"You'd never believe the amount of trouble I have in trying to teach my dogs to keep from scratching the gas-masks off with their paws. I've got some little puppies that I keep in gas-masks all the time. I only take their alkali-soaked bonnets off at their breakfast and dinner time. They even sleep in them."
"Poor little beggars!" exclaimed Horace, "and they haven't even got the satisfaction of realizing why they have to do it."
"Well," said the hunchback, gravely, "I always tell them 'It's for France!' Because," he added, half-seriously, "one can never tell how much a dog understands."
Horace spent the whole of his day off duty with his old friend and returned that evening to his telephone station, full of stories of the hunchback's wonderful dogs. With great gusto he recounted to his friend the veteran the story of the canine gas-masks.
"Luckily, as yet we haven't needed them here," the sergeant-major answered, "though I suppose we may expect gas at any time. It's a dirty, sneaking way of making war, I think! The Boches only started that against the British because they hate them so. You know their 'Chant of Hate':
"'You we hate with a lasting hate, We will never forego our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe and one alone, England!' When you hate anybody as much as that, I suppose, even poison gas seems justified."
"One hardly realizes," said Horace, thoughtfully, "that any nation could work up such a hate."
"Germany is worse poisoned by her hate than any one of our poor asphyxiated soldiers is poisoned by their chlorine gas. Yet it's a terrible thing to be gassed. I saw some of its victims on that sector to which I was transferred for a while, this spring. A gassed man is made blind and dumb; sometimes the sight returns, and sometimes it does not. The tongue is swollen to nearly double its normal size, ulcerated and blotched with black patches. The lungs are attacked so badly that quite often the blood vessels burst and the man chokes to death with bubbling frothy blood. The arms and legs turn a mottled violet color. The pulse is no more than a faint flutter. Even those who recover have their health so badly wrecked that they can never march or work again. To lift the hands over the head a few times drives a gassed man into a violent perspiration, and to walk upstairs produces exhaustion, while others, for the rest of their lives, will never be able to eat a solid meal."
"But did that poison gas do the Germans any good?" the boy asked. "Did it achieve any military gain?"
"Yes," the veteran admitted, "it did. It almost won them the war. If they had known as much about poison gas when they started it as they do now, they would have gobbled up the little piece of Belgium which they have never been able to win and thus secured a hold on the English Channel coast."