The Germans are using a new gas called "tear gas" which is hardly noticeable until it has complete hold on you.

With only a few days' notice Grant Willard was thrown into his ambulance work. Working under cover of night he and his aide, Johnny Taylor, evacuated wounded soldiers from aid posts and hospitals to areas in the rear. In his diary he refers to sitting patients as assis and those lying on stretchers as couchés, from the French.

Wednesday, August 15, 1917:

Johnny and I went on duty evacuating from Bevaux to various hospitals in this district at 3 P.M. today. This hospital does not keep cases which they can safely move on to other hospitals. The wounded are brought from the field posts by American Ambulance Section 1 and ourselves, and are left at this Bevaux base. From there they have formerly been evacuated by a French section of Fiat cars, but since the attack has started there have been too many cases for them to handle. We have offered four of our cars to help them out. So Johnnie and I were put on for our 24 hour shift. We carried our first load of two couchés and 4 assis to the Vadelaincourt hospital which is about 30-35 kilometers from here and returned for supper.

From then on to 1 P.M. Thursday we carried 5 more loads to various places near here--Belrupt and Dugny are the principal ones. We carried about 30 cases during that time, 15 of which were couchés and bad cases. At 2 A.M. we went to Dugny with three bad couchés. It was our first trip to that hospital. When we got down there we found the town in complete darkness and under shell fire. There wasn’t a soul we could ask directions of. We finally found what appeared to be a hospital, but we couldn’t rouse a soul. Johnny at last pulled about 6 nurses out of an abri and one of them could speak very good English. She told us we were at the wrong hospital and directed us to the correct one. Even then if it hadn’t been for a chance meeting of one of our cars on its way to Vadelaincourt we would never have found the place.


Most of the cases are brought in to this base to this base early in the morning around 5 and 6 o’clock because the night is very busy up at the front and roads are almost impassable because of camion trains and wagons. There were many, many gas cases brought in. The Germans are using a new gas called (in English) "tear gas" which is hardly noticeable until it has complete hold on you. Your eyes and nose and mouth all run and you feel sick all over. It doesn’t kill instantly, but puts one out of commission. There are other gases which are more poisonous, but can be smelled and seen before getting the best of one and masks put on. The odors vary. Some are plain chlorine, others smell like rotten vegetables, cheese, garlic, etc.