"If we had been real Germans, Reggy," I returned with conviction, "we’d be running yet!" "Do you think he’ll recover?" Reggy asked. "Yes. The attack is so violent and sudden; I think he has every chance. We’ll send him to England to-morrow." Another month passed. It was the night of the twenty-second of April when this startling message reached the hospital: "Empty every possible bed. Ship all patients to England. Draw hospital marquees, beds, blankets and paliasses, and have your accommodation for patients doubled in twenty-four hours." Something unlooked for had happened. We worked like slaves. The hospital grounds soon looked like a miniature tented city. In half the time allotted us we were able to report that we were ready for six hundred wounded. A despatch rider, covered with mud, whirled up to the door on his motorcycle. A little crowd gathered round him. "Anything new?" we asked him excitedly. "The Canadians are in one of the most frightful battles of the war," he replied. "The wounded will be coming in to-night." And this was the day for which we had been waiting! This was the day for which we had crossed the sea! It was as if an iron hand had suddenly gripped the heart and held it as in a vise. We asked for further news, but he knew nothing more, and with anxious and impatient minds all we could do was—wait. *CHAPTER XVIII* As the sun hid its face on that tragic evening of the twenty-second of April, 1915, the Turcos and Canadians, peering over their parapets, were astonished to see a heavy yellowish mist rolling slowly and ominously from the German trenches. In the light breeze of sundown it floated lazily toward them, clinging close to the earth. Although the Turcos thought it a peculiar fog, they did not realise its true significance until it rolled into their trenches and enveloped them in its blinding fumes, stinging their eyes, choking their lungs and making them deathly ill. They could neither see nor breathe and those who could not get away fell in heaps where they were, gasping for air, blue in the face, dying in the most frightful agony. Germany, discarding the last tattered remnant of her mantle of honour, had plunged brazenly into a hideous crime—poison-gas had been used for the first time in the history of war! Coughing, sneezing, vomiting; with every breath cutting like a knife, crying tears of blood, the unfortunate Turcos who had not already fallen, fled from the accursed spot. The horses too, choking and startled, whinneying with fear, stampeded with their waggons or gun limbers in a mad endeavour to escape the horror of the poisoned air. A storm of shrapnel, high explosive and machine-gun bullets followed the flying masses and tore them to pieces as they ran.