LIQUID FIRE.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 July 1916, Page 10

LIQUID FIRE.

A TERRIBLE WEAPON.

SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE.

Walking and crawling through the French trenches near Rheims, a luncheon in that city, with nearby houses disappearing under German shell fire, and a tour of the French munition factories and hospitals v/ere experiences of Mrs. Margaret M. Crumpacker, of New York, which followed her crossing of the English Channel aboard the ill-fated Sussex, attacked a few weeks later by a German submarine's torpedo. Most unusual of all she. saw in four months in France was a method of healing burns and rebuilding flesh over wounds caused by the liquid fire and burning tar the Germans are using in their trench warfare.

Dr. Barthe de Sandfort, a Russian noble, discoverer of this treatment, with a preparation of wax he has named ambrine, treats all who apply and is devoting his services without price to the cause of France and her defenders, as are so many of many lands besides the French.

''lt was tlie most amazing thing I ever witnessed," Mrs. Crumpacker said to a reporter of the New York Herald. "The treatment consists of application of a liniment to the wounds. They are truly awful. The burning tar and liquid fire used by the Germans not only burn where they touch but seem to hold and corrode the flesh.

"Wax, which when cold is of amber hue, is treated to a temperature of 240 degrees Centigrade and applied with a soft brush at first and then is poured on the wound. When they told me it did not burn I could not." believe, but Dr. Sandfort assured me and asked me to put my fingers in the boiling stuff to prove what he said. I did so and it did [not burn my flesh at all.

VICTIM'S EYES MERE RED HOLES.

"I saw a poor French soldier from the front at Verdun brought in for treatment. He had been burned by the liquid fire thirty-six hours before his arrival in Paris. His eyes were mere red holes and the flesh had been burned from his chin and his cheek bones. The bones showed bare. The poor man was writhing in frightful agony. They applied the liniment and the hot wax with brushes and then poured it on until it covered his wounds to u depth of nearly a half inch.

"Within 10 minutes he was asleep and his pain evidently had gone. They gave him no opiates. They remove the wax, which peels off like paper, every sis hours and pour on a now application. I saw this man several times and witnessed the astounding renewal of flesh over his wounds. Within two weeks I saw flesh covering his check bones where there had been none. Flesh again covered his chin and Iris beard was growing through it. The treatment seems to make the sound flesh around the burned place grow and extend itself over the bare places."