© Underwood and Underwood.
A FIGHT IN A CLOUD OF GAS
The Germans had sent over gas and in this spot it lingered. Then the infantry advanced and here, amid the British wire entanglements, the foes meet. Both sides in gas masks, they struggle amid the poisonous vapor, and when the bayonet fails they fight, like the pair in the foreground, to bring death by tearing away their opponent’s mask.
The measure of this success may be taken when it is pointed out that this trench represented in the German advance the apex in the breach which the enemy had made in the original line of the Allies, and that it was two and a half miles south of that line. This charge, made by men who looked death indifferently in the face (for no man who took part in it could think that he was likely to live) saved, and that was much, the Canadian left. But it did more. Up to the point where the assailants conquered, or died, it secured and maintained during the most critical moment of all the integrity of the allied line. For the trench was not only taken, it was held thereafter against all comers, and in the teeth of every conceivable projectile, until the night of Sunday, the 25th, when all that remained of the war-broken but victorious battalion was relieved by fresh troops.
CHAPTER III
Murders and Martyrs
MANY examples might be cited to show that the Central empires were dead to the humanities. There were apparently no limits to the brutality of the German war-makers. Among the outstanding deeds of the Teutons that sickened the world was the killing of Miss Edith Cavell, an English nurse working in Belgian hospitals.
A shudder of horror circled the world when announcement was formally made that this splendid woman was sentenced to death and murdered by a German firing squad at two o’clock on the morning of October 12, 1915.
The killing of this gentle-natured, brave woman typified to the world Germany’s essentially brutal militarism. It placed the German military command in a niche of dishonor unique in all history.
The specific charge against Miss Cavell was that she had helped English and French soldiers and Belgian young male civilians to cross the border into Holland. The direct evidence against her was in the form of letters intercepted by the Germans in which some of these soldiers and civilians writing from England thanked her for the aid she had given to them.
Upon the farcical trial that resulted in the predetermined sentence of death, Miss Cavell courageously and freely admitted her assistance in the specified cases of escape. When she was asked why she did it, she declared her fear that if she had not done so the men would have been shot by the Germans. Her testimony was given in a clear conversational tone that betrayed no nervousness and her entire bearing was such as to win the sympathy of everyone except her stony-hearted judges.