From his front lines and strong points favoring winds carried the poisonous clouds back upon the enemy's supports, reserves, and assembly areas. The whole of the front was lit up with enemy flares, dimly seen through the heavy mist, while the men in our lines could hear the enemy's gas alarms and cries of distress from the hostile trenches.
Nine minutes later our field artillery, supported by heavy guns and heavy trench mortars, opened up with a slow bombardment, which gradually increased in intensity, until, forty minutes later, the enemy positions were swept with a short, intensive, creeping barrage, which raked his forward and rear areas with high explosive. Caught by our gas without a moment's warning, caught again as he was emerging from his shelters by our artillery, the enemy's casualties must have been very heavy, for the effectiveness of our smaller gas operations has been emphatically proved by the evidence of prisoners.
Tonight's bombardment was three times greater than anything of its kind ever attempted by us on the Western front, and much greater than anything ever launched by the Germans, though the score of the second battle of Ypres and other reckonings are still to be settled, and will be settled.
Plucky Dunkirk
By Anna Milo Upjohn
Inspector in Paris for the Fraternité Americaine
[Since this article was written Dunkirk has faced a new peril from the blow struck in her direction by the powerful German armies around Ypres, to the southeast; but the author's vivid and sympathetic description of the daily life of the little city remains as true as in the Winter days when it was penned for Current History Magazine.
In the track of the wind stands the plucky little City of Dunkirk, still flapping the flags of courage and constancy in the face of an increasingly rabid enemy. It is the only city of France that is subjected to bombardment from land and sea and sky.
What is the every-day life in a town near enough to the front to be never free from the menace of a triple bombardment? That is what I went to find out, traveling by way of Calais in stygian darkness, for the train was without lights to avoid the danger of bombs.