarely does, refuse to
go to cases. He may insist on having them
brought to him, as there is only one medical
officer to a battalion, and his death may make
it awkward for his unit till he is replaced by
another surgeon from the nearest field ambulance.
However, though there was no let-up to the
shelling, there was no alternative but to go.
So I called the runners and my corporal and
we started over. Whether it was due to the
depressing effects of the gassing that we had
gone through I know not, but at any rate this
was the only occasion during my service at
the front on which I had a real presentiment
that death was going to meet me. Distinctly
do I remember expressing to myself the
following inelegant sentence:
"I believe this is the last damn walk that I
am ever going to take!"
But, fortunately, presentiments seldom
materialize. Our trip across that field was
without even a narrow escape. The shells obligingly
burst not closer to us than two or three
hundred yards, and we reached B Company
headquarters in safety. There a number of men
were in rather a bad condition--as a matter
of fact, one was dying--from the effects of
a shell which had struck directly into their
dugout. It killed one man by impact and gave the
others such a concentrated dose of the gas as
to put them into a dangerous condition.
As a result of this gas attack many of our
men had to go to the hospital, and those of us
who escaped that were depressed for several
days. Gassing weakens the morale of troops.
Men do not fear to stand up and face an
enemy whom they have a chance of overcoming,
but they do hate dying like so many rats in a
trap, when death is due to a gas against which
they cannot contend except by keeping out
pure air and breathing through masks a
mixture of carbon dioxide, poison gas, and air.
Fighting with gas is cowardly and is against
the rules of civilized warfare. Only a race
which cares for naught but success, no
matter how attained, would employ it. True, we
now retaliate in kind, but we should never have
considered this method of warfare as worthy
of civilized man, except in self-defense. If
you are fighting a wild beast of the jungle,
jungle methods are in order. I, for one,
believe that retaliation is the only method to
combat an enemy who has shown himself ready
to use any means to attain his end.