Far up in front, where the captain was, they had all hunched over and broken into a trot, and they seemed to be taking off their helmets. Nearer, just ahead of Connor, some of them had stopped and buckled over as if in pain; and then, before he could bring his mind into focus, something small and indistinct fell into the dust at his feet and exploded with a soft little noise — Pluffl — and his eyes and throat were attacked by fire.
He couldn’t see and he couldn’t breathe. He crouched, both hands grabbing for his eyes as his rifle swung clumsily loose at his elbow.
“Keep moving, men,” somebody was calling. “Keep moving …”
Stumbling and pushed heavily from behind, he lost his balance and fell on the road and rolled, legs in the air — all this happened before the first clear thought occurred to him: Tear gas.
And it was an agonizingly long time after that, while he scrabbled on all fours to retrieve his rolling helmet, before he thought of what to do about it — before his right hand clawed at the canvas pouch that had ridden under his left armpit for weeks, tore it open, and pulled out the wobbling rubber paraphernalia of his gas mask.
“Keep moving, men . . .”
Remembering something of gas-mask drill, he squeezed the snout of the thing with one hand and exhaled mightily as he pulled it over his head, and then he slobbered into it, coughing and retching as he opened his eyes and began to see the world through its cloudy plastic goggles. His helmet had come apart on the road, the liner rolling separately away from the steel bowl. He caught them up and fitted them back together, and then he found that this whole part of the column had broken up: he was surrounded by crouching, staggering, helmet-dropping men.
“Keep moving . . .”
Far up ahead — impossibly far, it seemed — the forward part of the column was still intact and marching in good order, and he could see that the last man in that section, plodding along as if nothing had happened, was Quint. He bounded and ran, carrying his rifle at the balance as he tried to keep from vomiting into his mask, which smelled of mildew and rubber and his own breath. They walked another fifty yards before the command came down:
“Test for gas!”
(Richard Yates: A Special Providence, 1969)
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