“Gas!”
Briefest and biggest of all words thrust by the Great War into the fore-ranks of speech, the word rang aloud upon the summer air.
A kernel of compressed menace, it burst explosively, spread elastically, until the very sky--the peaceful, lamb’s-wool New England sky--seemed darkened by its threat, until the brown buds, withered in their tender youth, and the rags of yellow grasses blighted before by its poisoned breath, trembled and wilted, as it were, anew!
It even withered the morning-glory bloom upon the faces of a quartette of young girls, who stood a few yards to windward of a little red-and-white post labeled “Danger Zone,” on the other side of which the warning was given.
Breathlessly, nervously, they shrank together until their shoulders touched, like fledgling birds struck by the terrors of the first storm that assails them in the nest, seeking for contact and comfort.
“Now the party is beginning--the ball opening, as our boys say over in France, when a gas attack is being launched against them. That smoke-candle off there on the edge of the trench, which is doing more than’s required of it--bursting into flame as well as smoke--that’s the illumination for ‘Fritzie’s’ party! And the rattle--you hear the policeman’s rattle, don’t you, shaking its teeth down in the trenches--that’s the opening stunt of the orchestra. See?”
It was a young lieutenant, a boy-officer of twenty-three, who spoke, with a silver dart in his gray eye matching the gleaming bars upon his shoulders, as he bent towards the tallest of the four girls whose face was paling under her velvet hat, uniquely embroidered by her own hand with certain silken emblems, typifying her name and symbol, together with the rank she held as a Camp Fire Girl.
“Smoke-candle! D’you mean that foot-high metal thing flaring away there behind the sand-bags, one of a dozen or so, stationed along the trench-brim? They don’t look much like ordinary candles, but they certainly can smoke! Such horrid, blinding sulphur smoke, too! Bah!”
She caught her breath a little, that oldest girl, her wide dark eyes watering, as a tiny yellow feather of the sulphur fumes, stealing stealthily to windward, wafted from the wing of the main cloud drifting off to leeward, tickled her throat in teasing fashion.
“Yes, it is blinding thick, isn’t it? We must move farther to windward, away from it.” The lieutenant smiled down at her, thinking the hat with its wide brim, and its delicate, emblematic frontispiece against the rich velvet--representing crossed logs, a tongue of flame rising from them and shading into a pearly pinion purporting to be smoke--was the prettiest headgear he had ever seen.
“Thick! So thick that you could drink it, if--if it wasn’t so horridly pea-soupy and pungent, eh?” laughed another girl, who stood next to the tallest one, their shoulders touching. “It’s as dense as the fog our Captain Andy used to tell us about; the fog out on the fishing banks--Grand Banks--which he declared was so thick at times that the poor fish didn’t know when they were atop of the water; they went on swimming up in the fog. Don’t you remember, Olive?” she asked as she merrily nudged the older, dark-eyed girl who wore the Torch Bearer’s insignia of logs, flame, and smoke--an insignia that stood for a high-beating heart, as ready and eager to do its share in this moment of world conflict, as that typified by the silver bars on the lieutenant’s shoulders and the cross-gun on his khaki collar.
It was he, Lieutenant Iver Davenport, or, to come down to detail, Lieutenant Iver O. P. Davenport, who, thanks to his middle initials and that keen silver of scrutiny between his narrowed eyelids, was christened in his infantry company “O Pips,” the camp nickname for an observation post, he who answered, with brotherly freedom, glancing over the Torch Bearer’s shoulder at the brown-eyed girl beyond her.
“Yes, sis, it’s as thick as the fogged-fish yarn, or as the fabled fog that the half-breed pathfinder who was attached to our Boy Scout troop used to tell of when he’d begin quite modestly that he ‘hadn’t seen fog ver’ tick--non--only one time he see fog so tick dat one mans try for drink eet an’ mos’ choke hisself; and wen dey take out dat fog wat dat mans try for drink, dey take dat for make broomstick--yaas!’ Oh! you couldn’t get ahead of Toiney; he who--was it three summers ago?--pulled one of your Camp Fire Group out of dangerous quicksands, eh?”
“Yes, that will be three years ago next August and we’re going to camp in that same region of white sand-dunes this coming summer, too, under the spell of the Green Com Moon,” returned the boy-officer’s sister, Sara Davenport, named by the Council Fire Sesooā, the Flame.
“Well! we won’t see Toiney again.” The eyes of the taller girl, Olive Deering, watered, but in their dark, liquid depths shone Toiney’s gold star, never to be eclipsed. “He sleeps under the daisies of France. You should have heard him march off to enlist, singing:
“‘C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
Eet’s a long way forre go-o--
C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
To dat chèrie girl--I--know!
Adieu, Peekadil-lee!
Adieu Leicestaire Square,
C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,
But my heart--she’s dere!’”
“Bravo! Ah, well, he’s gone on the longue chemin now--the long trail--a trail of light it must be,” murmured Lieutenant O Pips half under his breath, his eyes, keen and misty, searching that dense yellow cloud to leeward, billowing down into a ziggagging maze of trenches--the cloud thrown off by the smoking sulphur candles, of which here and there one did more than was required of it, yielded complete combustion and burst into a ragged, rose-red banner of flame, that added weirdness to the daylight scene.
Speaking of Toiney--light-hearted, raggedly romantic half-breed--who had made the supreme sacrifice, presently drew the girls’ thoughts to those living comrades-in-arms of Toiney, the American soldiers now lined up under that baleful yellow cloud, down in the invisible trenches, undergoing the training of being “put through gas,” in order to render them expert in adjusting their gas-masks directly the warning was given--the rattle sprung.
“‘Fritzie’s party,’ as you call it, seems rather halting; they haven’t brought on all the fireworks yet, have they?” suggested a third girl, known by the Council Fire as Munkwon, the Rainbow, in every-day life, as now, Arline Champion, the shell-like tint of her cheeks deepening to a hectic flush from the same expectant emotion which had paled her sisters.
“No, sometimes the chemists of the Gas Defense Department who have charge of these sham attacks, turn loose the smoke-cloud several minutes before they thicken it with the poison waves--gas waves,” the officer answered. “They send it over every old way so that no man down there may be caught napping,” with a brief excited puff of laughter.
“And I suppose this sham ‘party’ is just as dangerous for the men in the trenches here, being trained to meet gas, as the real one over there?” Arline persisted.
“Sure! With them, too, it’s the Quick or the Dead, as we say in the army!... If any one is slow about getting into his mask--otherwise his chlorine-fooler----”
It was at that moment that the whole round earth began, as it seemed, to “fool” and make believe that an earthquake heavingly rocked it. Up from the trenches came a loud, rolling report that echoed like thunder through the yellow cloud. Tearing its veil asunder, a broad sheet of flame leaped towards the sky. The ground shook under the girls’ feet. Wildly they clutched each other upon the sere skirts of Gas Valley, as this portion of the great military training-camp, where soldiers were initiated into the horrors of poison gas, was nicknamed.
“Ha! Now the fun’s really on! That turns loose the bitter tear-gas--worse than a corner on onions for making one weep!” blithely exclaimed the officer. “Don’t be nervous! It’s only the explosion of six sticks of dynamite down in the middle of the trenches, which bursts the shells on the surface, each containing a little paraffin cup--rice-paper cup--holding a small quantity of oil, and under that the lachrymatory liquid--the oniony ‘tear-stuff’ that would wring tears from a stone image. There go the chlorine-cylinders, gasping, too!”
He pointed--that young officer, charged like a live bomb himself, the heated tension of the scene and the excitement of having visitors reacting upon a naturally fiery disposition--pointed across the twenty-five yards of blighted vegetation which separated his group from the trenches, at two tall iron cylinders near which stood a couple of masked sentries, looming like brown goblins amid the yellow fringes of the smoke-cloud.
“What! Can they get as near to the horrid, deadly chlorine as all that?” breathlessly gasped the youngest girl, Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl--amid scenes like this, remote from the Council Fire, Lilia Kemp.
“Yes, if their masks are perfect, and properly adjusted. Those are two of the young chemists from the Gas Defense, who are putting over the ‘show,’ and----”
“Oh, goody! I know now why we’re urged to save and collect peach-stones next summer--ever so many other kinds of pits, too--to make carbon for soldiers’ masks! ‘Save the peach-stones; waste not one!’ A few may save a soldier’s life! When I’m drying them in the oven--incidentally burning my fingers, as I’m sure to do, I’ll feel really like--like----”
“Like the real girl behind the lines,” put in Lieutenant O Pips, his eyebrows lifting, in turn interrupting Little Owl as she had blinkingly interrupted him. “See, now, the ‘ball’ is on in good shape! There go the big firecrackers simulating shells, so that the men’s nerves may be prepared for bursting shrapnel; and the electric bombs exploding everywhere, in and out along the surface of the trenches, loosing more tear-gas!--Oh! this--this is spectacular now. But you should just see it at night. Then it’s Inferno, sure enough!”
“It--it’s that, in daylight, when one thinks of the men down there!” Olive Deering bit her lip, gazing steadfastly in the direction of the veiled trenches, above which the yellow smoke-screen was torn by the popping of monster firecrackers, pricked by the laughter of roseate flashes, so bright, so elfin, that who could dream their fairy splendor was but the glitter of a key to unlock tears?
“The men undergoing initiation in the trench-bays? Oh, bless you! they’re all right, unless--unless it should be a case of:
“‘The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.’
“But there won’t be any ‘blighter’ to-day--there couldn’t be!” He bent, that very tall young officer, nearer to Olive’s ear, the nineteen-year-old girlish ear under the Torch Bearer’s hat. “Nobody knows how I have been looking forward to this day, Olive, this spring day, when you girls would visit me in camp before I went over! I’m sorry that your father, Colonel Deering, and your aunt chose to pay a visit to Headquarters, Brigade Headquarters, instead--instead of coming on here to inspect the fireworks in Gas Valley.”
“Fireworks never to be forgotten!” murmured Olive, coloring a little as the luck of this longed-for holiday coined itself into a silver bar in the eager eyes bent upon her, matching the luck of those other silver shoulder-bars for which the young Plattsburg graduate had “plugged” so hard.
“Father has an old friend who is Captain of Headquarters Troop, but we’ll find him again later,” she said, suddenly rather breathless from the moving conviction that when the youth--for he was little more--beside her faced the poisoned horror-waves of the real Gas Valley “over there,” when he crouched, sleepless, in a cold and muddy trench-bay or led his men over the top, she, for him, would be beyond all others--even more than the brown-eyed sister to whom his glance roved now--the girl behind the lines, beyond the ocean, typifying America the Beautiful, standing for all he would die, smiling, to defend.
It may be that the prospect unrolled itself vaguely before the young soldier’s mind, for, as he straightened himself again, training his keen gaze once more upon the smoke-cloud, thickened with poison-waves, he was humming unconsciously, involuntarily, lines of a crude camp-song:
“Only one more kit-inspection,
Only one more dress-parade,
Only one more stifling stand-to--bleeding stand-to,
And the U. S. will be saved!”
“Stifling stand-to! Well, I guess the men down there in the trenches are having that now, ‘gooing’ up their masks--their chlorine-foolers--in that popping, heated cloud,” gasped his sister, racy little Sesooā, turning from a certain “kit-inspection” which she was holding upon the toilet and general get-up of another visitor to Camp Evens, not attached to her girlish party.
“Um-m! Isn’t that muff of hers pretty, the--the ‘spiffiest’ thing!” appraised Sara in silent soliloquy, the springy elasticity in herself causing her to rebound more readily than did her companions from the shock of seeing a gas attack launched; at her core there was a gay flame--a buoyant “pep”--which refused to succumb even to Inferno, with its yellow acres of sulphur smoke, its deadly waves of chlorine gas, its tormenting “tear stuff.”
“Humph! Rather late for a muff, though, seeing it’s April. We’ve discarded ours,” reflected further the self-constituted inspector of “kit,” otherwise clothing and equipment, upon the skirts of the military training-camp, as she shot a firefly glance towards the sky, more like July than April--flecked with lamb-like fleeces nestling in an arch of blue. “But then one may be forgiven for holding on to a thing like that! Adds the last touch of style to her costume! I wonder how many birds gave up their lives to make that muff: all dove-gray breast-feathers--tiny feathers--and the fashionable turban which goes with it.
“Her tailored suit is perfect, too; almost puts Olive’s new jersey one in the shade,” was the next random comment after a few seconds of absorption in the noise and novelty of the near-by attack, the monster fire-crackers, snapping, bursting, momentarily flowering in the yellow field of smoke. “And her gray cloth blouse with that soft, swathing collar around the throat, high under her ears!... Some officer’s wife most likely! Wonder what age she might be--thirty--thirty-two? For all her style she isn’t quite thoroughbred-looking like Olive--our Blue Heron,” shooting a sidelong glance at the pale, emotional face under the velvet hat adorned with the delicately embroidered logs and flame. “And she’s not in the same class at all for beauty; judging by the profile, that young woman could dispense with a little of her cheek-bone and chin. But--but what a wonderfully smooth pink skin; looks as if it had just been massaged--was massaged every day! Her skirt’s a trifle long; I suppose her feet aren’t pretty; that would be in keeping with her shoulders, for they’re rather broad--looks as if she played basket-ball and hockey. Athletic type, I guess. Her hair’s much the color of mine, but those silver threads in the mat over the ears--they--they add distinction; almost wish I were turning gray! What!”
The critic caught her breath, for the lone visitor, perhaps feeling the scrutiny, turned and boldly looked at her--looked through her, felt the Camp Fire Girl--with a glance as cool as an Arctic snow-blink. Bluish eyes--this stranger had, the gray-blue of salt ice, that.... Were they trying to infuse a little warmth into the ice-blink? Sesooā’s confused thoughts--rather abashed--never knew. For she hastily turned from this kit-inspection in which she had been furtively indulging, to seek refuge in the smoke-cloud.
And it was at that very moment that she heard a strange, hoarse exclamation from her soldier brother. At that very moment, too, she, together with her Camp Fire Sisters, felt as if the ground, now steady, rocked once more violently, sickeningly, under their feet.
What was happening upon the near edge of that dense sulphur-cloud, to leeward?
Its yellow muzzle was lifting.
Silently, stealthily, it was opening its poisoned mouth--and giving forth!