There was one
incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound. The
whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all
landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.
Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising
from the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a
fleecy texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask
our infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave
of cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then
curled forward to the enemy's lines.
"That's our gas!" said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group
of observers--English and French officers.
"And the wind is dead right for it," said another voice. "The Germans
will get a taste of it this time!"
Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath
as though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a
little. They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the
drama behind its curtain--men caught in those fumes, the terror-
stricken flight before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy
trapped in their dugouts.
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