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Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will, we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and London is a Pompeii in five minutes!
Are we really poor beasts in the jungle, striving by tooth and claw, high velocity and poison-gas, for the survival of the fittest in an endless conflict? If that is so, then God mocks at us. Or, rather, if that is so, there is no God such as we men may love, with love for men.
The only thing that prevents us wringing our hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle.
At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas mustard gas which raised blisters and burned men's bodies where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front.
The red signal-rockets ascending from the enemy's trenches gave no light, but only burnt for a second or two as a ruddy star. And the green lights turned the vaporous fog a sickly yellowish green as though it were some new poison-gas of the devils over there. I led the way straight across. It was too dark to pick a path and we committed no sacrilege as we trod on the bodies of forgotten comrades.
And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men's souls. So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so. If America must invent this poison-gas, let her.
They loathed the old men who said, "If I had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause." They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England to make the people know what war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all.
Or was the American only bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the gods look silly! I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter. The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious circle. And it ended in poison-gas. Yes, dear reader, so it did.
Did they have any faint idea of life in a sector where men stood, slept, ate, worked, under the fire of eight-inch shells, five-point nines, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, machine-gun bullets, snipers, to say nothing of poison-gas, long-range fire on the billets in small farmsteads, and on every moonlight night air raids above wooden hutments so closely crowded into a small space that hardly a bomb could fall without killing a group of men.
He does not shrink from a record of unlovely things, of those evil thoughts which attend upon the rancour of defeat, of the suspicion of treason which comes to dejected armies like a breath of poison-gas.
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