Then he brought us where those yellow flames leapt and hissed; some of these he covered with wet sand, and lo! they had ceased to be; but the moment the sand was kicked away up they leapt again fiercer than ever.
“We use ’em for bombing Boche dugouts now!” said he; and remembering the dugouts I had seen, I could picture the awful fate of those within, the choking fumes, the fire-scorched bodies! Truly the exponents of Frightfulness have felt the recoil of their own vile methods.
“This is a lachrymatory!” said the sub., whisking another bomb from his pocket. “When it pops, run forward and get in the smoke. It’ll sting a bit, but don’t rub the tears away—let ’em flow. Don’t touch your eyes, it’ll only inflame ’em—just weep! Ready? One, two, three!” A second explosion louder than the first, a puff of blue smoke into which I presently ran and then uttered a cry. So sharp, so excruciating was the pain, that instinctively I raised hand to eyes but checked myself, and with tears gushing over my cheeks, blind and agonised, I stumbled away from that hellish vapour. Very soon the pain diminished, was gone, and looking up through streaming tears I beheld the sub. nodding and beaming approval.
“Useful things, eh?” he remarked. “A man can’t shed tears and shoot straight, an’ he can’t weep and fight well, both at the same time—what? Fritz can be very frightful, but we can be more so when we want—yes, rather. The Boches have learned that there’s no monopoly in Frightfulness.”
In due season we shook hands with our cheery sub., and left him beaming after us from the threshold of the dingy hut.
Britain has been called slow, old-fashioned, and behind the times, but to-day she is awake and at work to such mighty purpose that her once small army is now numbered by the million, an army second to none in equipment or hardy and dauntless manhood.
From her Home Counties, from her Empire beyond the Seas, her millions have arisen, brothers in arms henceforth, bonded together by a spirit of noble self-sacrifice—men grimly determined to suffer wounds and hardship and death itself, that for those who come after them, the world may be a better place and humanity may never again be called upon to endure all the agony and heartbreak of this generation.