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Experiences of the Great War

First gas attacks

George Ramage arrived on the Western Front around the time that poison gas was first being used in warfare.

The Germans used it first — in an attack at Ypres. The British later responded with their own gas attacks.

Ramage's diary entry for 3 May 1915 describes the effects of gas:

'Captain Hume Gore told us that the German gas is chlorine — he deliberately told us a faleshood in saying that chlorine does not kill … one of our men returned from hospital next day where he had seen gas stricken men gasping for breath and dying like flies while the medical people could do nothing for them apparently except prop them up against the wall in the open air, all black in face — if Hume Gore was educated surely he knew that iron burns in chlorine and that therefore human lungs could not thrive in it.'

Other experiences