“Gas!”
Briefest and biggest of all words thrust by the Great War into the fore-ranks of speech, the word rang aloud upon the summer air.
A kernel of compressed menace, it burst explosively, spread elastically, until the very sky--the peaceful, lamb’s-wool New England sky--seemed darkened by its threat, until the brown buds, withered in their tender youth, and the rags of yellow grasses blighted before by its poisoned breath, trembled and wilted, as it were, anew!
It even withered the morning-glory bloom upon the faces of a quartette of young girls, who stood a few yards to windward of a little red-and-white post labeled “Danger Zone,” on the other side of which the warning was given.
Breathlessly, nervously, they shrank together until their shoulders touched, like fledgling birds struck by the terrors of the first storm that assails them in the nest, seeking for contact and comfort.
“Now the party is beginning--the ball opening, as our boys say over in France, when a gas attack is being launched against them. That smoke-candle off there on the edge of the trench, which is doing more than’s required of it--bursting into flame as well as smoke--that’s the illumination for ‘Fritzie’s’ party! And the rattle--you hear the policeman’s rattle, don’t you, shaking its teeth down in the trenches--that’s the opening stunt of the orchestra. See?”
It was a young lieutenant, a boy-officer of twenty-three, who spoke, with a silver dart in his gray eye matching the gleaming bars upon his shoulders, as he bent towards the tallest of the four girls whose face was paling under her velvet hat, uniquely embroidered by her own hand with certain silken emblems, typifying her name and symbol, together with the rank she held as a Camp Fire Girl.
“Smoke-candle! D’you mean that foot-high metal thing flaring away there behind the sand-bags, one of a dozen or so, stationed along the trench-brim? They don’t look much like ordinary candles, but they certainly can smoke! Such horrid, blinding sulphur smoke, too! Bah!”
She caught her breath a little, that oldest girl, her wide dark eyes watering, as a tiny yellow feather of the sulphur fumes, stealing stealthily to windward, wafted from the wing of the main cloud drifting off to leeward, tickled her throat in teasing fashion.
“Yes, it is blinding thick, isn’t it? We must move farther to windward, away from it.” The lieutenant smiled down at her, thinking the hat with its wide brim, and its delicate, emblematic frontispiece against the rich velvet--representing crossed logs, a tongue of flame rising from them and shading into a pearly pinion purporting to be smoke--was the prettiest headgear he had ever seen.