The men of those divisions were lined up during the night in the communication trenches, which had been dug by the sappers and laid with miles of telephone wire. They were silent, except for the chink of shovels and side arms, the shuffle of men's feet, their hard breathing, and occasional words of command. At five-thirty, when the guns in all our batteries were firing at full blast, with a constant scream of shells over the heads of the waiting men, and when the first faint light of day stole into the sky, there was a slight rain falling, and the wind blew lightly from the southwest.
In the front-line trenches a number of men were busy with some long, narrow cylinders, which had been carried up a day before. They were arranging them in the mud of the parapets with their nozles facing the enemy lines.
“That's the stuff to give them!”
“What is it?”
“Poison-gas. Worse than they used at Ypres.”
“Christ!... supposing we have to walk through it?”
“We shall walk behind it. The wind will carry it down the throat of the Fritzes. We shall find 'em dead.”
So men I met had talked of that new weapon which most of them hated.
It was at five-thirty when the men busy with the cylinders turned on little taps. There was a faint hissing noise, the escape of gas from many pipes. A heavy, whitish cloud came out of the cylinders and traveled aboveground as it was lifted and carried forward by the breeze.
“How's the gas working?” asked a Scottish officer.