“A bad gas attack two nights after. Two hundred piled along our passages, fifty lying outside in the covered passage. We saved a lot of cases. I bled as many as I could, and most of them survived; My eyes and nose streamed, and I have been very seedy since, sick, and heart funny. I thought dawn would never come. The men across the river are so splendid that any little difficulties we contend with are mere trivialities. I have never experienced such splendid Christianity. I wept over some of the boys, and nod knows we are as hardened as flints ... ..”
“The town I am in is quite leveled. It is difficult to find one’s way about, it is so altered. One hundred thousand shells at least must have fallen upon, it. May God get us safely back out of this. The bearers-are splendid, carrying the cases across the broken bridge in the dark — nothing but shells pouring into it. Splendid work.”
July, 1917. — “Out and back in the dunes, thank God The Colonel came up, and W. — relieved me. We are all gassed, some have died. I am a little sick, but otherwise fine. Shall sleep for days. You saw the fight in the paper — the division on our left stood and died. A few were captured, barely a battalion, and we have since escaped. I swam the river. Our division stood like heroes, their trenches simply disappeared.”
July, 1917. “At ten o’clock we had a sharp gas attack — tear shells. We sneezed on the patients as we dressed them, and they sneezed back at us. When D — and J — were dressing cases a 12-in, shell came into the porch. There was total darkness through the building. The staff-sergeant’s bedroom down the passage disappeared through the wall, passing en route an officer whose leg I had just set — then into my bedroom — every door and window out and broken — we were all as black as tinkers, and all our stuff ruined; the place half an inch thick in mud. Half an hour after the dressing-station was carrying on as usual — only casualty, one boy, whose leg I had just amputated―he lost his eyes, and was full of apologies for causing me further trouble. A dear boy.
“The camp next us was plastered by an airplane. I have been down to my old ambulance to see the stalwarts who were gassed with me that night. They are an awful sight—they have oxygen laid on in the wards, and pipes like ordinary gas, and each man has a rubber pipe put up his nose: Last night a 15-in. shell just missed the roof and, didn’t explode, but its landing nearly shook the place down, and its passage was like a cyclone.”
July 21, 1917. — “The army sent round a flattering message to all units—it ended, the medical arrangements were deserving of the highest praise.’”
Does it not shame us as we read of duty so bravely done for an earthly king, that we do so little for our Heavenly King? Read the last page of Message, and help us to do more for Christ among the soldiers. — HEYMAN WREFORD.