"If the gas area should be of considerable extent the chap with the bellows would soon be pumping chlorine into his fellow-Tommy, and die pumping at that, or else take to the woods and let the diver himself get what air he could find.
"Many accidents might befall the tube. A Hun might sit on it. I hate to think of myself, squatting in a trench with one of those things over my head, praying for air, with the bellows man pumping his heart out trying to get ozone through a rubber tube on top of which some fat Boche had plumped, while he potted away at one or the other of us.
"A shell, too, would have an interesting time with such a tube. Imagine the chap in the helmet hollering, 'Pump away, you lazy beggar, I'm not getting enough air to keep a flea alive,' and all the good old oxygen pouring out of a jagged hole in the bally pipe, hundreds of feet from him.
"Then, suppose a man, coming up before daylight, got his foot caught in that length of tube," he continued enthusiastically—but I realised I had started something I couldn't stop, and fled.
On May 5th I found E. F. Lumsden, of the A.S.C., an old friend with a passion for car repair of all sorts, who had charge of the lorries and motor workshops attached to the 7th Brigade Royal Garrison Artillery Ammunition Park. His lot were in Estaires. I turned my car over to them for rejuvenation while I hied myself to London to purchase an alarmingly large collection of parts with which to assist the somewhat extensive rebuilding Lumsden had gleefully planned.
I was back with a heavy load of hardware and empty purse by the night of May 7th, and by midnight on the 8th left Estaires with my chariot, which was in a greatly chastened mood.
While I was on leave in England the troopers of the 1st Cavalry Division had spent their nights in the Ypres Salient digging reserve line trenches and making barbed wire entanglements. Ypres on fire, the trench line alight with flares and the flash of constant shell-bursts, made this work more spectacular than pleasant. Once or twice a shell fell sufficiently near the troopers to wound one or two. One Black Maria unfortunately dropped among a squadron of the 18th Hussars, killing two of them and wounding a couple of dozen more.
Lunching on the 8th with a gunners' mess on the Laventie front, I learned of a big "push" ordered at dawn on the 9th. The Auber ridge was to be attacked from the south-west by two Indian Divisions, and from the north-west by the 8th Division and the 7th Division, with the Northumbrian Territorial Division and the newly arrived West Riding Territorial Division somewhere about. Something like 120,000 men were thus to be engaged. The Canadian Division was in reserve, in addition, and the 9th Division, the first of the "K" troops to reach the Front, was expected by rail that night.
The 6th Division, in the Bois Grenier area, was ready and eager to push forward toward Lille if the Auber ridge attack proved successful.