Word: ypres
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Their deaths in foreign French fields scattered from Verdun to Ypres remind us that we are ultimately responsible to a higher calling than just formals and final papers...
...fearsome business. In August 1914 an Englishman placed a personal ad in the London Times: "Pauline -- alas, it cannot be. But I will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me." The man's generation, destined for the trenches at Ypres and the Somme, was almost innocent enough to ship off thinking of Horace's lines: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori." Years later, American boys flying to Vietnam sometimes unreeled John Wayne movies in their head. That was the model; that was what a man should look like...
...document was easily skirted by the Germans, who used poison gas to devastating effect in World War I. In April 1915, German soldiers surreptitiously installed 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine in the trenches along a four-mile section of no-man's-land near the Belgian town of Ypres. Using a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans were able to shatter the cylinders and release the lethal gas. In a single afternoon, 5,000 French troops were killed and an additional 10,000 were injured. The carnage in Flanders was commemorated in a poem by Wilfred Owen...
...came across the low-lying fields as a drifting fog that some men saw as gray, some as yellow, some as green."Thus did Historian Ralph Allen describe the deadly mist of chlorine gas that ravaged the Canadian First Division at Ypres in 1915. Last week, as Canada celebrated Remembrance Day-the 61st anniversary of the end of World War I-fear of another kind of chlorine gas attack forced the evacuation of Mississauga...
...propane sent flames that towered into the sky and rattled windows 30 miles away. Firemen at the scene sniffed acrid fumes leaking from one tanker that contained 81 tons of liquefied chlorine; if that car exploded, its contents could turn into a modern equivalent of the deadly fog at Ypres. Within hours, provincial authorities ordered the largest evacuation in Canadian history; with surpassing smoothness, and little panic, most of the city's inhabitants moved to temporary quarters in auditoriums, school halls and churches in the Toronto area. At week's end, a leak in the chlorine tanker...