'Stretcher-bearers': (4) The Phoney Period - Gas!

The Phoney Period - Gas!

August, 1940. Corporal in charge of gas drill, Crookham Camp, Aldershot.

"Now remember, lads. The Germans will use GAS!"

He then orders us to don our gas masks and enter the gas filled hut.

Shouting from behind his own gas mask, he gives further orders which we fail
to understand. He begins to execute swift circles inside the hut. We all join in the fun, prancing and cavorting like silly devils.
Eventually this military pied piper shoots out through the back door and we follow, a hideous gaggle, goggle-eyed with rubber faces.
He has not yet finished. He bawls through his mask words that sound like "Bless your cats!" None of us can translate this into "Test for Gas!" before he has smartly whipped two fingers behind his right ear and ripped off his mask.
"Now then , lads. Suppose that was Mustard gas.. What do you do, eh?"
Gas masks off, flushed and hot, we pant for breath until some notorious creep, remembering Abyssinia, takes a wad of cotton waste from his respirator case and starts plucking off imaginary pink spots of liquid gas from his brown paper gas detector sheets. We all wear pairs of these on the arms of our battle dress tunics..
"Good, lad! Now. what next?"
We dig out sods of grass with the metal heel caps of our army boots, burying in the holes fragments of cotton waste impregnated with non-existent liquid gas, Finally, like tidy golfers, we tread down the divots.
During the next five years we never practised that drill again, thank God! All the same, we liked the friendly corporal and hoped that he spent the rest of the war training recruits for the crisis that never came.

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