One moment they had been operating their cameras. The next they were bowled over.
"Put on your——" began Blake; and then he could say no more. He tried not to breathe as he fumbled at his belt to loosen his mask. He buried his nose deep in the cool earth, but such is the nature of this gas that it seeks the lowest level. There is no getting away from it save by going up.
In a smoke-filled room a fireman may find a stratum of cool, and comparatively fresh, air at the bottom near the floor. This is because cold air is heavier than the hot and smoke-filled atmosphere. But this does not hold with the German gas.
And so, before Blake could slip over his head the chemical-impregnated cloth, he lost consciousness. In another moment his two companions were also unconscious. Private Drew, struggling against the terrible pressure on his lungs, managed to get his helmet over his head, and then he gave his attention to his friends.
He knew that to save their lives he must get their helmets on; for a few breaths of the gas will not kill. But they will disable a person for some time, and a little longer breathing of it means a horrible death.
And so, working at top speed, the soldier, now himself protected from the fumes, though he had breathed more of them than he liked, labored to save his friends.
Suddenly a new terror developed, for, wearing their own helmets which made them look like horrible monsters out of a nightmare, the Germans charged against the French and Americans, whom they hoped to find disabled by the gas.
"Here they come with blood in their eyes if I could only see it!" mused Private Drew, as he finished fastening the helmet on Charles Anderson, having already thus protected Joe and Blake. All three boys were now unconscious, and what the outcome would be the soldier could only guess.
"But there won't be any guesswork if I leave 'em here for the Huns," he reasoned. "I've got to help 'em back—but how?"
The Germans, in a counter-offensive, were striving to regain some of the lost ground, and, for the moment, were driving before them the French and American forces. Back rushed the advance lines to their supporting columns, and Drew, seeing some of his own messmates, signaled to them, for he could not talk with the helmet on.