The gas mask makes you feel only half a man. You can’t think; the air you breathe has been filtered of all save a few chemical substances. A man doesn’t live on what passes through the filter, he merely exists.
Even soldiers who had seen many dreadful things found that it was the sight of gas casualties that froze their marrow years afterwards. Bernard Martin heard the gas-gong sound at Ypres in 1916 when the sentry spotted a cloud of gas moving towards the British lines.
Blast from a shrapnel shell momentarily blew a gap in the gas cloud, and I saw several men, (unrecognizable of course in their masks) standing irresolute as though uncertain of purpose – all but one made his purpose apparent. He was without a mask, his head bare, his white face expressing horror. Before the cloud of gas reformed I saw this man lurch sideways, arms outstretched, attempting to pull off another’s mask; a third, wielding what I judged to be a bit of broken duckboard, pressed between the two. I saw one of them fall to the ground.
All over in a moment, a vivid picture in my mind for ever, and ever, and ever, and ever.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Steel and Fire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 425-26. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Hanbury Sparrow Land-Locked Lake pp. 309-10.
Martin Poor Bloody Infantry pp. 55-6.
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