On the night of July 23/24th the Battalion was brought up by light railway trains to near Ypres, and marched from there to Austral Dump. The first part of the operation went off smoothly. Apart from one burst of enemy machine gun fire, which wounded two men at Austral Dump, nothing exciting happened. The trains were pushed into position in No Man’s Land without great difficulty, and the men withdrew according to plan. The gas was liberated and a dense white cloud floated slowly across No Man’s Land. The enemy made no sign. Fifteen minutes after the discharge, the men went out again to remove the trucks. Then the trouble began. The trucks should have been much lighter after the discharge, but they were undoubtedly much harder to push. The air was thick with the gas, but so hard was the work that respirators could not be worn properly, and most men simply had the nose-clip and mouth piece adjusted. The oil of the wheels was clogged by the gas, the ground was slippery from the recent rains and afforded little foothold, and there was not sufficient room to move properly between the railway line and the barbed wire fences beside it. The first part of the way was up an incline, and trucks were continually derailed. To get these latter on to the lines again, the cylinders had to be unloaded, and then replaced. It was found impossible to move whole trains, and trucks had to be uncoupled, and pushed in twos and threes. Even then they could only be moved by officers and N.C.O’s shouting to the men to “heave,” as in a tug-of-war. It was almost daylight before the last trucks crossed the British front line. Every man was thoroughly exhausted, and many were suffering more or less from the effects of the gas. It had been a terribly anxious time for the Commanding Officer, who had himself been working as hard as anyone. Strange to say, through it all the enemy remained completely inactive. The moon was very bright, and the noise must have been audible several hundreds of yards away. Yet, not a shot was fired; not a shell burst anywhere near. Could the gas have had so deadly an effect? Little was ever heard of the result of the operation. Patrols reported many dead rats in No Man’s Land. Later, prisoners from the 6th Cavalry Division, which relieved the 1st Landwehr Division, spoke vaguely of the latter having been withdrawn owing to the use of a new gas by the British. But nothing more definite was ever learned by the Battalion. After nine days in Brigade Reserve, the Battalion again took over the Zillebeke Sector, this time relieving the 2nd Battalion, 118th Regiment of the 30th American Division. This Division was now undergoing the last stage of its instruction, and during the whole tour the Battalion had an American company in the line with it. Each company came in for three days, the system of instruction being as follows:--