A PHASE OF TRAINING AT CAMP WADSWORTH

By PRIVATE WALTER A. DAVENPORT in the "Gas Attack"

INTO THE VALLEY OF BREATH

We quit our several jobs, went down to the armory and enlisted. The Colonel spoke the word and we were off down Main street with the band out front. The women folks wept. The major called us heroes. The clergyman prayed for us publicly and the population, generally, got together and showered us with ten thousand things that added to our naturally curtailed creature comforts. And, to be brief about it, a fairly good time was had by all, if the home newspaper was to be taken seriously.

The enthusiastic reporters said that we marched off to the training camps like veterans-grim, stern, self-reliant, determined. The best can be said about that is to repeat that the reporter was enthusiastic. I am one of the minority that loves reporters.

SIX MONTHS ELAPSE

We'll assume that six months have passed-six months of training for war as war is today. George Waffus, one of us who participated in that lionized departure for the training camp, gets a furlough. George goes home.

After mother, father, Sister Sue and Brother Bill and everybody else has had a chance to weep on George's greatly enlarged chest and wring his Bessemer-processed hands-hands that once were inclined to pulpiness-there's time to sit down, look George over and do a bit of thinking.

A DIGRESSION ON THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF MAN

One of the real calamities of the war is that every man and woman-soldier and civilian-in these beloved United States

did not hear Lieutenant-Colonel Applin, Fourteenth Hussars, British Army, in Converse College Auditorium, two weeks ago. I had a whole bonnet full of ideas for GAS ATTACK stories before I heard Colonel Applin speak. They were perfectly sound ideas, I might add. They must have been sound because they had lived through many million words and passed through the typewriters of several hundred aspiring writers and they are just as good today as they were when discovered.

Have you ever experienced, to its uttermost, the realization of just how damned unimportant you, as an individual, are? Did you ever stop to think that what you thought made not the slightest difference in the world to anybody?

It is not my job, however, to enter upon the somewhat difficult task of putting the Lieutenant-Colonel's speech across in this magazine. Sufficient to say that he said it all and added to it.

RETURNING TO PRIVATE WAFFUS

But we'll return to Private Waffus. Physically, Waffus is three or four times the man he was when he was wept away that sentimental afternoon six months previous. You comment upon that by telling him how fine he is looking.

But has it occurred to you what Private Waffus, as he stands before you, represents; just what work it has entailed to make him even half good enough to put up the quality of scrapping that the all-too-efficient Hun compels?

The contents of this magazine are censored. If the following gets past the blue pencil at Division Headquarters you may take it as my necessarily limited effort to convey to you just what Major General O'Ryan is doing through Lieutenant-Colonel Taylor to make us Waffuses in the Officers' Training School fit to fight and impart our knowledge to others.

ON BEING GASSED

We have been gassed. We have hurled bombs that flew back at us so rapidly that we received the impression that we had thrown them backward. We have vibrated at the safe end of Chauchat automatic rifles. We have speared Dummy Huns on a bayonet run that would discourage the Ringling Brothers.

You've heard about gas, of course-lachrymatory gas and gas that suffocates and corrodes you and ruins you generally. Terrible, isn't it? We, too, had heard all about it. We had received lectures from British soldiers who knew whereof they spoke soldiers who had been gassed and had come over here to tell us about it.

We were taken over to the beautiful hillock whereon the sealed gas chambers squat. There we were drilled in putting on and taking off the masks. Incidentally you folks have no idea what the word discomfort means until you try on a gas mask or respirator.

Did you ever try swallowing a hot water bottle? Did you ever clip a clothes pin over your nose and then try earnestly to thrust your head into a rubber boot? Sometime cover your favorite pillow with a slip made of Tanglefoot fly-paper and try a nap thereon.

We got quite used to the bally thing after a few days. We no longer strangled. We were less messy after wearing it for a half hour or so and believe me one can be messy with one's nostrils clamped together and a two-inch hose between one's teeth. We became so proficient that we could flip the masks on in six seconds. And then they decided to gas us.

INTO THE VALLEY OF BREATH

In platoons we were ushered into the lachrymator. Captain Stephen DeLanoy received us. We were informed that the gas within those hermetically sealed walls was not as strong as that which we would encounter in the front line trenches.

Captain DeLanoy talked about tear gas for several minutes and then announced that we should take off our masks. He pointed to the door and told us that as soon as we could stand the sting no longer we might feel quite free to leave. We took off our masks! You've heard of speed, of course. You've likely read about Joe Loomis running the hundred yards, and Dario Resta driving his motor car 115 miles an hour and Georges Guynemer battleplaning through the air at the rate of 130 miles an hour and all that sort of speed. They used to cite lightning as the standard to which speed might best be compared. They

speak about the light of the sun traveling through space at a rather lively gait. Wrong, my friends, all wrong.

EXIT HURRIEDLY

We took off our masks! That which followed would have made Loomis, Resta, Guynemer, lightning and the jolly old sun tear their hair in pure chagrin. Nothing like it has been seen since soldiers began wearing hats. Before we took off those masks I was flanked by Students Burrell and Mendenhall. Both men are crack sprinters and jumpers. They can do the hundred in twelve seconds in khaki and brogans, and Burrell can jump twenty feet without taking his hands out of his pockets. With all due modesty, I claim that I emerged from that door at a speed something more startling than fifty miles per hour, but Mendenhall and Burrell did it in nothing at all flat. And they could have done better had not several students clung to their blouse tails.

As I said, nothing quite like that speed has been seen since soldiers carried arms. It made one think of the possibilities. When we answer first call at reveille with something approximating that speed we'll be walking up and down Europe looking for someone strong enough to make us use both arms in a fight. When we stopped running we were led and shoved to the brow of the hill where we could weep in chorus. We wept like boarding school girls at commencement time. And then the chlorine tank. We entered the chamber of asphyxiation a bit more seriously. One inhalation would not kill us, but that inhalation would ruin the toughest lungs amongst us. No man could have lived in the chamber more than two and a half minutes without his mask. We were warned to wrap all jewelry in handkerchiefs and bury the roll in our clothing.

THE REAL THING

The gas was turned on. Outside the sun was shining with all the radiance of a Sicilian morning. From the wonderful hill on which the gas chambers rest we could see the Blue Ridge Mountains twenty miles away and all the gorgeous valley between. In a great circle we saw the miles of lovely meadow-land

The chamber is heavily

and creeks and rolling cotton field. sealed, but there are windows on either side-heavy windows that clamp like the doors of an ice box, but clear and wide. Yet none of the jewel-like brilliance of the day came in. Within that squat room there hung a greenish pall that was heavy and demoralizing. The gloom was like the early winter twilight. The medical corps men were outside. There might be accidents. Captain DeLanoy talked in short phrases through his mask.

They asked for volunteers to stay inside and remove their masks. Such men were to take a long, deep breath through the respirator. Then each man was to flip off the mask. He was to hold his breath-hold his breath as he loved his lungs. Captain DeLanoy led the way. He removed his mask without haste. Very calmly he snapped it back after a few seconds. Without suggestion of hurry he inflated the face fabric and cleared it-once, twice, three times. Then he cleared the goggles. The men outside were peering through the windows. The place was made even darker thereby.

"Take off your masks when you are ready," said Captain DeLanoy through the respirator. "Don't hurry. Don't lose your heads. You are quite all right if you avoid panic. Don't hurry, but don't fumble." I've seen quite a number of things that are warranted to thrill. I've seen men hanged, electrocuted, shot and one miserable negro burned to the stake. And, quite unavoidably, I assure you, I have been in places where the chances that I would be carried out were disconcertingly good.

A NEW SENSATION

But this was a sensation quite new. We ripped off the masks, each man doing it in his own time. Personally, I never held anything quite so fiercely as I clung to those lungsful of air I had inhaled through the chemical canister. Everybody was utterly calm. A silver ring I wore had already gone blue-black -the shade of your rifle barrel. My eyes still smarted from the lachrymator. Previously I had snapped the mask on in six seconds and had become rather proficient in the intricate art of wearing the thing. I kept it off in that chamber about five seconds, I figure. But I put it on in one. Certainly it was not