The officers of No. ---- Canadian Field Ambulance, with that camaraderie so prevalent out there, invited us to share with them a couple of old cellars to which they had gone on deserting the brewery. We accepted gladly. One of their two cellars they used as sleeping and eating quarters, the other as a dressing station where they were kept exceedingly busy attending the wounded. The Germans had the range of Vimy to a nicety, and with true German love of destruction they poured five hundred to a thousand shells into the ruins daily. Whenever the Germans are driven from a village, their practice is to ruin it by high explosive shells sent from their new line of defense. And these two cellars were about the center of the Vimy target.
The previous day two officers of the field ambulance were standing a few feet apart in a little room off from the cellar used as sleeping quarters. A table stood between them, on which were two lighted candles. Suddenly through the floor above came a four-inch shell, just missing the table, and sinking into the floor. Fortunately for the two officers it did not explode--it was a dud. The rush of air caused by the shell extinguished one of the candles. The other remained lighted. It may be understood easily that the officers felt a bit unnerved. After staring at the hole in the floor for some moments, Captain M---- picked up the lighted candle in one hand and the extinguished one in the other and endeavored to light one from the other. His hands shook so that he could not make the candles meet. After a number of vain attempts to bring them together he gave it up. His nervous system was so shaken that he was sent to the rest station on two weeks' leave.
We arrived shortly after the shell had gone through the cellar. Captain M---- himself told us of it, and his humorous description of his attempts to get the candles within six inches of each other was ludicrous in the extreme.
After an appetizing supper eaten in the cellar with the officers of the field ambulance, we medical officers took turns attending to the many wounded who were arriving. All went well till eleven o'clock that night, when we heard the whirr of gas shells coming in our direction. As they burst close to us, we soon smelt their penetrating, pineapple odor. The Huns continued to pour them in large numbers in our direction, and, as the town of Vimy is in a hollow at the foot of Vimy Ridge, the atmosphere soon became laden with the poison gas which, being heavier than air, sinks to the bottom of any hollows. The air in our cellars became saturated with the filthy, death-dealing gases in spite of the wet blanket which we hung over the entrance to prevent their entering. Had we been able to stay in the cellar and keep the blanket tightly placed over the entrance, our misery would have been much less, but wounded were coming in from all directions and we had to keep going in and out, in turns, to the cellar in which we did our dressings. The gas kept thickening every minute.
