The doctor's examination was brief,--"Gas," and I was laid alongside my brothers in misery. We were ordered to keep absolutely quiet and on no account to leave our stretchers; but while lying there the unwelcome messages from the German guns began coming in our neighborhood; and the ever terrifying sound of their explosions brought the nerves of the men, already on edge, over the border line of reason, and a number of them struggled up from their cots and started running away, forgetting or ignoring the doctor's orders. The poor fellows paid dearly for it; some of them dropped in their tracks, dying, where they dropped; some died after they were brought back to the station, and some gave up the ghost when in England they lost the last remaining tissue of their lungs, due to the effect of their running. "I mustn't budge!" I kept repeating to myself, for my own nerves were at the jumping-off point and I thought the veins in my head would burst if I had to endure those explosion-roars another minute. Happily they ceased as suddenly as they began. There is no kind of suffering endured in the battle front that has such a horror for the men as the gas; it is that fighting for breath that takes the life out of a fellow, and, God! how it chokes. Out of that bunch of 56 gassed men, only six came out whole. The following week we were ordered to leave the Somme. Although I felt in the mood for sticking it as long as I had the strength to keep going, yet I must confess the order filled my soul with a gratitude that was unspeakable. I had been in the Somme campaign three months, and when our guns swept into position at Martinsaart, my weight was 171; when I left, I tipped the scales at 145. The men who had been with the guns there and who know what it is to work 24 hours in the day for many days in the week, rarely during the three months experiencing the refreshing rest of a consecutive two hours' sleep, and working like veritable demons during every waking moment, either at the guns or cleaning the ammunition, or carrying the ammunition into place,--they will understand what it means to lose 25 pounds in weight on the Somme. My uniform was in rags and saturated so thickly with grease and dirt that for many days it was one of my pet recreations to take a knife and scoop it by the bladeful out of the khaki cloth. And my skin! What a hide! The combination of cleaning and repairing guns, working them constantly, driving horses, observation work, together with the gas, my body was saturated with a mixture that took weeks to extract.