CANADIAN VICTIMS
“There were about twenty of the worst cases in the ward, on mattresses, all more or less in a sitting position, strapped up against the walls. Their faces, arms, and hands were of a shiny, gray-black color. With their mouths open and leaden-glazed eyes, all were swaying slightly backward and forward trying to get breath. It was a most appalling sight. All these poor black faces struggling for life, the groaning and the noise of the efforts for breath was awful.
“There was practically nothing to be done for them except to give them salt and water and try to make them sick. The effect the gas has is to fill the lungs with a watery frothy matter, which gradually increases and rises until it fills up the whole lungs and comes to the mouth—then they die. It is suffocation, slow drowning, taking in most cases one or two days. Eight died last night out of twenty I saw, and the most of the others I saw will die, while those who get over the gas invariably develop acute pneumonia.
“It is without doubt the most awful form of scientific torture. Not one of the men I saw in the hospital had a scratch or wound. The Germans have given out that it is a rapid, painless death—the liars. No torture could be worse than to give them a dose of their own gas.”