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.
