About a month after the Canadians had taken Vimy Ridge we relieved the —— Canadian Battalion in the town of Vimy, where our battalion was in support to another battalion holding the front lines some distance in advance. Our Regimental Aid Post on our previous stay in this town had been in the cellar of a brewery near the railway station. Since we had left the shelling in the neighborhood had become so severe that this cellar had been abandoned. It had caught fire and all the woodwork had burned up. Out of curiosity I visited this old cellar on our arrival at Vimy and found it still hot as hades from the heating up of the brick and cement. It was absolutely uninhabitable. So we were forced to search for other quarters.
The officers of No. —— Canadian Field Ambulance, with that camaraderie so prevalent out there, invited us to share with them a couple of old cellars to which they had gone on deserting the brewery. We accepted gladly. One of their two cellars they used as sleeping and eating quarters, the other as a dressing station where they were kept exceedingly busy attending the wounded. The Germans had the range of Vimy to a nicety, and with true German love of destruction they poured five hundred to a thousand shells into the ruins daily. Whenever the Germans are driven from a village, their practice is to ruin it by high explosive shells sent from their new line of defense. And these two cellars were about the center of the Vimy target.
The previous day two officers of the field ambulance were standing a few feet apart in a little room off from the cellar used as sleeping quarters. A table stood between them, on which were two lighted candles. Suddenly through the floor above came a four-inch shell, just missing the table, and sinking into the floor. Fortunately for the two officers it did not explode—it was a dud. The rush of air caused by the shell extinguished one of the candles. The other remained lighted. It may be understood easily that the officers felt a bit unnerved. After staring at the hole in the floor for some moments, Captain M—— picked up the lighted candle in one hand and the extinguished one in the other and endeavored to light one from the other. His hands shook so that he could not make the candles meet. After a number of vain attempts to bring them together he gave it up. His nervous system was so shaken that he was sent to the rest station on two weeks\' leave.
We arrived shortly after the shell had gone through the cellar. Captain M—— himself told us of it, and his humorous description of his attempts to get the candles within six inches of each other was ludicrous in the extreme.
After an appetizing supper eaten in the cellar with the officers of the field ambulance, we medical officers took turns attending to the many wounded who were arriving. All went well till eleven o\'clock that night, when we heard the whirr of gas shells coming in our direction. As they burst close to us, we soon smelt their penetrating, pineapple odor. The Huns continued to pour them in large numbers in our direction, and, as the town of Vimy is in a hollow at the foot of Vimy Ridge, the atmosphere soon became laden with the poison gas which, being heavier than air, sinks to the bottom of any hollows. The air in our cellars became saturated with the filthy, death-dealing gases in spite of the wet blanket which we hung over the entrance to prevent their entering. Had we been able to stay in the cellar and keep the blanket tightly placed over the entrance, our misery would have been much less, but wounded were coming in from all directions and we had to keep going in and out, in turns, to the cellar in which we did our dressings. The gas kept thickening every minute.
To add to the discomfort these gas shells contained two gases. One entered the lungs, causing congestion of their tissues followed by inflammation, suffocation, and death if a sufficient amount were inhaled; the other, lachrymatory gas—called tear shell gas by the soldiers—which not only inflames temporarily the conjunctiva of the eyes, but is cursedly irritating while it lasts.
Naturally we quickly adjusted our gas masks. But, as it was fifty feet from one cellar to the other, and we dared not flash lights to pass over the stone and mortar of the fallen walls, we found it necessary to remove our masks for moving, as well as for the purpose of tying up the wounds in an acceptable manner. Thus, by midnight, our eyes were as red as uncooked beefsteak and they felt as if they had been sandpapered. Our lungs on each respiration felt as though they were gripped in a closing vise. The gas masks act by filtering the inhaled air through a chemical, which neutralizes the poisonous materials in the gases. When we removed them we had severe attacks of coughing which were relieved only by breathing through the mouthpiece of the masks.
Hours dragged slowly by. Still the whirr of approaching shells and the soft thud of their bursting continued. Misery? Never elsewhere had we experienced anything akin to it—the inflamed eyes; the suffocation in our lungs; the knowledge that inhalation of sufficient of the gas would put us into Kingdom Come. We knew that we could easily get out of this poisonous atmosphere by climbing to the top of Vimy Ridge, only a few hundred yards behind us. But we did not, for that would be deserting our posts.
All these things combined to make it the most miserable, soul-torturing night we had ever experienced. And, to add to it all, our artillery was in a hollow nearby where the gas was so thick that it prevented our gunners from retaliating, making it all take, and no give. We all learned that night what it felt like to long to desert. We learned that there are times when a man who is brave enough to be a coward deserves sympathy. But, thank God! there are few such men in our armies. The brave man and the coward, both, at times, experience the same sensation of fear, the coward allowing the emotion to conquer him, while the brave man grits his teeth and carries on.
For nearly five hours we endured this misery, wondering when we would have inhaled enough of the poison to put our names among the casualties. One of the strange things that struck me during that long night was that I heard no word of censure or condemnatio............