tion>Alec Waugh
The Prisoners of Mainz
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066183035
Table of Contents
CHAPTER II ON THE WAY TO THE RHINE
CHAPTER III KARLSRUHE AND MILTON HAYES
CHAPTER VI THE GERMAN ATTITUDE
CHAPTER VIII OUR GENERAL TREATMENT
CHAPTER X HOW WE DID NOT ESCAPE
CHAPTER XII HOW WE AMUSED OURSELVES
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT OFFENSIVE
§ 1
March 21st, 1918.
The small box respirator, like the thirty-nine articles of the Faith, should be taken on trust; one is quite prepared to believe in its efficiency. Countless Base instructors have extolled it, countless memos from Division have confirmed their panegyrics; and with these credentials one carries it on one’s chest in a perfect faith; but one has no wish to put its merits to the test. No one if he can help it wishes to have his face surrounded by elastic and india-rubber, and his nose clamped viciously by bent iron; and for that reason my chief memory of March 21st was the prolonged discomfort of a gas-mask.
For from the moment that the barrage opened at 5 a.m. the air was full of the insidious smell of gas. Masks were clapped on, and thus hooded the machine-gunners fumbled desperately in search of stoppages; it was an uncomfortable morning.
Being stationed about two miles north of the left flank of the German attack, it was for us a much more comfortable morning than that spent by most of those south of Arras. For when the mist began to rise, it revealed no phantom figures; we did not find ourselves encircled, and outflanked, with the cheerful alternatives of a perpetual rest where we stood or of an indefinite sojourn on the wrong side of
