Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/126

 can’t make a deathless epic out of a man being sick—dreadfully sick beside the road—and an hour afterwards getting your food for you. It doesn’t sound very romantic, I admit, and yet It was in the morning, I remember, about three o’clock, that we first smelt it, and we were lying about half a mile behind the line. That first sweet smell of chlorine turning gradually into the gasping, throat-racking fumes. Respirators weren’t regarded with the same importance then as they are now, but we all had them. Of course I’d lost mine. Since early childhood I have invariably lost everything. Brown found it, and I put it on—and then he disappeared. Some two hours later, when the shelling had abated a little, and the gas had long since passed, I found him again. He was white and sweating, and the gas was in him—not badly, you understand, not badly—but the gas was in him. For three or four hours he was sick, very sick—and his head was bursting. I know what he felt like.

And I said to the major, “I’m sorry it’s Brown, but it’ll teach him a lesson not to lose his respirator again,” for, that is the way with Thomas Atkins—he is apt to lose most