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Updated: September 14, 2025
But you've not silenced me yet, for all that. We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and much more ideal. So we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas.
To begin with, he did not believe in them; they were just a part of the poison-gas of war. When men were willing to stab one another with bayonets, and to blow one another to pieces with bombs, they would be willing to lie about one another, you might be sure; the governments would lie deliberately, as one of the ways of making the soldiers fight harder.
They gave more play to intelligence, and abolished the tyranny of the bully, who took the wall of every man he met, and made himself a public nuisance. The introduction of poison-gas, which is a small thing compared with the invention of fire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of fighting-men.
A battleship may be taken as the concrete embodiment of this view. When we read, say, of some new poison-gas by means of which one bomb from an aeroplane can exterminate a whole town, we have a thrill of what we fondly believe to be horror, but it is really delight in scientific skill. Science is our god; we say to it, "Though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee." And so it slays us.
It was a fight on behalf of the whole of humanity. A staggering blow had been dealt by our relentless enemy at Belgium, which had been knocked down and trampled upon, and Germany had also dealt blow after blow at humanity by the use of poison-gas, the bombardment of seaside towns, and bombs thrown on defenceless places by Zeppelins.
Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs. "It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. "None of us expected to come out alive." Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee.
It was identical with that which, as we had come down from the upper floor of the Abbey Inn, had proceeded from the room wherein the mysterious shell had exploded. In a word my cottage was filled with some kind of poison-gas! "We must risk it, anyway," said Gatton, "and find out who it is." I nodded, sick with foreboding.
Some are used by savages for arrow poisons, others for fish poisons, and some we use for medicinal drugs. Dixon records a 'gas-tree' in Africa, the essential oil of which contains chlorine and the smell of which is like the poison-gas used in the World War. And poison-ivy, in the United States, will poison some people even if they only pass close to it."
Surely if the leaders of the warring nations were put together for even a week in some such place as Hooge, or the Hohenzollern redoubt, afflicted by the usual harassing fire, poison-gas, mine explosions, lice, rats, and the stench of rotting corpses, with the certainty of death or dismemberment at the week-end, they would settle the business and come to terms before the week was out.
We were given a smattering of trench cooking, sanitation, bomb throwing, reconnoitering, listening posts, constructing and repairing barbed wire, "carrying in" parties, methods used in attack and defense, wiring parties, mass formation, and the procedure for poison-gas attacks. On the tenth day we again met our friends "Hommes 40, Chevaux 8."
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