However, the cannonade was decreasing in violence. The gun-fire ceased, reviving only at intervals. The stretcher-bearers ran up, took away the wounded, picked up the tortured gas victims, whose lungs creaked like the bellows of a forge. The battle was over. The Boches were repulsed. In spite of their gas, in spite of the surprise, in spite of their cannon, they left on the field before us almost a battalion: sprawling corpses, dismembered like broken puppets; dead men who gaped at the stars; wounded who soon were dead. Our losses were considerable, theirs were much greater. Twenty of their number remained with us as prisoners. Haggard and stunned, they were led to the rear for the interrogatory. * * * * * “Well, how has it been?” I asked Berthet, as I gripped his hand. “It was superb!” he responded. There was a hole in his coat. “Not touched?” “No, a ball just missed taking me off.” He said it with a calm which I admired. He concealed from me the fact that he had breathed the abominable vapors. After all, it was only a local action on our line. It was not, in the generally accepted sense, a battle. All of us have seen much greater since then. However, on account of the gas, this first engagement is vividly present in our memory, a recollection never to be effaced. It was an encounter so strange! That foul vapor which enveloped the earth, which ate its way into the fibre of the clothing we wore, corroded and withered the leaves on the trees, and changed the aspect of God’s sane creation into a distorted image of hell, will remain forever one of the deepest infamies of the Germans. After contact with this poisoned cloud, nothing retained its original appearance. The arms were red without being rusty, the color of uniforms was changed. There were very few of our men suffering from gun or bayonet wounds, but whole mounds of those who died in convulsions: poor, twisted dead, who agonized in dying; so disfigured their own mothers could not have recognized them. Some of them were wringing their hands, others were swallowing stones, others seemed to be rammed into the earth like stakes. This was not war; it was worse. This was not the rain of bullets which pierce the flesh, or break a skull in passing. This was not the brutal shell, which bursts to fragments, scatters in a thousand directions and mows down a group of men as gayly as a child knocks down a house of cards. This was another matter. It was the very air turned accomplice of the enemy; blinded eyes, frothing mouth, rotted lungs, a breast on fire; every effort exerted redoubling the torture; the rescuer struck down above the man he attempted to save; the officer suffering like his men; the telephone-operator seized in his shelter, the courier arrested in his course, all alike smothered and struggling with death. This was a breath from the depths of hell, this diabolic invention, which that monster, the German Junker, forced men to choose: weapon of meanness