Right here I can mention something which will give you an idea why descriptions of this war don’t describe it. During the first gas attack, the Canadians, choking to death and falling over each other in a fight against a new and unheard-of terror in warfare, found a way--the Lord only knows who first discovered it and how he happened to do it--to stay through a gas cloud and come out alive. It isn’t pretty to think of, and it’s like many other things in this war which you can’t even tell of in print, because simple description would violate the nice ethics about reading matter for the public eye, which have grown up in long years of peace and traditional decency. But this thing which you can’t describe meant just the difference between life and death to many of the Canadians, that first day of the gas. Official orders: now, tell every soldier what he is to do with his handkerchief or a piece of his shirt if he is caught in a gas attack without his mask. The nearest I can come, in print, to telling you what a soldier is ordered to do in this emergency is to remind you that ammonia fumes oppose chlorine gas as a neutralizing agent, and that certain emanations of the body throw off ammonia fumes. Now that I’ve told you how we got from the Knickerbocker bar and other places to a situation which was just one hundred and fifty yards from the entrenched front of the German army in Belgium, I might as well add a couple of details about things which straightway put the fear of God in our hearts. At daybreak, one of our Fourteenth platoon men, standing on the firing step, pushed back his trench helmet and remarked that he thought it was about time for coffee. He didn’t get any. A German sharpshooter, firing the first time that day, got him under the rim of his helmet, and his career with the Canadian forces was over right there. And then, as the dawn broke, we made out a big painted sign raised above the German front trench. It read: WELCOME, EIGHTY-SEVENTH CANADIANS We were a new battalion, we had been less than seventy-two hours on the continent of Europe and the Germans were not supposed to know anything that was going on behind our lines! We learned, afterward, that concealed telephones in the houses of the Belgian burgomasters of the villages of Dinkiebusch and Renninghelst, near our position, gave communication with the German headquarters opposite us. One of the duties of a detail of our men, soon after that, was to stand these two burgomasters up against a wall and shoot them. CHAPTER II THE BOMBING RAID