I went to bed that night very homesick, wishing that the Kaiser was in Hades and the war was over. For a long time I could not get to sleep and an agitated rapping on my door made me start up quickly from a restless slumber. My window was open and the choking fumes of chlorine poured into the room while Madame rapped away, exclaiming, "Monsieur the Colonel; the asphyxiating gas has arrived." I slammed the window to, soaked a muffler in water and wrapped it over my mouth and nose while robed in a dressing gown, I hastened down stairs. My own gas mask, carefully placed in a corner, had been moved, and, in the dark, I could not find it. I gathered the four women into the inner kitchen and made them breathe through towels wrung out in a solution of ammonium carbonate, which we were fortunate enough to find, while we excluded as much gas as possible by wet towels placed over the cracks in the doors. It was a most unpleasant experience. As we were nearly seven miles from the German line, it was quite evident that the gas must have been discharged in tremendous quantity to have reached us in the strength it did. I had visions of the Germans discharging gas for hours and killing everything that breathed for miles back of the lines. It was a horrible sensation to realize that you had been caught like rats in a cellar and would slowly die of asphyxiation. The gas crept in through the doors, and it was quite impossible to breathe except through towels saturated with the chemical solution. I wondered how the Germans would feel about it when they came over through a country devoid of all life and whether they would take the trouble to bury all the women and children and dead animals. Breathing was steadily becoming more and more difficult, when suddenly the door bell rang. One of the girls insisted on going to answer it, and quickly came back to report that a neighbor had called to see whether they were all right, and that the gas cloud had passed. Never did fresh air taste so sweet to me, and I wasted no time in sending to a hospital for a set of masks so as to be prepared should another gas cloud arrive. The streak of gas that crossed our section of the town must have drifted along some depression in the surface of the country, for a good many people in other parts of the town, particularly where the windows had been closed, were not greatly inconvenienced by it. The gas was strong enough to kill all the young foliage of the roses and other plants in our garden, while closer to the front a number of horses were poisoned by it. Several hundred soldiers of British regiments were gassed and the Germans, under cover of the gas cloud, raided the British trenches in an endeavour to locate and blow up certain mine shafts. That they did not succeed was shown recently when these same mines on the Wytschaete ridge blew both Germans and trenches far on the way towards the eternal stars.