"GASSED" AT YPRES

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3061, 24 April 1917, Page 11

"GASSED" AT YPRES

A SOLDIER'S EXPERIENCE

THE FIGHTING INSTINCT

"My first sensation (wp, L. B.Treeman) was of a smarting away -up inside of my nose. This quickly extended to my throat, and then, as my lungs suddenly seemed filled with redhot needles, I was seized with a spasm of coughing. Coughing up redhot needles'is not a pleasant operation, and the pain was intense. Mercifully, it was only a few minutes before a sort of stupor seemed to come on, but even as I passed into half-oonsciousness I was, aware of my outraged lungs revolting, in heaves that shook my frame, against tho poison that had swamped tho trench. With somo of my comrades the fighting instinct was the last thing that died, and I have a sort of recollection of two or three of them clutching at ; the parapet, and firing from cough-shaken shoulders off into tho depths of the -rolling yellow gas clouds. One lad toppled over beside me, and still kept pumping shots from tho bottom of the-trench. I remember hazily trying to kick his rifle out of his hand as ho discharged it over my ear, and, failing to locate it with my foot, recall groping instinctively for my old wrench, and trying to disarm him with that. My last recollection of this stase of things was the shock of feeling the wrench handle swing backward harmlessly for lack of my two shrapnel-smashed fingers to steady it. I had rolled and "writhed, in tho agony of the pain of the gas in my lungs, in a pool of slush in the bottom of the trench, and it must, have been the lying with my face buried in the shoulder of my wet woollen tunic that saved my life. The Huns Arrive.

"Most of my comrades were quite •unconscious /when the Huns, with their heads protected by baggy 'snoots,', came pouring into the trench, but I had enough of /my. senses loft unparalysed to be able to -watch them in a hazy sort of way. Thohorriklo quietness of the thing was positively uncanny. Always before, the enemy had charged with yells (it is directed in their manual that they do to, though, of courso, a man 'gives tongue' naturally on such occasions from, sheer excitement), but now they were hardly making a Bound. Probably this was. by order, so that no more air than was necessary should be /taken into the lungs; but even when some of them did,try to speak the words were so •muffled that:it must have been hard to make them out. The Huns were pretty excited' at first, and started, right down the trench, bayoneting one. body after another. But before th;»y got to me an officer stopped thorn for a minute, and evidently gave them to understand that they were to confine their butchery only to those that tried. to resist. Two or three of our boys, who had not gone under, entirely, but had not sense enough _to iinderstand •the uselessness of putting up a fight, mado' a few groggy passes at the Huns, and paid the penalty. I lay quiet and 'played possum,' but got a nasty prod in the groin whon one of them turned me over with his bayonet to seo whore I was wounded. There was still a good deal of gas in tho bottom of the trench,'

and between that and loss of blood 1 must have lost consciousness' entirely about this time. _ I have some memory of being oarried in a stretcher, and of passing through one or two dressing stations, where" my wounds were washed and bandaged. And After. "My connected -recollections bogin after my waking up in a hospital—well back from the front, but still not out of the sound of tho guns—that was evidently • devoted entirely to 'gas' oases. The ward I was in was filled with men from my own regiment, but what interested mo especially—as soon as I was able to take any interest in anything beyond my own sufferingwas to observe that_a great many Germans were also being treated in the same hospital. I never did find out just how these happened to bo 'gassed,' but presume it wa6 either through accidents to their apparatus or from their 'snoots' being faulty. At cny rate, the Germans had evidently prepared in advance for 'gas' cases, and the chances are that they pulled through a good many of us who might have died had we l beeh taken back to our own hospitals, where they.had, _ at that time, small facilities for handling that kind of trouble. The ward was kept as hot as a Turkish bath, and some of our chaps thought this . was done with the idea of making our agony worse. : One of them, who jumpef out of bed, threw up a window, got a lungful of cold air, and died the same night, gave lis a objectlesson, in why the air had to be kept at close to blood heat. Some of them also thought that a kind of stuff they gave us to inhale made us worse rather than better; but that was only their imagination. If there was any real ground for complaint it might have' been on tho score that the doctors tried many experiments on us, because jfchis was the first chance they had had to study gas-poisoning on a largo scale; but that was no more than wo could have expected."—From "Beating' Back from Germany," in the "Cornhill Magazine" for February.