egan. Looking towards the French line
we saw this yellowish green cloud rising on a front of at least three
miles and drifting at a height of perhaps a hundred feet towards us.

"That must be the poison gas that we have heard vague rumours about,"
I remarked to the Captain. The gas rose in great clouds as if it had
been poured from nozzles, expanding as it ascended; here and there
brown clouds seemed to be mixed with the general yellowish green
ones. "It looks like chlorine," I said, "and I bet it is." The Captain
agreed that it probably was.

The cannonade increased in intensity. About five minutes after it
began a hoarse whistle, increasing to a roar like that of a railroad
train, passed overhead. "For Ypres," we ejaculated, and looking back
we saw a cloud as big as a church rise up from that ill-fated city,
followed by the sound of the explosion of a fifteen-inch shell.
Thereafter these great shells succeeded one another at regular
intervals, each one followed by the great black cloud in Ypres.

The bombardment grew in intensity. Over in a field not two hundred
yards away numerous coal boxes exploded, throwing up columns of mud
and water like so many geysers. General Alderson and General Burstall
of the Canadian Division came hurrying up the road and paused for a
moment to shake hands, and to remark that the Germans appeared to be
making a heavy attack upon the French. We wondered whether they would
get back to their headquarters or not.

Shells of various calibres, whistling and screaming, flew over our
heads from German batteries as well as from our own batteries replying
to them. The air seemed to be full of shells flying in all directions.
The gas cloud gradually grew less dense, but the bombardment redoubled
in violence as battery after battery joined in the angry chorus.

Across the fields we could see guns drawn by galloping horses taking
up new positions. One such gun had taken a position not three hundred
yards away from us when a German shell lit apparently not twenty feet
away from it; that gun was moved with despatch into another position.

Occasionally we imagined that we could hear heavy rifle and machine
gun fire, but the din was too great to distinguish much detail. The
common expression used on the front, "Hell let loose," was the only
term at all descriptive of the scene.

Streaking across the fields towards us came a dog. On closer view he
appeared to be a nondescript sort of dog of no parti