“Ha! Now the fun’s really on! That turns loose the bitter tear-gas--worse than a corner on onions for making one weep!” blithely exclaimed the officer. “Don’t be nervous! It’s only the explosion of six sticks of dynamite down in the middle of the trenches, which bursts the shells on the surface, each containing a little paraffin cup--rice-paper cup--holding a small quantity of oil, and under that the lachrymatory liquid--the oniony ‘tear-stuff’ that would wring tears from a stone image. There go the chlorine-cylinders, gasping, too!”
He pointed--that young officer, charged like a live bomb himself, the heated tension of the scene and the excitement of having visitors reacting upon a naturally fiery disposition--pointed across the twenty-five yards of blighted vegetation which separated his group from the trenches, at two tall iron cylinders near which stood a couple of masked sentries, looming like brown goblins amid the yellow fringes of the smoke-cloud.
“What! Can they get as near to the horrid, deadly chlorine as all that?” breathlessly gasped the youngest girl, Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl--amid scenes like this, remote from the Council Fire, Lilia Kemp.
“Yes, if their masks are perfect, and properly adjusted. Those are two of the young chemists from the Gas Defense, who are putting over the ‘show,’ and----”
“Oh, goody! I know now why we’re urged to save and collect peach-stones next summer--ever so many other kinds of pits, too--to make carbon for soldiers’ masks! ‘Save the peach-stones; waste not one!’ A few may save a soldier’s life! When I’m drying them in the oven--incidentally burning my fingers, as I’m sure to do, I’ll feel really like--like----”
“Like the real girl behind the lines,” put in Lieutenant O Pips, his eyebrows lifting, in turn interrupting Little Owl as she had blinkingly interrupted him. “See, now, the ‘ball’ is on in good shape! There go the big firecrackers simulating shells, so that the men’s nerves may be prepared for bursting shrapnel; and the electric bombs exploding everywhere, in and out along the surface of the trenches, loosing more tear-gas!--Oh! this--this is spectacular now. But you should just see it at night. Then it’s Inferno, sure enough!”
“It--it’s that, in daylight, when one thinks of the men down there!” Olive Deering bit her lip, gazing steadfastly in the direction of the veiled trenches, above which the yellow smoke-screen was torn by the popping of monster firecrackers, pricked by the laughter of roseate flashes, so bright, so elfin, that who could dream their fairy splendor was but the glitter of a key to unlock tears?
“The men undergoing initiation in the trench-bays? Oh, bless you! they’re all right, unless--unless it should be a case of:
“‘The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.’
“But there won’t be any ‘blighter’ to-day--there couldn’t be!” He bent, that very tall young officer, nearer to Olive’s ear, the nineteen-year-old girlish ear under the Torch Bearer’s hat. “Nobody knows how I have been looking forward to this day, Olive, this spring day, when you girls would visit me in camp before I went over! I’m sorry that your father, Colonel Deering, and your aunt chose to pay a visit to Headquarters, Brigade Headquarters, instead--instead of coming on here to inspect the fireworks in Gas Valley.”