Of course with the trenches so close together a lot of men had difficulty in getting protection in time. Parties of men in advanced saps and listening posts had the greatest difficulty, and numbers of these men were killed. One pioneer of a tunnelling company came out of a mine gallery knowing nothing about what had been happening aboveground, and walked straight into the middle of the gas cloud. A man in one of the companies of the Irish Rifles was wounded in the head by shrapnel through both his steel and gas helmets. In spite of the wound and the hole in his gas helmet he held the latter close round his mouth and nose and was not gassed at all--a clear case of presence of mind saving his life. One thing which impressed every one with the need for thorough gas training at home, and which should be taken to heart by all men in training at the camps or likely to go there, was the way in which reinforcements and men who had recently joined up suffered. Their casualties were out of all proportion to their numbers and were due entirely to the fact that insufficient attention was given at that time to the gas-defence training of the recruits. Many of them had never put on a helmet before, and none of them had ever smelled gas. In one particular instance a batch of twenty men had come straight over from England and were in the gas attack the day after their arrival in the trenches. The only training they had had was a lecture from their own regimental officers, and consequently they knew little or nothing about the use of their helmets. Every one of these men was gassed. It is true that they had scrambled into their helmets somehow, and none of them died; but the fact remains that absence of training at home cost the fighting line twenty men in one company. In this company they were the only men gassed. Largely as a consequence of this, gas-defence training was taken up very seriously in the early training of recruits, and big gas schools were established at all the camps both in England and at the bases in France, so as to catch the young soldier early. The boche made another gas attack on the Irish Division on the same Front two days later. Once again he let off two waves--this time with an interval of only a quarter of an hour. But despite his idea of “mixing them up” he could not bring off that particular surprise again.