Even when arrangements had been made for the manufacture of respirators in England, the supply suddenly dried up. It was found that the girls who made them were working as best they could with raw and bleeding fingers, and London was being scoured for rubber gloves. Someone had altered the formula of the mixture in which the respirators were dipped by substituting for carbonate of soda caustic soda, which has the property of dissolving the human skin. His name, needless to say, does not appear in the official history. Such were some of the difficulties which we incurred in our anti-gas work, through the ignorance of highly-placed persons. As, however, our defensive (though not our offensive) measures were ultimately better than those of any other nation, things must have been still worse elsewhere. The success of our respirators was largely due to one man, Harrison, whose name is insufficiently known to his countrymen. He was an analytical chemist, and author of that admirable and too little read work _Secret Remedies_ (published by the British Medical Association). He enlisted as a private, but was a Lieutenant-Colonel when he died of influenza and overwork in 1918. Naturally the ignorance of our private soldiers was of an even more abysmal character. In the early days they often removed the respirators from their faces and tied them around their chests, as it was there that they felt the effects of the gas. Again in 1917 80% of the mustard-gas cases vomited, while this symptom was rare in 1918. Apparently it took five months for the British Army to realize that gas-poisoning did not necessarily mean poisoning through the stomach. If, then, in future wars we are to avoid gross mismanagement in high places, and panic and stupidity among the masses, it is essential that everyone should learn a little elementary science, that politicians and soldiers should not be proud of their ignorance of it, that ordinary men and women should not be ashamed or afraid of knowing something of the working of their own bodies. If we persist in the belief that we can be saved by patriotism or social reforms, or by military preparation of the type which would have sufficed in former struggles, we shall go down before some nation of more realistic views. We do not know what type of scientific knowledge will be needed: we can be certain that some type will be. The British are a tired people: they like to rest “in breathless quiet after all their ills,” and to pin their faith to the promises of leaders whose eyes are fixed on the past. It has all happened before. “Ganz vergessener Völker Müdigkeiten Kann ich nicht abthun von meinen Lidern, Noch weghalten von der erschrockenen Seele Stummes Niederfallen ferner Sterne.” (“I cannot lift from my eyelids the weariness of quite forgotten peoples, nor hold away from my terrified soul the dumb downfall of far stars.”)