"LEST WE FORGET"

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 127, 31 May 1919, Page 14

"LEST WE FORGET"

SHELL SHOCK AND GAS

DEVILISH GERMAN DEVICES

WHAT SOLDIERS SUFFERED,

Mr. Philip Gibbs, the famous English war correspondent, has been telling Americans a few things the British and Dominion troops suffered in France and Flanders. Mr. Gibbs remembers, the poor fellows who suffered from the deviltry of the Germans, and the horrors of war will never forget; but the American people who stayed at home, in common with those who never went from the Dominions, may remember no more, the war being over, and the soldiers—who survived—having returned. Mr. Gibbs'. lips are unsealed by the removal of censorship.. He speaks— PUBLIC'S SHORT MEMORY. The danger is that in a generation, or less, the memory of what this war meant in human suffering may fade, out, leaving only the remembrance of heroism, touched by romance. The danger, is, even now, that when people talk about "the horrors of war," it is but an abstract idea to, them, and that they do not really understand the depths of' abomination through which our men passed so bravely, so patiently, so silently. " 5

For the fighting men did not tell what was happening to them. In their letters home they wrote of the brighter side- of things for the sake of those who were anxious and afraid; and, when they came home on leave, in answer to questions aboufc their sufferings they said : "I want- to forget all that. . . Let's go and see a. show which will make us laugh. Thank God for laughter." As 0, war correspondent in the field I, too, had' to tone down the black side of war. Apart altogether from' censorship, it was my duty to keep up the heart of the people, and not,to add to their torture of anxiety', for those they loved by harrowing descriptions of carnage, and misery.. And there were, things . the enemy wanted to know, which I was not going to tell him —the exact effect of his' poison gas. The sum total of his slaughter in particular places. The success of his flame machines, and other devlish devices. So, in spite of the tragic spirit which often brooded in my despatches from. the front, and my descriptions of battlefield scenes which were grim enough, God knows, in their realism, I did not give the full picture of our men's agony. ; ,'": BUEIED ALIVE. ' '■■ . Many soldiers were,\;buried .:alive. That,happened scores of times in; Ypres where platoons of men.billeted in.vaults below the A cloth hall, the: cathedral, and houses, 'were, entombed by.-.-tons of masonry hurled down by high' explosives. I remember., in the spring of 1915 that 40 men wereHburied like this below a house in ■ Ypres which was piled above them by German shellfire. .Their groans were heard by their comrades, who made frantic efforts to rescue them, but during this work of rescue the enemy's fire was intensified, and around the living tomb of the 40 men lay many dead and dying. That happened not once, but hundreds of times, not only in Ypres, but in Albert and Arras, and' many other towns under' German gunfire into which we went with the nagging little devil of thought that at any moment death "or horrible agonies preceding death might happen to us. Yet our men went into these places and lived in them, laughing and whistling, taking the risk, day after day, and hiding that cold touch of fear which was somewhere in the heart of the bravest of them: Our troopa and our transport went up the tracks which the Germans had registered with their 'guns. It was just luck, always, whether they, passed between the bursts of shellfire at "Suicide Corner," and "Shrapnel Corner," and "Hellfire Cross Eoads," and out of Ypres along the Menin-road. IN THE TEENCHES. The Germans on the high ground made their drainage flow into the British trenches, and the heavy rains of Flanders flowed down naturally into the flats* so that many of our trenches were water-logged. Even in August I have waded waist-deep in water through trepches where English soldiers were holding the front line.

"That Grand Fleet of curs don't, seem to be very active," said one of them, getting a joke out of his misery. "It's a pity it don't steam down these blinking trenches and do a bit of fight-.' ing-"

That was in summer. In winter, when the water was ice cold, it may be imagined what our men endured. They were always wet. They slept in wet clothes, sat in wet dug-outs, stood in wet boots and the cold slime of,mud in Flanders encased them and . put its clammy touch' about .their very souls. In the first ■ two winters of. the war they were stricken with a disease called "trench foot." Its symptoms were exactly like those of frost-bite, a sense of burning until all sense was: deadened and the feet blackened and, rotted. Battalions lost 40 per cent. of their men for a time from this cause, and in the old Ypres salient I have seen men of the 49th (Yorkshire) division crawling back from the trenches, or carried pick-a-back by their comrades, unable to walk a yard, and with both feet tied up in cotton wool afc the field ambulance.

There was no' comfort for then 1 in their dugouts which were miserable holes in the wet earth without any of the comfort or safety of those deep tunnelled dugouts which the Germans had built for themselves below the ridges. They were not only wet, but alive with vermin, and our officers and men from de-. cent, clean homes, some 'of them used all their lives 'to ■ the delicacies and refinements of civilised life, found themselves swarming with lice, ' and they hated this worse than the danger of five-point-nines and trench mortars, with the risk of being buried alive in their dugouts, or killed by a flying scythe of steel across their parapets. For the. lice did not leave- them alone by day or night, and made life itself, a foul and disgusting thing. Larger vermin—rats and mice—invaded the trenches and Romped and squealed in. the dugouts, attacking food supplies and careless of living men, though they liked dead men best, and outside in No Man's Land, or in. the bogs of Hooge—the worst hell of all, where our men sat and lived amid the corruption of human flesh. WHAT SHELL SHOOK IS. British soldiers were great fightere; j but bad diggers. It was the constant | shelling behind the lines, and in the lines, which wore down the nerves of the men and caused that new disease, unknown to mankind before, called shell shoek —the most horrible malady in war. Strangely enough, it affected the'stolid, phlegmatic type of man more than the nervous and highly strung, and it had nothing to do with lack of courage,, but waj a physical disorder of the nervous system caused by concussion. During the attack on Thiepval, in the battles of the Somme, I saw a tall and strapping Sergeant-Jlajor go raving mad by shell shock. He kept clawing at his mouth and his body wae shaken with convulsions, so that he- had to be strapped to a stretcher. Another soldier near him, a young iind lmndaomn boy/ to shaking ki a kitirf of wun, AtaHna wildly

with a dreadful terror in his eyes, quite insane. After almost every battle we fought through four and a-half years of fighting- there was- always a crowd of shell shock cases, and I used to turn my head away from the sight of these poor boys, with their dazed and lolling eyes, and that clawing gesture at the mouth. Our asylums are still full of them.

Then the "Flammenwerfer," or flame-thrower, made its appearance, and our King's Royal Rifles in the Ypres' salient were the first to see this new form of terror. As they stood-to in the trenches they were aware of some liquid falling lightly upon them, and it smelt, of petroleum. A few minutes later they saw German soldiers advancing upon them with canisters strapped to their shoulders, and hose-pipes from which jets of flame- gushed out twenty yards ahead. Some of the King's Royal Rifles caught fire and were charred to cinders. Others beat the flames out of , their clothes, crying and cursing, and others, in spite of their burns fired through those tongues of flame, and Germans carrying canisters were burned to death in their own fire. WHAT POISON GAS REALLY MEANT. Then came the devilish use of poison gas, first used by the Germans in the second battle of Ypres, in April of 1915, when our men did not understand its meaning and retreated before that vapour of death through a wild stampede of civilians in Ypres until many fell, choking and gasping their lives out in the fields around. That was in the spring of 1915, and until the end of the war the Germans and ourselves developed and intensified this most dreaded means of destruction.

The enemy was devilishly ingenious in his methods and varieties of gas poisoning. He made it heavy so that it filtered down into our cellars in Arras and Armentierea, where our men lay sleeping and breathed in its poison. He made it invisible, and odourless so that when gas masks were invented our men did not know when to wear them. He made a gas which caused us to vomit, and when we took off our gas masks sent over another gas which killed. And then he invented "mustard gas," tlie worst of all, which deposited a brownish powder and burned through men's clothes and raised enormous blisters and blinded them. With this gas, sent over in shells, he "strafed" our batteries and put many of them out of action, and caused thousands of casualties among our infantry, month after month. It was • a dreadful sight to go tlirough field hospitals where hundreds of these gas cases were lying, panting for breath, with their lungs turned to water, ■with their bodies burned, and with bandaged eyes. On one day in one section of the line there vrefe 1500 of these cases, and every day for many 'months there were hundreds. It was but poor comfort to. our men in agony that our gas was even more deadly. WITH NEW ZEALANDERS. Mr. Gibbs refers at' length to the battlefields where the New Zealanders fought. The Flanders battlefields were worst of all because of the intensity of fire there and because of the state of the soil in five months of heavy rains so that each shell hole merging into another' pit ten or twelve feet deep was filled to the brim and made great bogs in which dead bodies floated. Our men could only get through that ground ten miles deep to Passchendaele by duckboard tracks, a foot and 4-half wide and greasy with slime, and "taped out" by German shellfire. They went into action at night up those narrow ways of death and if they slipped off the duckboard they_ fell up to the armpits or deeper into the slime-filled pits, and their cries came wailing down the gusty wind. Woe betida. a wounded man who. fell like that. If there were no comrades handy to haul him out he sank deep into those bogs by Glencorse Wood and- 'Inverness Copse, and drowned \ y

After a battle in those 6wamps there were many wounded men'lying there, and one of them told me how he recovered consciousness at dawn and thought himself quite. alone and was very much afraid because of that' loneliness, until he heard .the voices of wounded wailing about him, and as the light of dawn paled over those gray fields of slimo he saw blood-stained figures raising themselves out of the pits like dead men risen from their graves. Afterward some of them clung to each other, or held hands like chilren, and so I met them and saw how they were shaken, by the cold in their, bones, and how the gray slime of- the Flanders mud was clotted on them, engrained in the skin of their faces and hands, and plastering the clothes to their bodies, so that they seemed to have been buried and dug up again. During all the years of war, until the last phase, there were dreadful epir sodes like that when whole bodies of men, round Ypree, in Delville. Wood and High Wood, on the Somme, at Gommercourt and Thiepval, were slashed to death by German gunfire. They were fine men, boys for the most part, from English counties and Scottish farmsteads and cities, and Irish villages, and I had many friends among them and. loved them all, so that it was hard to go to a battalion mess after one of these battles and to. find few familiar faces, but new faces of other boys who had come out to fill up the gaps, knowing that in a little while their turn would come.

Hut they came and did not try to shun their fate. They walked among the dead and knew the horrors of war, but they put on a mask of cheerfulness and hid any'fear they might have in their hearts—God knows we were all afraid—and they were gallant to the end, hating this war as the hell it was but going through with it, and drinking to the very dregs its cup of agony, for the name and honour of the British race and for their own pride of manhood, which would allow no surrender.