Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/63

 shelling will do the damage now—the gas is over.”

“Was it a bad attack?” asked Gerald.

“One of the worst we’ve had. One part of the line has been pierced, but the men have stuck it well everywhere else. Mercifully we’ve almost avoided it here.” And with that he was gone.

Two hours later the wounded started to come down the road, and with them men who had really been gassed badly—probably through having mislaid their pads and not being able to find them in time. Some were on stretchers and some were walking. Some ran a few steps and then collapsed, panting and gasping on the road; some lurched into the ditch and lay there vomiting, and on them all impartially there rained down a hail of shrapnel. In the dressing station they arranged them in rows; and that day two sweating doctors handled over seven hundred cases. For the gassed men, wheezing, gasping, fighting for breath, with their faces green and their foreheads dripping, they could do next to nothing. In ambulances they got them away as fast as they could