The Washington herald., 1919-04-06
THE UNTOLD AGONY OF THE WAR

ingenious in his methods and
varieties of gas poisoning. He
made 1t heavy so that 1t filtered
down into our cellars in Arras
lay sleeping and breathed in its
poison. He made 1t invisible
and odorless so that when gas
masks were invented our men
did not know when to wear
them. He made gas which
caused US to vomit and when
we took of our gas masks sent
over another gas which killed.
And then he invented mustard
gas" the worst OF all. which de-
posted a brownish powder ana
burnt through mems clothes
and raised enormous blisters
and blinded them. With this
gas. sent over in shells. he
"strafed" our batteries and put
many of them out of action. and
caused thousands of Casualties
among our infantry, month after
month. 1t was a dreadful sight
to go through field hospitals
cases were lying, painting for
breath. with their lungs turned
to water, with their bodies
burned. and with bandaged eyes.
On one day in one section OF
the line there were 1900 of
these cases, and every day for
many months there were hun
dreds. 1t was but poor COM
fort to our men in agony that
our gas was even more deadly.
Yet after all.
Slaughter on these devices
BattIehelds were but the
Worst Of All. trimmings and
decor ations Of
that death which is war. The
slaughter In the battlefelds by
artillery, heavy and light. by
machine guns and trench NOR
tars, was the main business OF
the enemy and ourselves, and
both sides did their Job thor
oughly, with superiority on our
side toward the end. In those
four and a half years our losses
were nearly 100000 killed. and
over 100000 wounded. High
figures. Crying out to the pity
of God and man for all this sac
rifice of splendid youth, and with
much suffering OF spirit and
body to each individual before
he lay quiet below a wooden
cross or went home with a
blighty wound, who can describe.
the terrors of the battlefield? I
through those fields on days of
great battle and seen our guns
blown up into the air by high
explosives with their teams
killed beside them. and have
walked through tracks strewn
with our dead and German dead,
headless. with arms and legs
flung far from their bodies, with
dreadful mangled faces, or with
no faces. I have seen not once
but scores Of times the long
trail of the walking wounded.
staggering back under shellfire
with their arms about each
others necks, or hobbling alone
until they dropped to wait for
the stretcher bearers or to die.
so patiently that they hardly
groaned-men with ghastly
wounds revealed markedly. blind
men cropping forward miserably
with one hand tightly clutching
a wounded comrade, men so
hIdeous in masks of clotted
blood that I dared not look at
them after the first glance. The
Flanders battlefields were worst
of all because of the intensity of
fire there and because OF the
state OF the soil in five months
of heavy rains so that each she'll
hole merging into another pit
ten or twelve feet deep was
filled to the brim and made great
bogs in which dead bodies float
ed. Our men could only get
through that ground ten miles
deep to Passchendaele by duck
board tracks. a foot and q
half they fell up to the arm
wide and greasy with slime. and
"taped out" by German shellfre.
They went into action at night
UP those narrow ways OF death
and II they slipped off the duck
boards they fell up to the arm
pits or deeper into the slime
filled pits. and their cries came
wailing down the gusty wind.
Woe betide a wounded man who
fell like that If there were no
comrades handy to haul him out
he sank deep into those bogs by
Glencorse Wood and Inverness
Copse, and drowned. After a
battle in those
The Shiny swamps there were
Bogs of many wounded men
Flanders. lying there and one
of them told me
how he recovered consciousness
at dawn and thought himself
quite alone and was very much
afraid because of that loneli-
ness. until he heard the voices
of wounded wailing about him.
and as the light of dawn paIed
over those grey fields of slime
he saw blood-stained figures
raising themselves out of the
pits like dead men risen from
their graves. Afterwards some
of them clung to each other, or
held hands like children, and so
I met them and saw how they
were shaken by the cold in their
bones, and how the grey slime
OF the Flanders mud was clotted
on them, engrained in the skin
OF their faces and hands, and
plastering the clothes to their
bodies. so that they seemed to
have been buried and dug I'D
again. For five months in 1917
our British soldiers endured