GERMAN POISON GAS.
From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HQ, France, Tuesday.
During the past twenty-four hours or so there have been a number of small raids, some meetings of patrols in No Man’s Land, and some heavy shelling by the enemy in Flanders, round Armentières, and upon our villages and defences south of Cambrai. The enemy is using an increasing quantity of gas shells, with the object of stupefying our gunners and spreading a zone of poison vapours over our camps near the line. It is an invisible menace, which puts all our men on the alert for any faint smell borne down the breeze, or for the slightest whiff of fumes causing a smart to the eyed and skin. But our men are conscious of the danger, and are trained to be ready instantly, at all times and in all places, with an unfailing safeguard.
They work, sleep, and eat with their gasmasks handy, no further away than their left hip, and practise wearing these things on and off duty, marching, running, and riding. These practices produce uncanny scenes along the loads and in the fields of war, so inhuman and fantastic, that if any creature, came from another planet and visited this Western front, and fell among a group of these masked men, busy with mysterious labour above earth dwellings dug into the hillsides or among the ruins of churches, mediaeval mansions, and farmsteads, smashed to matchwood he would be terrified by the beastlike aspect of the earth’s inhabitants, and believe that they were cvi1 monsters who had entered into possession of man’s inheritance after the destruction of his civilisation. Our men make a game of the business and I think they enjoy the hideous effect they make upon the passers-by. I passed a crowd of them yesterday busy with the cleaning of a lorry column, and another crowd marching back from a hath like a battalion of anthropoid apes, and some gun-teams at artillery practice, with these goggles and nozzles hiding their humanity.
It is a good joke to them, and they compete with each other, in the length of time they can wear the mask and the physical exertions they do in it, but I confess the very sight of them puts the wind up my back-hair by its frightfulness. The enemy’s gas-shells are utterly harmless against, masked men, and he will be disappointed with the results of this filthy weapon of war, which has been turned against him to some purpose, many of his own gas-masks being ineffective against our gas.
There are other queer-looking beings along the reeds and in the fields, and truly this Western front of ours and the country in its rear offer the most amazing pageant the world has ever seen. The “chinkies,” who are road-mending and felling timber for us in some back areas, always fascinate me when I pass them. A motor-car with a “brass hat” inside appeals to their simple sense of humour, and they laugh like anything when a tyre bursts. They stand and chuckle at a battalion of marching men going up to the front with their packs on. To us they are picturesque fellows in their padded clothes of blue cloth, and all sorts of odds and ends of hats, from the bowler to the cloth cap and the billycock. On other roads in the rear are French Arabs, Senegalis, Annamites, and strange, soft-eyed fellows with long silky hair done up in a “bun,” and black men from the African coasts. They are labour colonies.