“Wa-al! I do sometimes this and sometimes that. I can do most things. It’s just what I happen to want to put my hand to. I’m master of half a dozen trades, I am. I’ve been on the farm, and I’m a blacksmith, and an engineer on the railway; and a barber, and a butcher.”
Her gaze is serenely fixed on the smiling green path. From the shadow in which we sit, it leads to a slope out into the blaze of the sunshine, where a cypress-tree rises like an immense green flame, circled with a shimmer of light. But perhaps her tone conveys rebuke, for our Canadian suddenly relapses into silence, from which we cannot again entice him.
A little further away a friend who is staying with us, and the relative above mentioned, are listening with intense interest to the talk of a tall, black-moustached soldier. His face is very pale under its bronze; he is the worst of the three gas victims who have come to-day. It is only what are called the very slight cases that are treated in the hospital close by.
A much older man this, who has been many years in the army and came over with the Indian division. He has a gentle, thoughtful face. There is no resentment in his eyes--only the look of one who has seen death very close and does not forget--and a great languor, the mark of the gas. He is talking very dispassionately of our reprisals.
“Oh yes, we have used our gas, the freezing-gas! But it don’t seem hardly worth while. It draws their fire so.” Then, with an everyday smile and no more emotion in his tone than if he were descanting on a mousetrap, he goes on to describe the incredibly sudden effect of what he calls the freezing-gas, which we suppose to be the French Turpinite. “It freezes you up, so to speak, right off on the spot. You see a fellow standing, turning his head to talk to a fellow near him. He lifts his hand, maybe, in his talk like; then comes along the gas, and there he stands. You think he’s going on talking. He’s frozen dead, his arm up, looking so natural-like, same as might be me this minute. Oh, it’s quick! what you call instantaneous. But it ain’t ’ardly worth while. The Germans, you see, it draws their fire so. Two or three times we got it in among our own men--oh, by mistake, miss, of course!” This in response to the horrified ejaculation of his interlocutor. “And that didn’t seem ’ardly worth while.”