The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-11-16
AMERICAN WRITES DETAILS OF AMBULANCE CORPS WORK ON THE
 BLOODY FIELD OF CHAMPAGNE
Discovery of Gas Bombs Shows That They Prepared For Use Seven Years Before Outbreak of Hostiities Americans Have Whole Ambulance Work of An Army Corps.


 | 'One of the incidents which stands
 out clearly in my mind is of a night mare drive to Herlus. l received or l ders late one evening to take two cars to this village at 1 8. m. Not 1 being able to find the divisional doc 1 tor to tell him that I considered it 1 imp ossfble to take ambulances by night, without lights, in the pouring rain over the shel1-ho1ed road which led to the village had to try 1t. MT. Joseph WhitweIl with his car and chauffeur accompanied. On my car had George Tate, a most capable man. As he is a. better driver than I am he held the wheel while l Gas so it seems now) spent my whole time wading through knee-deep mud trying, by the faint light of an elec- tric lamp, to find the way round shell holes and bogs or pushing the car out | of the gutter. It shows how difficult the journey was that to cover the six ki1ometers there and back took us two hours and a half. We had the sat isfaction of getting the wounded safe 1y to the hospitals and perhaps it was not entirely low minded of us to be pleased next morning when we heard that some French cars had refused to make the same journey"
 MT. Norton tells at some length of having his ambulanceS stationed one day at Perthes, at a spot only forty yards distant from a battery which I fell. so close that the American am bu1ance men took refuge in a dug out, the entrance of which was fill ed with dirt and splinters from vari- ous explosions. A horse ambulance near by them was bIown-up, and fin ally the Germans brought their gas shells into play tEWe fixed masks on the wounded and on ourselves ,'' writes MT. Norton, ''and after about two hours the Germans let up and we were able to take a long breath and express our feelings of the man who invented this dirty way of fight ing. Nobody was really any the worse for the experience, though our throats and eyes troubled us for a day or two.
 MT. Norton was formerly the direc- tor of the American Classical school 1h Rome, and the director of the American Archaeological Mission at Cyrene, North Africa. An allusion to his former work is made in the fol- lowing picturesque paragraph in his letter:
 "One cloudy morning, after a very tiring night was sitting on the road side watching a rather heavy bonn baFdment nearby and suddenly through the din rose the sweet clear notes of a shepherds pipe It was the same red pipe I have heard so often on the hills of Greece and Asia Minor, and the same sweetly- sad, .age-o1d shepherd music telling of Pan and the Nymphs and the asphodel meadows where youth lies buried. The piper was an ordinary piou-piou, a simple fantasin, mon vieu xCharles,' with -knapsack on back, rifle slung over his shoulder and helmet on head stFo1ling down to the valley of death a few hundred yards beyond. Nor is this the only music I have heard. One night a violin sounded among the pines which shelter our tents and I stro1led over to find a blue-cIad Or pheus easing the pain of the wound ed and> numbing the fatigue of the brancardfers with bits of Chopin and Shubert and Beethoven. Such are some of the impressions of the battle seen from this side of the line.
 Others I have formed since the main fight ceased, in the lines prev1- ously held by the Germans T went over some of their trenches the other day and have never seen anything so horrible. Although, as prisoners have told us, they knew they were to be attacked they had no idea that the attack would be anything so severe as it was. Those I have talked to said it was awful and that they were glad to be out of it. Their trenches were very elaborately constructed, many of the dugouts being fitted up with considerable furniture, the dwellers evidently having notion they would be htrriedly evicted After
 
 left of all this careful work. The whole earth was torn to pieces. It looked as though some drunken giant had driven his giant plough over the land. In the midst of an utterly in describable medley of torn wire, l broken wagons and upheaved timbers, l yawned here and there chasms like l the craterss of small volcanoes where mines had been exploded. It was an ashen Agray world distorted with the <1f I5 T. moon
 ''In the notice given gout by the French authorities no mention is made of some very interesting gas l machines that were taken. These were of two sorts, one for the produc- l ton of ans, the other to counteract it's effects. The latter were rather elab- | crate and heavy but very effective in struments consisting of two main | parts; one to slip over the head pro- | tecting the eyes and clipping the nose, l the other an arrangement of bags and l bottles containing oxygen which the wearer inhaled through a. tube held !, in the mouth. There were several forms of these apparatuses but the l most interesting point to note about | the words: Type of 1914HdeveIoped from type of 1912, developed from 1 type of 1908" thus showing that seven years ago the Germans had decided to 1 fight with gaS.''
 Among those who shared experi- ences with MT. Norton, in the battle 1 of Champagne were W. P.N Clyde, Jr., of New York a graduate of Yale; | William R. Berry of Philadelphia, a graduate of Princeton, Messrs. Coats | worth and Schrieber of Buffalo, N. Y, l Frederick Morgan, a Massa chusetts | man and graduate of Harvard, and | several other American young men, | mostly college graduates. In addition | to Burlington and Phelps, whose place of residence is not known, MT. Nor | ton mentioned in his letter that the | two Whitwells, the two Phelps. Buck | nall and Coatsw orth' did the hardest | work and the chauffeurs Reeves, Tate, | Gibson and Bawer, were untiring.
 An additional paragraph of pie |