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In one of these improvised amphitheatres I saw an officer illustrating the proper method of using the gas-mask to a class of 600 men.

Of the three, one was a girl, and, as Farrel entered, carrying the souvenirs of his service a helmet and gas-mask she glanced at him with the interest which the average civilian manifests in any soldier obviously just released from service and homeward bound. Farrel's glance met hers for an instant with equal interest; then he turned to stow his impedimenta in the brass rack over his seat.

Then he went to his room, changed his clothes to knickerbockers, his shoes for heavier ones, picked up a rifle, a pair of field-glasses and a gas-mask, slung a satchel containing three days' rations over his powerful shoulders, and went out into the street. Six Alpinists awaited him.

Always this capital of the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about. "Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert." So said the traffic man at the crossroads. As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.

When he could see no more motion anywhere he donned his gas-mask, strapped upon his back a large canister of the poison his capacious pockets were already full of smaller containers and two savagely exultant sentences escaped him.

At the same time an unmasked figure on the cliff above began talking by American radiophone with three planes half a mile in the air above him. He spoke naturally, easily, into a transmitter to which no wires were attached. He was still talking when Recklow arrived at his side from the ravine below, tore off his gas-mask, and put on a peculiar helmet.

Comrades!" in the ghastly irony of surrender. A man whose entire helmet, gas-mask, and face had been blown off, and who was still alive and trying to speak, stiffened, relaxed, and died in my arms. As I rolled him aside and turned to the next man whom the bearers were lowering into the crater, his respirator and goggles fell apart, and I found myself looking into the ashy face of Duck Werner.

A ring came at the door and Balcom leaped to his feet and lighted the powder in the brazier. Then he adjusted a gas-mask that Doctor Q had given him, and, returning to the divan, lay down, pulling a camel's-hair coverlet well over himself as he awaited results. There was a rap at the door and a peremptory demand for entrance a pause and a whispered consultation outside.

It was more awful than that German did you ever meet him? who lay just the other side of the parapet for weeks and weeks." His only companion now is a paraffin stove, which does not, perhaps, require a gas-mask to aid in its companionship, though about that I won't be sure.

A group of Frenchmen passing by burst into hilarious laughter; it was ridiculous and humiliating, but Jimmie was powerless to help it he wasn't cut out for a soldier, he hadn't agreed to be a soldier, they had had no business sending him up here where vast craters of shell-holes were opening in the ground, and whole trees were being lifted out of the earth, and the air was full of a stink which might require a gas-mask or might not how was poor Jimmie to tell?