A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

ONE ‘Frightfulness’

THE 22ND OF April 1915 had been a warm and sunny day, but towards the end of the afternoon a breeze sprang up. It came from the north, from behind the German lines, blew across No Man’s Land, and gently fanned the faces of the Allied soldiers in position around the village of Langemarck, near Ypres.

They were new to the trenches – French reservists and Algerians from France’s north African colony. To them the fresh wind must have seemed a good omen, for a few seconds later, as if on cue, the German guns which had been bombarding them all day suddenly stopped firing. An abrupt silence descended over the front.

A few hundred yards away, four divisions – of the 23rd and 26th German Army Corps – crouched in their trenches. They had waited there since dawn, unable to move for fear of giving away their presence. Now, just as it had begun to seem too late, the moment had come. The wind had changed. An attack.

At five o’clock, three red rockets streaked into the sky, signalling the start of a deafening artillery barrage. High explosive shells pounded into the deserted town of Ypres and the villages around it. At the same time the troops sheltering near Langemarck saw two greenish-yellow clouds rise from the enemy’s lines, catch the wind, and billow forwards, gradually merging to form a single bank of blue-white mist: out of sight, in special emplacements protected by sandbags and concrete, German pioneers were opening the valves of 6,000 cylinders spread out along a four mile front. The cylinders contained liquid chlorine – the instant the pressure was released and it came into contact with the air it vaporized and hissed out to form a dense cloud. At thirty parts per million of air chlorine gas produces a rasping cough. At concentrations of one part per thousand it is fatal. The breeze stirred again, and one hundred and sixty tons of it, five feet high and hugging the ground, began to roll towards the Allied trenches.

Chemical warfare had begun.

The wave broke over the first line within a minute, enveloping tens of thousands of troops in an acrid green cloud so thick they could no longer see their neighbours in the trench. Seconds later they were clutching at the air and at their throats, fighting for breath.

Chlorine does not suffocate: it poisons, stripping the lining of the bronchial tubes and lungs. The inflammation produces a massive amount of fluid that blocks the windpipe, froths from the mouth and fills the lungs. In an attempt to escape the effects, some men tried to bury their mouths and nostrils in the earth; others panicked and ran. But any exertion or effort to outdistance the cloud only resulted in deeper breaths and more acute poisoning. As the tide of gas washed over the struggling men their faces turned blue from the strain of trying to breathe; some coughed so violently they ruptured their lungs. Each man, as the British casualty report was later to put it, was ‘being drowned in his own exudation’.¹

Advancing cautiously behind the chlorine cloud came the German infantry, all wearing crude respirators of moist gauze and cotton tied round their faces. They passed through an unprecedented scene of horror. The dead lay where they had fallen, arms outstretched trying to escape the gas. Interspersed with the corpses, the wounded and dying sprawled gasping and choking as their agonized lungs coughed up mouthful after mouthful of yellow fluid. Any metal object the chlorine had come into contact with was tarnished. Buttons, watches, coins; all had turned a dull green. Rifles were rusted and looked as if they had been left out in the mud for months. Most of the breech blocks on the sixty guns the Germans captured that day were unusable.

Any of the French still capable of movement fled. The British suddenly found the roads and bridges of their sector clogged with retreating soldiers, many of whom could only point at their throats in explanation. By six o’clock, even as far back as ten miles, the chlorine cloud was still making men cough and their eyes smart. By seven o’clock, the few French guns which had been left in action were ominously silent.

The first large-scale gas attack had taken the Allied commanders so completely by surprise that it was not until the early hours of the morning that they began to appreciate the scale of the disaster that had overtaken them. The Germans had torn a hole four miles wide in the Western Front, smashing in an afternoon defences which had held for months. The German commander, Falkenhayn, was as startled as his opponents by the overwhelming effect of chemical warfare. He had seen gas merely as an experimental aid to his attack and had insufficient reserves ready to exploit his advantage. But for that he might have been able to drive right through the Allied line to the Channel ports: the gas attack could have won the war for the Germans. Instead, as night fell over Ypres, the German soldiers dug in. Falkenhayn’s ‘experiment’, the Germans reckoned, had cost the Allies 5,000 men dead and 10,000 wounded.

Thirty-six hours later, while the British and the French were still struggling to fill the breach in their defences, the Germans struck again. At 2.45 am, shortly before dawn on the 24 April, Captain Bertram of the Canadian 8th Battalion noticed some greenish-white smoke rising from the German front line about 600 yards away. Travelling at eight miles an hour, the cloud ‘drifted along the ground towards our trenches, not rising to more than seven feet from the ground when it reached our front line’.² The bank of high-density chlorine rolled over the Canadians, whose only protection was handkerchiefs, socks and towels which they urinated on and then stuffed into their mouths. Over the next few hours they were subjected to successive waves of gas so thick they blotted out the sun. Once or twice through the clouds they caught glimpses of German troops apparently dressed as divers, wearing large hoods with a single glass eyepiece set in the front.

There was the same panic-stricken scramble for the rear. On a small stretch of ground leading from the advanced trenches to the supports Bertram counted twenty-seven bodies of men killed trying to outrun the gas; he himself collapsed with vomiting and diarrhoea, unable to breathe, with a feeling ‘of great heaviness in the bottom of the chest’.

The German gas and artillery attack killed 5,000 men. Sergeant Grindley of the Canadian 15th Battalion was one of hundreds carried off the battlefield into the primitive medical posts. The doctors had no idea how to treat gas casualties and two days later Grindley died, gasping for breath. The surgeon who treated him called it ‘air hunger’. In blue pencil he scrawled a post-mortem report:

Of those who survived the gas attack, 60 per cent had to be sent home; half were still fully disabled at the end of the war.

Neither for the first time nor the last, men like Grindley – ‘lions led by donkeys’ – suffered for the blunders of their commanders who for weeks beforehand had been warned of what the Germans were planning. Although the facts were suppressed at the time, we now know that on 13 April, over a week before the first attack, a French patrol had captured a German soldier actually carrying a respirator. The soldier, a twenty-four-year-old private called August Jager of Germany’s 26th Army Corps, revealed the German plan to use gas and described the position of the cylinders (the existence of which had already been confirmed by aerial reconnaissance). Jager’s information was passed to the French divisional commander, General Ferry, who in turn passed it on to the British and French High Commands with the advice either that the men threatened be withdrawn or the gas emplacements bombarded. Both his warning and his advice were ignored. As the official British report on the affair – classed ‘secret’ until almost sixty years after the attack – put it:

Neither Ferry nor Jager profited when their predictions were proved correct. Ferry was dismissed from his post by the French High Command, furious at having their incompetence revealed. Jager’s fate was grimmer. In a memoir published in 1930, Ferry imprudently named him as the source of his information. Jäger, now a civilian, was promptly arrested, and at Leipzig in 1932 he was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, the court deciding that his betrayal of German plans had helped cost them the war – the last and perhaps saddest casualty of the first gas attack.

The victims of Ypres were evacuated to the area around Boulogne, where they became the focus of intense scientific curiosity. What gas were the Germans using? What protection could be devised against it? The British ransacked their universities and hospitals for experts who might be able to provide the answers to these questions, and by the end of April the seaside town was filled to overflowing with wounded and dying men, attended by a small army of specialists and academics.

The largest hospital was housed in the famous pre-war Casino at Le Touquet, one of the great symbols of the Golden Era that came to an end in August 1914. Now – wrote one of Britain’s leading physiologists, Joseph Barcroft – in elegant rooms which had once echoed to the sound of the roulette wheel, ‘one simply wades through wounded’. Another hospital, in the Pleasure Pavilion at the end of the pier, was ‘so full that it was almost impossible to move about. All the beds full and all available space on the floors. All the other hospitals are the same. Sometimes the beds are made and three cases pass through the bed in a day.’⁵

The feelings of shock and outrage were compounded by the fact that poison gas was specifically outlawed by international law. The Hague Declaration of 1899 had helped lay down the principle that there were certain methods of combat which were outside the scope of civilized warfare. The signatories, including Germany, had pledged among other things ‘to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’.

To the gassed soldiers sixteen years later, this Edwardian gentlemen’s agreement must have been as far removed from the realities of 1915 as the ornate chandeliers and paintings crated away at the Casino. With extraordinary cynicism, the Germans claimed that by not using projectiles but instead releasing the cloud of gas from cylinders, they had avoided breaking the Hague agreement. The German newspaper, Kölnishe Zeitung, went so far as to claim that ‘the letting loose of smoke clouds, which, in a gentle wind, move quite slowly towards the enemy, is not only permissible by international law, but is an extraordinarily mild method of war’.⁶ The British Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, did not think so. On 23 April he telegraphed London asking for the means to retaliate. On the 24th, as the Canadians were enduring the second gas attack, Lord Kitchener, the War Minister, replied. ‘Before we fall to the level of the degraded Germans,’ he informed French, ‘I must submit the matter to the Government.’ It was clear, international agreements notwithstanding, that general chemical warfare could not now be far off. While the Cabinet considered the British position with regard to gas, news of the attack was spread to the general public.

There was a great spasm of anti-German feeling. The press fuelled the anger, printing vivid accounts of the suffering of the wounded. ‘Their faces, arms, hands were of a shiny grey-black colour,’ wrote ‘The Times, ‘with mouths open and lead-glazed eyes, all swaying slightly backwards and forwards trying to get breath.’⁷ Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail appealed to the women of England to make respirators using a simple pattern of cotton wool in a gauze envelope. The response to the Mail’s call was enormous: a million of these embryo gas masks were made in a single day. Thousands unfortunately reached the front and were issued; they were useless when dry and caused suffocation when wet. A week after they arrived, the British High Command ordered them to be withdrawn; by the time the last one disappeared from the battlefield some days later, the Mail’s respirator had been responsible for the deaths of scores of men.

Not that the official policy was much better. The army relied on the advice of two English professors, Haldane and Baker, who visited the front on 27 April. They recommended as protection the ‘use of cloths etc moistened with urine, earth folded in cloth or enclosed in a bottle from which the base has been removed’.⁸ These stop-gap measures were all that the Allies had to carry them through three gas attacks on 1, 6 and 10 of May.

The last and greatest attack of the summer came on the 24th. At dawn, under cover of a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans released chlorine along a two-mile sector of the front, between the Menin Road and Sanctuary Wood, south-west of Ypres. The men who held the line – soldiers of the British 1st Cavalry, 4th and 28th Divisions – clutched hastily-issued respirators consisting of two layers of flannel (with tapes attached to tie over the mouth) which were meant to be dipped in soda solution before use, bottles of which were placed in the trenches.

The menacing cloud of greenish-white gas swirled over the British positions as it had over the French and Canadian, but this time at a totally unexpected density. The chlorine reached a concentration which proved fatal a mile and a half away; it was still strong enough to cause vomiting and smarting of the eyes nine miles from the front. Three miles back, at Ypres, houses and trees were completely blotted from view and the cellars of the hospital ‘became filled with a fog’. In the trenches themselves – only a few hundred yards from the cylinders – the gas produced desperate scenes, as General Wilson recorded:

The attack lasted for over four hours. During the next few days, nearly three and a half thousand men were treated for gas poisoning; more than half of them had to be sent home to England. There were no figures for the number of dead.

Two days later, on 26 May, a strange figure clad in a uniform ‘bearing tell-tale marks of long association with mud and barbed wire’, a cap split by a shell splinter and a pistol strapped to his belt, appeared at the Advanced General Headquarters of the British Army at Hazebrouck. Major Charles Howard Foulkes of His Majesty’s Royal Engineers had an appointment with General Robertson, Chief of Staff to Sir John French. It was an interview, Foulkes later recalled, of few words:

The British Army had, in Foulkes, appointed as ‘Gas Adviser’ a figure seemingly straight from the pages of Kipling or Rider Haggard. Foulkes was one of seven sons of a British chaplain in India, all of whom grew up to serve the Empire, and five of whom were buried overseas. By the time of his appointment in 1915 Foulkes was forty. He had spent twenty-three years in the Army, and had seen service in Sierra Leone. (‘The White Man’s Grave’ where he had twice nearly died of malaria), Gambia, the Gold Coast, South Africa, the West Indies, Nigeria and Ceylon. During the Boer War he had devised bicycle-mounted photo-reconnaissance equipment and several times narrowly escaped being shot while photographing Boer positions. In 1902, posing as a newspaperman and ostensibly covering the eruptions of the Mont Pêlee volcano, he had secretly photographed the French fortification in Martinique for the Secret Service. In the same year, travelling on horseback and by canoe, he penetrated deep into hostile and largely unexplored country to chart the boundary between Northern Nigeria and the French Sahara. A big game hunter, a First Division football player (for the Scottish side, Heart of Midlothian), a competitor at the 1908 Olympic Games, this remarkable, archetypal son of the Empire was to crown his career as ADC to the King and die in his bed – in the same year that men landed on the moon – at the age of ninety-five.

In 1915 the task facing him was to tax even his ingenuity to the utmost. The British High Command wanted gas ready to employ in their autumn offensive. Foulkes had five months to devise a gas weapon, get it into production, recruit and train men to use it, and work out how best to employ it. Fortunately for the British, these attempts would not be hampered by further German gas attacks. After the attack on 24 May, the wind began to blow from the west, and the Germans transferred their Gas Corps to the Eastern Front, where it was employed with devastating results against the ill-equipped Russian Army. Apart from two attacks against the French in October, no more gas was discharged against the Allies in France until December.

The major problem confronting Foulkes was the one which he, as a soldier, could do least about: the weakness of the British chemical industry. There was nothing in the United Kingdom, or even in the rest of the world, remotely to match the productive capacity of Germany’s eight giant chemical combines huddled together in the massive concentration in the Ruhr known as the Interessen Gemeinschaft – the IG.

To fight a war with poison gas requires highly efficient massproduction, a demand which the IG (then capitalized at an estimated $400 million) was ideally suited to meet. Most First World War gases could be manufactured in bulk using the methods and machinery normally employed in making dyestuffs. By the start of the war, Germany had a virtual world monopoly in the production of dyes; Britain on the other hand could produce only a tenth of what she needed. The imbalance was to be a serious handicap to the Allied chemical warfare effort, which right up to the end of the war lagged behind the efficiency of their enemy’s. Indeed it was this unchallengeable superiority in chemical production, together with the fact that the British naval blockade was starving them of supplies of nitrate for making high explosive, that first led the German High Command to contemplate using gas.

They had introduced a form of tear gas (called T-Stoff after its inventor, Dr Tappen) on the Russian Front in January 1915. T-Stoff, one of the precursors of modern riot gas, was considered just within the scope of weapons permitted by the Hague Convention. The Allies had similar weapons. In March, the French, on the initiative of a conscripted policeman, introduced tear gas cartridges and grenades. The British were developing a ‘stink bomb’ for clearing dug-outs named ‘SK’ after South Kensington where it was invented. In the stress of war, it seemed but a short step from the use of gases which ‘incapacitated’ men by temporarily blinding or choking them, to the introduction of lethal agents.

The introduction of chemical warfare was in fact actively canvassed by the IG cartel from the outset of the war, most notably by its head, Carl Duisberg. An ‘imperious Prussian who would not tolerate dissent in either his personal or his business life’,¹¹ a man who (specifically) spoke of and believed in the ‘Führer Principle’ long before Hitler was ever heard of, Duisberg belonged to the scientific and industrial elite whose skill and unscrupulousness was to enable Germany to fight the world for ten out of the next forty years.

The chemical industry was the foundation of Germany’s war machine. Without Duisberg’s factories’ discovery and mass production of synthetic nitrates, the Kaiser would have been forced to sue for peace in 1915. Now, the initiation of poison gas warfare promised both to strengthen further the IG’s position in Germany, and to revive the moribund dye industry, which had been at a virtual standstill since the start of the war. Duisberg urged the employment of chemical warfare at a special conference of the German High Command in the autumn of 1914 and he personally investigated the toxicity of the various war gases. (Later he arranged for the offices of his own company, Bayer, to be decorated with a giant frieze depicting all the various aspects of the factory’s war work: one panel showed gas being made, another shells being filled, a third gas masks being assembled. At the end of the war he proudly displayed this work of art to a bemused Allied officer.)

To Duisberg’s enthusiasm and the productive power of the IG was added the genius of Germany’s leading industrial scientist. The man today generally credited as the ‘father’ of chemical warfare was the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin: Fritz Haber. Forty years old, a brilliant chemist, a future Nobel Prizewinner and a fervent patriot, Haber energetically set about the task of finding the world’s first, practical, lethal chemical weapon. Work began in the autumn of 1914. ‘We could hear,’ stated a witness at the end of the war, ‘the tests that Professor Haber was carrying out at the back of the Institute, with the military authorities, who in their steel-gray cars came to Haber’s Institute every morning… The work was pushed day and night, and many times I saw activity in the building at eleven o’clock in the evening. It was common knowledge that Haber was pushing these men as hard as he could.’¹² In one of these early experiments a laboratory was blown up killing Haber’s assistant, Professor Sachur.

By January Haber had a weapon ready to show the Army. Instead of filling the chemical into shells, he proposed to discharge it from cylinders. The chemical he chose was chlorine, a powerful asphyxiating gas which could be easily stored in the cylinders in liquid form; on contact with the air it evaporated into a low-hanging cloud which, with a favourable wind, could be carried into the heart of the enemy’s positions. In addition, there were large stocks of chlorine to hand. Even before the war, the IG was producing forty tons per day; British production was less than a tenth of this.

The shock of the new weapon, the scale upon which an attack could be mounted, and the ability of gas to penetrate even the strongest fortifications, gave the Germans great hope that chemical warfare might end the deadlock in the west. Haber himself went to Ypres to supervise the attack. Yet despite the fact that between 22 April and 24 May, 500 tons of chlorine were discharged from over 20,000 cylinders, the Allied line held. Gas could not win the war alone – it had to be backed by a powerful offensive, which at Ypres the Germans failed to mount. Haber was bitterly disappointed. The military commanders, he wrote later, ‘admitted afterward that if they had followed my advice and made a large-scale attack, instead of the experiment at Ypres, the Germans would have won.’¹³

Haber returned to Berlin where his wife Clara pleaded with him to give up his work and stay at home. Haber refused. In May he left for the Eastern Front where in three devastating attacks forty miles west of Warsaw the Russians lost around 25,000 men killed and wounded. Throughout the war the poorly-protected Russians suffered the worst of all the countries engaged in the chemical war: by the end of the war they were said to have suffered almost half a million casualties. In just one of the early attacks the Siberian Regiment was virtually eliminated – it began with thirty-nine officers and 4,310 men; it ended with four officers and 400 men.¹⁴

In the west, however, it was the Germans who were about to suffer. Duisberg had made a fatal miscalculation about the Allies’ inability to respond with chemical weapons. Far from breaking the stalemate as he and Haber had hoped, gas was to become a major part of it. A pattern was established which was to persist to the end of the war: the Germans would initiate the use of a new gas to try to break through; it would fail, be copied by the Allies, and the cycle would repeat itself. In the summer of 1915, as work began in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on the next war gas – phosgene – Foulkes struggled to find the men and material for the Allies’ first gas attack – using chlorine.

Haber himself was left to mourn the personal cost of his work on chemical warfare. On the night that he left for the Eastern Front, Clara Haber committed suicide.

And so, by a combination of industrial might, military expediency, and the skill of a handful of patriotic scientists, the world drifted into chemical warfare. Britain’s poison gas offensive was waged by an elite section of the army, raised by Foulkes and known as the Special Companies (later the Special Brigade). Everyone was given extra pay and all held a rank at least equivalent to corporal. Most of them were new recruits, science graduates or industrial chemists. After the war many of them became key figures in Britain’s fledgling Imperial Chemical Industries. In 1915 they carried revolvers instead of rifles, were largely excused the discipline of the parade ground, and learned instead to handle the ‘oojahs’, the great 190 lb cylinders of chlorine which required two men to carry them and which were to be the basis of Britain’s first chemical attack.

By 25 September, 5,500 of these cylinders, containing 150 tons of gas, had been manhandled into position at Loos in Belgium ready for the British offensive. They had been shipped across the Channel in the greatest secrecy, each in an unmarked wooden box carried at a cost of twelve shillings each. A patrol of aeroplanes ensured that the Special Companies were not observed as they prepared the attack.

The need for surprise was paramount. In all plans for the attack distributed to company commanders, gas was referred to simply as ‘the accessory’, and severe penalties were imposed on anyone who accidentally described ‘the accessory’ as gas. The attitude of most officers to ‘the accessory’, and to the ill-assorted soldiers in charge of it, was well summed up by the old-school Captain Thomas in Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That:

Yet, for all the suspicion, Foulkes could, on the eve of the Battle of Loos, look back on a remarkable achievement. Five months after the German initiation of gas warfare had caught the Allies by surprise, he had 1,404 men, including fifty-seven officers under his command. As they moved into position at midnight on the 25th, Foulkes waited nervously at Sir Douglas Haig’s battle headquarters at a nearby château, a large-scale trench map spread out on the table in front of him, with small flags representing each of his commanders. At 5 am Haig considered calling off the attack. The wind was so slight that stepping into the grounds of the château, he asked one of his officers to light a cigarette; the puff of smoke scarcely drifted in the still morning air. Nevertheless, the attack went ahead. At 5.50 am the cylinders were opened. One gas officer, in a sector where the wind was least favourable, refused to discharge the gas. His refusal was relayed to Headquarters who instructed him to do as he was told. A few minutes later he was horrified to see the cloud drift back, gassing hundreds of British troops.

Graves was scathing about the efficiency of Foulkes’s men in his sector of the front. The spanners they had been provided with for unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders were the wrong size and ‘the gas-men rushed about shouting for the loan of adjustable spanners.’ Only one or two cylinders were released. Warned of the attack the Germans opened fire: ‘direct hits broke several of the gas cylinders, the trench filled with gas, the gas-company stampeded.’

Things went better elsewhere along the front. An aerial reconnaissance report handed to Haig shortly after 6 am reported that ‘the gas cloud was rolling steadily over towards the German lines’. As the chlorine reached the first trenches, warning drums began to sound along the length of the German Front. In the trenches themselves the scenes were a virtual replay of those at Ypres in April. Officers and men were equally unprepared. Masks had been lost or forgotten, most of the respirators they had were useless (after the attack one British sergeant reported burying twenty-three gassed Germans: all were wearing respirators). German commanders reported complete panic. Men who had been given no rations for four days as a result of the constant bombardment which had preceded the gas attack were already weak and quickly collapsed. Some tried to crouch in dug-outs – these were at first free from gas, but gradually it accumulated and forced them out. Seventy Germans tried to come over the top to surrender but were mown down by their own machine gunners who were better equipped than the ordinary troops, with divers’ helmets and oxygen cylinders. Eventually though even they succumbed: their oxygen supply lasted thirty minutes; by carefully interspersing the clouds of chlorine with waves of smoke, the British padded out the attack to forty minutes. The smoke had an additional psychological effect, blotting out the autumn morning with a fog so thick that as far back as four miles behind the German line visibility was less than ten paces.

An hour after the first discharge of gas, the British infantry charged the German line, penetrating a mile in the first rush. ‘Behind the fourth gas and smoke cloud,’ reported the war correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, ‘there suddenly emerged Englishmen in thick lines and storming columns. They rose suddenly from the earth wearing smoke masks over their faces and looking not like soldiers but like devils. These were bad and terrible hours.’¹⁶ A soldier of the 1st Middlesex Regiment, in a letter which was stopped by the censor, wrote:

British soldiers fought their way through German trenches that were a wasteland of dead. The 20th Brigade reported ‘whole machine gun crews lying gassed to death’. Other troops described ‘five men and two officers lying heaped in one place, blue in the face and undoubtedly gassed to death’. Men lay face down in the trenches; one officer reported a German still seated in his chair – gassed. Elsewhere, six dead Germans were found huddled together, as if trying to ward off the cold. Many of the dead were in the second and third lines, and in the communicating trenches where they had died trying to scramble to the rear. ‘We saw the deadly effects of our gas,’ wrote one officer to a London paper. ‘The Germans had suffered as we too had suffered in the past.’¹⁸

In some places, the German line was penetrated by British troops to a depth of three miles. But, as in so many battles of the First World War, the gains were transitory and small, the sacrifices enormous. Although eighteen guns and 3,000 prisoners were captured, the Battle of Loos cost the British over 50,000 casualties. There was no breakthrough. As at Ypres, gas – unpredictable in its effects and heavily dependent upon the weather – had failed to achieve the decisive victory each side sought. Like Haber, Foulkes was left after the battle to sigh a series of ‘ifs’: ‘if fortune had been a little kinder, if the wind had been only slightly more favourable, there is no doubt whatever that Sir John French would have gained a smashing victory on this day.’¹⁹ As it was, within a week the Germans had recaptured almost all the ground they had lost.

After Loos, gas was an even more unpopular weapon than it had been before. In the three weeks after the first discharge, 2,000 British troops reported as casualties of British gas; fifty-five cases were ‘severe’ and ten died. Pipes and cylinders often leaked, frequently they were damaged by enemy shells; and when a gas attack occurred, the wind often wafted the cloud over the wrong side. Even the commanders viewed it with distaste.

In the ordinary soldier there was born a hatred of gas that steadily deepened as the war progressed. For the next three years men were kept constantly on their guard. Allied anti-gas schools were set up at Havres, Rouen, Etaples, Abbeville, Boulogne and Calais. Every soldier was put through a standard course which included an hour immersed in a cloud of gas (to give him ‘confidence in his respirator’) and half a minute exposed to tear gas (to give him a fright and teach him to take anti-gas precautions seriously). Masks had to be put on in a regulation six seconds – but before being allowed to do so, and while still exposed to the tear gas, men had to repeat their name, number and battalion; sometimes they were made to do it twice. ‘It was,’ as one historian has put it, ‘a brisk business, which sent men back to the front with an aggrieved feeling of the unfairness of gas.’²⁰ It was believed that gas casualties were a result of slack discipline. Courts of Inquiry were held on the victims, and each gas case had to wear a ‘wound stripe’ – visible evidence of his neglect in allowing himself to be gassed. (This practice was only stopped after the introduction of mustard gas, when there were simply too many casualties for the system to cope with.)

The effectiveness of these stern measures is reflected in the statistics for gas casualties. Of the 180,983 British soldiers officially accounted as having been gassed in the First World War, only 6,062 are recorded as having died, giving a mortality rate of around 3 per cent²¹ (although, as will be discussed later, this figure is almost certainly well below the true number).

Using these figures, advocates of chemical warfare later argued that gas was actually the most humane of the weapons used in the First World War, wounding far more than it killed. But the figures do not reveal either the horror or persistence of gas wounds. Nor do they show the psychological casualties. As the fighting dragged on, the constant state of gas readiness imperceptibly sapped men’s strength and fighting spirit. Fear was omnipresent. Every few miles along every road, signs warned of the danger of gas. As far back as twelve miles you had constantly to carry your mask. In the event of a gas alarm a deafening racket arose along the front. Bells were rung, empty shell cases beaten, and the great Strombus horns – twenty-eight to the mile, powered by compressed air and audible nine miles away – let out warning screams. One eyewitness recalled:

In June 1915, 2,500,000 ‘Hypo Helmets’ were issued – bags of flannel which had been chemically impregnated against chlorine. The bags were placed over the head and tucked into the collar; two eyepieces cut into the front and made of celluloid enabled the wearer to peer out at the scene around him. In the autumn the British added modifications – the helmet was better impregnated and a rubber exhaust tube was added. Nine million of these ‘P Helmets’ were issued by December.

The shapeless hood, the twin eyeholes, the elephant’s trunk of rubber hanging down from the mouth – the respirators gave the men a nightmarish quality as they moved around in the dense clouds of gas. To wear, the masks were extremely uncomfortable. Often they leaked around the mouthpiece, or the eyepieces cracked and let in the gas. They produced a feeling of suffocation. A dangerous concentration of carbon dioxide was likely to build up inside. They made you sweat, and when that happened the eyepieces steamed up and the chemical solution the flannel had been dipped in began to run, stinging the face and dripping down the neck. And in a long attack, the effectiveness of the helmets could come dangerously close to exhaustion; with the chemical protection worn away, the gas was able to seep through.

The P Helmet had been hastily improvised to provide protection against phosgene, another chemical used in the dye industry, whose potential as a war gas had been noticed by the Allies in the summer of 1915. The helmet arrived at the front in the nick of time.

At 5.30 am on 19 December, the German Gas Corps broke their six month silence on the British Front with an attack at Ypres using phosgene for the first time. Captain Adie of the Royal Army Medical Corps recalled a loud hissing sound. ‘Almost at the same moment red rockets went up from the German lines… I was at Headquarters drinking a cup of tea with the Colonel. At first I thought the water from which the tea was made had been over-chlorinated – a moment later I thought I could smell gas.’²³

Travelling at great speed, the cloud – a mixture of chlorine and phosgene – outstripped the alarm system of gongs and klaxons and took hundreds of men unawares; one man was gassed five miles behind the front line. Panic set in on the dark winter morning as shell fire cut all the telephone wires to the front. It was mid-afternoon before Adie could reach the first trench. Most of the chlorine victims were already dead, ‘blue and puffed out’, the wounded frothing from the mouth. The phosgene victims began to feel worse as the day progressed. Men who thought they had escaped being gassed suddenly found the slightest effort made them ill.

One officer died suddenly in an ambulance, another collapsed while walking to report his symptoms. A third reported to a medical post at 8.30 pm. ‘He said he didn’t feel very well, but he did not look very bad. I gave him a cup of tea which he drank and we talked for a little while. Suddenly he collapsed in the chair he was sitting on. I gave him some oxygen but he died an hour afterwards.’ 1,069 men were gassed that day; 116 died.

The appearance of phosgene greatly deepened the fear of gas. Like chlorine it had quirky side-effects – for example it made pipe tobacco taste like hay. But it was, at a rough calculation, eighteen times as powerful as chlorine, practically colourless and odourless, and much more difficult to detect. Effective in concentrations of just one part in 50,000 it had a deadly delayed action. A victim who has inhaled a lethal dose at first feels nothing more than a mild irritation of eyes and throat which quickly passes off; for up to two days afterwards a man might actually feel mildly euphoric. Throughout this period his lungs are filling with fluid. Collapse comes quickly. The slightest action – turning over in bed for instance – can send the respiration rate rocketing to 80 breaths per minute, the pulse to 120. The ‘drowning period’ begins. Official reports describe ‘an abundant flow of thin watery fluid, often streaked with blood, which simply flows from the mouth as the dying patient loses the power to expel it. After death, the foam from this fluid may dry to a white efflorescence around the mouth.’²⁵ Victims were known to cough up four pints of this yellowish liquid every hour; it could take forty-eight hours to die.

The gas produced some of the most curious stories of the war. Foulkes recalled a German taken prisoner after a British phosgene attack. At his interrogation, in high spirits, he ridiculed the ineffectiveness of British gas. Twenty-four hours later he was dead. One German died while writing a letter home to his family. Because of its delayed action, phosgene caused many casualties among the men of the Special Companies, unaware that they were being poisoned.

At the Battle of the Somme alone, fifty-seven of Foulkes’s men died from the effects of their own gas.

It was at the Somme, in June 1916, that the Allies first used the new gas. In the biggest attack they had launched up to that time, chlorine and phosgene were released along a seventeen mile front, producing a massive cloud that penetrated twelve miles behind the German lines. The cloud wiped out men, horses, wildlife, insects, vegetation – virtually everything it touched. Three months before autumn, all the leaves on the trees in the nearby Monchy wood had fallen. The war correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote of the hundreds of dead rats and mice that ‘are found in the trenches after gas attacks. Owls are greatly excited. Behind the front, fowls and ducks are said to have become restless a quarter of an hour before the gas clouds approached; and the gas kills ants and caterpillars, beetles and butterflies. I found a hedgehog and an adder both killed by gas. The only birds that seem indifferent to the gas are the sparrows.’²⁷ A few weeks later, in August, a German cloud of phosgene reached a height of sixty feet and passed through a wood near Ypres, killings thousands of birds nesting in the trees.

On the Somme, phosgene killed men in their hundreds. The Daily Chronicle enthusiastically reported that ‘British wounded brought back from the German trenches by their comrades related that the effects of the new gases experimented with are terrible. One soldier of the Highland Light Infantry, who took part in one of the principle incursions into the enemy trenches, declares that all the Germans occupying that particular sector were dead. Two hundred and fifty corpses were counted lying huddled together.’²⁸

The story was the same as in previous gas attacks: men caught unawares, panicking, and spreading the terror and confusion which enabled the gas to do its work. ‘Some men,’ according to a report captured from the German 12th Division, ‘were taken by surprise and put on their masks too late, others ran too quickly and tore off their masks because of the difficulty of breathing. Others, again, tumbled about during the alarm and either had their masks torn off or displaced.’²⁹ The dead were too numerous to bury: the dug-outs where they lay were merely blown up or filled in with earth.

In the first eighteen days of the Somme Battle, the Special Brigade carried out fifty gas attacks. Phosgene became the main British chemical weapon. Over the next nine months almost 1,500 tons of it were discharged.

To the British – the public, the army, even the men of the Special Brigade – gas was universally known as ‘Frightfulness’. Even after years of war and atrocity which had seen the introduction of such terrifying new weapons as the tank, the Zeppelin and the U-boat, gas was still the most hated and feared of them all, with a complete demonology to itself. Chemical weapons came to epitomise all that was most disgusting and evil about the war, a mood captured best in Wilfred Owen’s famous poem:

Foulkes tried his best to play down this image. He was tireless in his efforts to promote gas. He acted as its ambassador, even to neutral nations not fighting the war but who wanted to know more about the potentialities of chemical weapons. He introduced ‘Open Days’ at the Special Brigade’s HQ at Helfaut. There were regular demonstrations to convince the sceptical. ‘On several occasions,’ Foulkes recalled, ‘there were more than 100 Generals present at time, and 300 or 400 officers altogether.’ Winston Churchill visited Helfaut and came away, according to Foulkes, powerfully impressed by chemical warfare – a conviction which was to be of crucial importance a quarter of a century later, when Britain was next at war. Other VIP visitors included the Duke of Westminster and George Bernard Shaw.

This public relations exercise was useful, but in the end Foulkes won the battle against the critics of gas warfare through simple military expediency. A chemical arms race developed, in the rush of which there was no time to worry about ethics. Soon, virtually every leading chemist in Britain was at work on some aspect of gas warfare. Thirty-three different British laboratories tested 150,000 known organic and inorganic compounds in an attempt to develop the most poisonous war gas possible, and in 1916 this massive research and development organization was given its focus when the British opened an installation whose name has been synonymous with poison gas ever since – the chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down. Occupying a 7,000 acre site on Salisbury Plain, Porton (whose work is described in Chapter Two) employed over a thousand scientists and soldiers whose job it was to transform the theories of the laboratory into actual weapons.

In a short time, chemical weapons moved from the fringes of the war to its very heart. In 1915, 3,600 tons of gas were discharged. In 1916 that figure more than quadrupled, to 15,000 tons. Chemicals and aeroplanes vied with one another as the fastest-developing forms of warfare. Gas attacks ceased to be carefully-planned set-piece affairs; they became an everyday occurrence. For the British, the expansion was due in particular to two new weapons – the Livens Projector and the Stokes Mortar – which despite their prosaic titles were innovations as deadly as they were revolutionary. ‘The heirs of the Livens Projector,’ one expert has written, ‘are the multiple rocket launchers and the aircraft cluster bombs.’³⁰

Captain F. H. Livens, the inventor of the Projector, was marked by two key characteristics – a passionate hatred of the Germans, and unflagging energy. A former civil engineer and commander of ‘Z’ Company of the Special Brigade, ‘Livens,’ recalled Foulkes, ‘had a strong personal feeling in the war connected, I believe, with the sinking of the Lusitania.’ He was a ‘go-getter’, enthusiastically leaping in and out of gas clouds to test their effects, and prone to commandeer equipment he needed, if necessary, at the point of a gun.

His invention was crude, but so effective that it was still one of the army’s main chemical weapons thirty years later. The Projector was a steel tube, generally between three and four feet long, and eight inches in diameter. It was simply buried in the ground at an angle of 45 degrees, and fired remotely by means of an electrical charge, generally in banks of twenty-five at a time. The charge sent hurtling from the tube a drum containing 30 lb of chemical, usually pure phosgene. The only warning the enemy received was the flash of the discharge. Seconds later a core of TNT burst the container over their positions, setting up an instantaneous, lethal concentration of gas. Rather than releasing the clouds of gas from cylinders which then placed them at the mercy of the wind, the Livens Projector was effectively a means of dropping the cylinders on the heads of the enemy. It was not particularly accurate, but it had a range of a mile, and was also cheap and easy to make. Livens calculated that if the Projector was mass-manufactured ‘the cost of killing Germans would be reduced to only sixteen shillings apiece’.

The British first launched a full-scale attack using the Livens Projector at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917:

The terrors of the gas cloud and the artillery bombardment were combined in a weapon which the Germans came to view with particular horror. A captured German document spoke of the ‘violent explosion’ of a projector attack: ‘volcanic sheets of flame or the simultaneous occurrence of many gun flashes, thick black smoke clouds, powerful concussion, whistling and noise of impact up to 25 seconds after the flash of discharge… the noise resembles that of an exploding dump of hand grenades.’³² At Arras, the German gun crews were forced to wear their masks for hours on end; many ran out of ammunition as the gas killed hundreds of horses used to carry munitions up to the front.

It was virtually the only time the Allies took the Germans by surprise with a new chemical weapon in the entire war, and despite German attempts to copy it the Livens Projector marked a major shift in the chemical war in favour of the Allies. Its drawback was the amount of preparation which a successful projector attack required: installing, loading and camouflaging them was a risky business. Nevertheless, the British used them on an increasing scale, often in batteries of thousands at a time. New fillings of high explosive and incendiaries were developed, as well as ‘stinks’ like bone oil and amyl acetate whose obnoxious smell forced the enemy to don gas masks.

The Battle of Arras also saw the widespread use of the Stokes Mortar. Like the Projector, its design was extremely simple: a steel tube raised at an angle by two struts. It fired four-inch mortar bombs, each containing two litres of gas. A well-trained crew could fire fifteen bombs and have them all in the air before the first one hit its target, with pin-point accuracy, as much as 1,000 yards away.

In addition to mortars and projectors came the gas shell, whose whistling flight and thudding impact became familiar noises in the cacophony of battle. The French and the Germans used them early in 1916, and large-scale shelling by the British came in the following year. By 1918 between a third and a fifth of all shells were being filled with chemicals. The Germans actually named their gases after the markings on the shell cases: Green Cross for phosgene and chlorine, Yellow Cross for mustard gas, and White Cross for tear gas.

Gas-filled artillery weapons overcame much of the initial antagonism felt for chemical warfare among military planners. Gas could now be more easily integrated into an attack, there was less dependence on the wind, and leaking cylinders – which often gave warning of an impending attack by sending hundreds of rats fleeing across No Man’s Land – were largely banished from the trenches. By 1918, 94 per cent of all the gas used was being delivered by the artillery: an over-all total for the war of 66 million gas shells. Shelling on this scale meant that chemical warfare, once an unexpected and terrifying experience, was now an ever-present threat. For in July 1917 the Germans began to use a gas weapon whose power dwarfed anything which had gone before and which was only made possible by the development of the gas shell: dichlorethyl sulphide.

Mustard gas.

The scene was once again Ypres. At 10 pm on the warm summer evening of 12 July, the British 15th and 55th Divisions came under heavy bombardment. The enemy was using 77 and 105 mm gas shells in massive numbers. But what they delivered was not ‘gas’ in the sense that the soldiers were used to. It was a brown liquid, rather like sherry, which gave off a smell variously described as ‘unpleasant’, ‘oily’, ‘like garlic’ and ‘like mustard’. Apart from a slight irritation to the eyes and throat, there were no initial effects, and few men even bothered to put on their gas masks. Most quickly went back to sleep. But in the early hours of the morning they began to wake up with ‘intolerable pain’ in the eyes, which felt as though sand or grit had been rubbed into them. Then they began to vomit uncontrollably. As the night wore on, the pain in the eyes became so intense that many had to be given morphia. The following day the sun rose over an army that looked as if it had been stricken by some biblical plague.

The hours passed and the symptoms grew worse. Moist red patches of skin affected by the vapour became massive yellow blisters up to a foot long. The gas could easily penetrate clothes, attacking the skin wherever it was most sensitive: at the bend of the elbow, the back of the knee, the neck, between the thighs. The Chemical Adviser to the Fifth Army, trying to retrieve fragments of the mustard shells for analysis, developed blisters on his wrists and on the backs of his hands. He tried to carry a portion of a shell under his arm and developed blisters on his chest, the mustard working its way through several layers of clothing. ‘Owing to its high boiling point,’ reported the War Office expert Sir Harold Hartley, ‘some of it is scattered on the ground and continues to give off gas for some time. It could be smelt in Ypres on the day following the bombardment.’³⁴

The field hospitals were choked with casualties. Two days after the attack, the first deaths occurred. Dying was a slow and agonizing process. It was not necessarily the burns that killed, but the havoc the gas wrought in the throat and lungs. ‘On entering a ward full of cases gassed during the recent attack,’ reported Captain Ramsay of the RAMC ‘one is struck by the incessant and apparently useless coughing of the patients.’³⁵ The men’s bronchial tubes were stripped of their mucous membrane by the gas. ‘In one case,’ wrote another medical officer, ‘the mucous membrane formed apparently a complete cast of the trachea.’³⁶ The victim died with his windpipe clogged from top to bottom.

There is no record of the precise circumstances in which Sapper Guest of the Royal Engineers was gassed on 12 July. We know only that he was admitted to hospital nine days later and ‘complained of difficulty in breathing and pain in both eyes’. The following day, ‘during the early morning the difficulty in breathing became more marked. He rallied slightly but relapsed in the early forenoon and died at 10 am.’

Here was a gas so powerful that men standing around the dismembered corpse of a victim at an autopsy could still feel its effects ten days after the initial poisoning. And as the post mortem continued, the full extent of the damage wrought by the gas lay revealed before the doctors. The larynx and vocal chords were ‘swollen and very red’, the windpipe filled with ‘thin frothy fluid’, and ‘six ounces of blood stained fluid in the left lung’; the lung itself, which was more than double its normal weight, ‘felt very firm and solid’, and ‘portions of the lobe sank in water’; the heart weighed twenty ounces instead of the normal ten, and the veins over the surface of the brain ‘contained innumerable small bubbles of gas’.

Another victim, thirty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Collinge of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, took ten days to die:

Collinge and Guest were only two of hundreds. The Germans had delayed their attack until they had built up enormous reserves of mustard gas and were in a position to mount a bombardment on a giant scale. In ten days Allied positions were pounded with more than a million shells containing 2,500 tons of gas. Within three weeks of introducing Yellow Cross shell, the Germans had caused as many gas casualties as had resulted from the entire gas shelling of the preceding year. By the end of the first week, the number of gassed men admitted to British Medical Units was 2,934; by the end of the second week, a further 6,476 had been added; by the end of the third week, another 4,886.

In all, from July 1917 to the end of the war, British casualties from mustard gas amounted to at least 125,000–70 per cent of the total number of British gas casualties for the whole war. A conservative estimate of the number of deaths was 1,859. Although the mortality rate was therefore only around 1½ per cent, the severity of the effects was enough to keep a man away from duty for two to three months, if not longer. There were frequently secondary infections of the respiratory system and the skin. First World War doctors noted that healing skin could often erupt in fresh blisters, or inflammation could occur in an area which had been previously thought not contaminated. Ramsay gave an instance of a man who ‘had burns of the scrotum on the second day, and on the eighth day the skin of his back became inflamed for the first time.’³⁸

Thousands of men were drawing disability pensions at the end of the war as a result of mustard gas poisoning. It was, declared a secret British assessment of gas casualties prepared in 1919, ‘in a class by itself so far as casualty producing power is concerned’. It was not simply a matter of deaths and numbers wounded, it was the time it took for them to heal. ‘To put the matter bluntly, mustard gas on several occasions accounted during a week or two for the prolonged removal from the sphere of active operations of casualties equivalent in number to the combatants of two of more Divisions.’³⁹ Thanks largely to mustard gas, in the last eighteen months of the war, one casualty in every six (16½ per cent of the total) was a victim of chemical weapons.⁴⁰

Long after the initial bombardment had occurred, an area which had been contaminated by mustard was liable to remain dangerous. The liquid formed pools in shell craters and in the corners of dug-outs ready to trap the unwary. It polluted water. In cold weather it froze like water and stayed in the soil: mustard used in the winter of 1917 poisoned men in the spring of 1918 when the ground thawed. In this way, mustard could be used to ‘seal off’ whole areas of a battlefield; the only way to cross a contaminated section of ground was by laying a road of bleach. To survive such conditions, men not only had to wear masks, but also leggings, gloves and goggles. To continue to fight it was necessary to decontaminate equipment constantly. Gas became a weapon of attrition: its military effectiveness was not only measured merely in casualty lists. If gas never killed a man, wrote General Fries, head of the infant United States Chemical Warfare Service, ‘the reduction in physical vigour and, therefore, in efficiency of an army forced at all times to wear masks, would amount to at least 25 per cent, equivalent to disabling a quarter of a million men out of an army of a million.’⁴¹

For the average soldier, the strain of living in this alien, chemically-polluted environment was scarcely bearable. Even the well-disciplined made mistakes. Among the rest – the shell-shocked, the careless, the raw and frightened conscripts – gas mopped up casualties. ‘After July 1917,’ wrote Lord Moran, ‘gas partly usurped the role of high explosive in bringing to a head a natural unfitness for war. The gassed men were an expression of trench fatigue, a menace when the manhood of the nation had been picked over.’⁴²

Mustard went under a variety of different names. To the Germans it was ‘Lost’, to the French ‘Yperite’, after Ypres, where it was first used; the British also code-named it HS (‘Hun Stuff’). Its chemical name was dichlorethyl sulphide – a substance the British had actually turned down when it was suggested as a weapon on the grounds that it wasn’t sufficiently lethal. They now had cause bitterly to regret that decision. It had taken the Germans only six months to get the gas into production. It took the French until June 1918 – almost a year. The British encountered even more difficulties in setting up bulk production. Not only was the chemical process required extremely complicated, it also proved highly dangerous.

The main English plant – capable of producing over twenty tons a day – was eventually sited at Avonmouth. Among its 1,100 workers, its Medical Officer reported in December 1918 that there had been over 1,400 illnesses directly attributable to the work.⁴³ In addition there were 160 accidents and over a thousand burns; three people were killed and another four had died of related illnesses in the six months that the factory was in operation. There were a vast number of complaints – blisters of the hands, scalp, shoulders, arms, abdomen, buttocks, genitals, thighs, legs and feet; erythema, iritis, scrotal dermatitis, leukodermia, conjunctivitis, pharyngitis, bronchitis, tracheitis, gastritis, pleurodynia, purulent broncho-pneumonia, aphonia, acute rhinitis (bleeding from the nose); debility, gastric pain, mental inertia, chronic cough, breathlessness, memory weakness and defective eyesight. Many of the workers were old, many were women – some pregnant. There were thirty resident patients in the factory hospital, tended by a doctor and eight nurses. All in all, it added a new meaning to the phrase ‘the Home Front’. Yet despite the frenzied efforts to produce British mustard gas, no supplies reached the battlefield until September 1918, two months before the Armistice.

Instead the British responded with a series of major cloud gas attacks – the last of the war – using cylinders of phosgene mounted on the backs of railway engines. Foulkes, who dreamt up the idea, called them ‘beam’ operations – concentrated clouds which drifted in thin columns over the enemy positions, bleaching vegetation for distances of up to 12,000 yards; at Ypres the clouds accumulated in the river valleys for hours.

The attacks caused panic among billeted soldiers in villages and towns many miles behind the lines. When a cloud was detected approaching (invariably at night) alarm bells were rung and troops and civilians, all clutching respirators, made their way to the top rooms of the houses, closing all the windows and doors. The cloud swirled by below, killing all the flowers and vegetables in the gardens. The attacks, reaching far behind the lines and for the first time affecting large numbers of civilians, were greatly feared. The Germans were so anxious to avoid revealing the casualties they incurred that – according to Foulkes – ‘the greatest secrecy was always observed… and all burials and evacuations were carried out at night.’⁴⁴

They were dangerous and difficult attacks to mount. Captain A. E. Hodgkin, commander of the Special Brigade’s ‘A’ Company, left behind in his diary a striking account of what life was like in the closing months of the war: working close to the front line in the early hours of the morning, in a ‘very cold and high wind’, the night moonless and pitch-black, trying to manhandle tons of liquid phosgene ‘brought up the line by light railway which is never repaired much and which is consequently jerky, to say the least of it. Each truck goes up separately being pushed by five or six men: every 100 yards or so it hops off the line and has to be unloaded, replaced on the line and loaded up again. My vocabulary has been improved wonderfully by the exercise, but that of the men is becoming rather threadbare.’⁴⁵

Night after night, the men of ‘A’ Company would stand by to release the gas – Hodgkin by a field telephone in a tunnel full of a ‘multitude of fungi and rats’ – only to be told as dawn was breaking to forget it until the next night. Often the German sentries a few hundred yards away heard them moving about and passed word to their artillery. On one occasion, Hodgkin was stranded at the front in a heavy bombardment:

Eventually, after weeks of waiting, Hodgkin was given the order to release the gas. The cylinders were mounted on the backs of ten 10 ton trucks, towed by four engines to within 700 yards of the German Front line. At 1 am, in bright moonlight, Hodgkin watched apprehensively as the first waves of the gas drifted towards enemy positions where the night before a patrol had reported that ‘loud talking and laughing could be heard at 4 am’. The discharge lasted over three hours. Hodgkin had little idea – apart from ‘a good deal of promiscuous shelling in retaliation’ – of what effect the attack was having. The only accurate casualty report he received was when he returned to base to be told that he had ‘killed three of our own men, poor devils, who hadn’t been warned by their officer to be clear of the danger area by zero time.’

Despite the riskiness of railway-mounted operations from behind the front lines, in March 1918 Foulkes was putting the final touches to what would have been the biggest cylinder discharge of all time, so great that, in his opinion, ‘trench warfare would have been converted into open warfare in a day’. 200,000 cylinders of phosgene were to be opened from the backs of dozens of railway trains, releasing 6,000 tons of gas in a chemical offensive which would last for twelve hours. Few respirators – even twenty or thirty miles behind the front line – would be able to withstand such an onslaught. Casualties were estimated to be likely to be 50 per cent. In the ensuing confusion the British High Command planned to launch a mighty offensive, spearheaded by tanks, which would punch its way through the front and end the war. The sector of the front provisionally selected for the attack was that held by the 3rd Army, between Gavrelle and Gouzeaucourt.

But Foulkes’s dreams of triumph were overtaken by events. In March 1918, having concluded peace with Russia, a much-strengthened German army was able to launch its own great offensive in the west. The Allies were subjected to a hurricane bombardment from over 4,000 guns. With the IG producing a thousand tons of mustard gas a month, the Germans were in a position literally to drench the British and French with gas.

On four successive nights, from 10 to 13 March, the Cambrai Salient was blanketed with 150,000 rounds of Yellow Cross shell. Later, 20,000 shells were fired in the course of fifteen hours into the village of Armentieres; liquid mustard ran like rain water in the gutters of the streets. Trying to survive for hours at a time on the stale air of the respirator was almost unendurable. The gas was everywhere. It evaporated quickly in the warm spring weather and penetrated every crevice. It waited until sweating men loosened their clothing or wiped the perspiration from their eyes – and then it struck. In the week ending on 16 March, 6,195 gas cases were admitted to medical units; the following week saw the admission of a further 6,874; and during the week ending on 13 April, the British suffered what was possibly their worst ever period, as 7,000 gassed men flooded into the field hospitals.⁴⁶

It was the week of Field Marshal Haig’s famous ‘Special Order of the Day’ of 11 April: ‘There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.’ Over the next few weeks, 200 German divisions advanced over forty miles, capturing 80,000 prisoners and 1,000 guns. Hodgkin, retreating day after day, wrote that he felt as though he was ‘living on the side of a precipice’. An enemy attack could come ‘at any moment of the day or night. The bombing season has begun again with the new moon and the air has been full of enemy aeroplanes all this evening.’

The success of the attack owed much to mustard gas. Ammunition dumps later captured by the Allies were revealed to be as much as 50 per cent stocked with chemical weapons. The Americans alone suffered 70,000 casualties from mustard gas – more than a quarter of the US Army’s over-all casualties for the entire war.

In advancing so far, however, the Germans had sown the seeds of their own defeat. In July and August the Allies were able to strike back at the over-extended German positions. Their armies too were heavily dependent on chemicals. By August the British and Americans were increasing the proportion of gas-filled munitions ordered from the factories to between 20 and 30 per cent of total ammunition supplied. That ratio was planned to be increased still further. By 1919 it is possible that chemicals would have come to rival, even in some cases outstrip, high explosives. In June the French acquired mustard gas, and in September, in the dying days of the war, the first significant supplies of British-charged mustard shells reached the battlefield. By then it was all nearly over.

Yet the British use of mustard gas is significant for one incident alone. On 14 October, during the final Allied offensive, British mustard shells rained down into a shattered Belgian village called Werwick, causing heavy casualties among the exhausted 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry. A few days before the Armistice, a trainload of the men wounded in the Werwick attack were shipped back to Germany. Among them, blinded and humiliated, was a twenty-nine-year-old corporal, whose injuries helped determine him to avenge the German defeat: Adolf Hitler.⁴⁷

Fearing that he would be tried as a war criminal, Fritz Haber donned a false beard and as the war ended he took off for Switzerland: so too did Carl Duisberg, head of the German chemical industry. Neither in the end was tried. Indeed in 1919 Haber was honoured with the Nobel Prize for his work on the synthesis of ammonia, a decision which outraged the scientific world, the New York Times asking – if Haber got the Chemistry Prize – ‘Why the Nobel prize for idealistic and imaginative literature was not given to the man who wrote General Ludendorff’s daily communiqués?’⁴⁸

Between them, Haber and Duisberg had changed the history of warfare. At least 1.3 million men had been wounded by gas; 91,000 of them had died. Germany, France and Britain had all suffered around 200,000 casualties, and Russia more than double that figure. An estimated 113,000 tons of chemicals had been used.⁴⁹

Had the war gone into a sixth year, there is no doubt that these figures would have been vastly increased. All the belligerents had new weapons about to come into service. In the spring of 1918 a team based at the Catholic University, Washington DC, discovered Lewisite: faster acting than mustard gas it caused ‘immediate excruciating pain upon striking the eye, a stinging pain in the skin, and sneezing, coughing, pain and tightness in the chest on inhalation, often accompanied by nausea and vomiting.’⁵⁰ The first batch of 150 tons of Lewisite was at sea, on its way to Europe when the Armistice was signed. The British had the ‘M device’, which generated an ‘arsenical smoke’ code-named DA, capable of penetrating even the most effective German gas mask within fifteen seconds. Within a minute the victim would be in agony. Haldane described the pain in the head ‘as like that caused when fresh water gets into the nose when breathing, but infinitely more severe. These symptoms are accompanied by the most appalling mental distress and misery. Some soldiers poisoned by these substances had to be prevented from committing suicide; others temporarily went raving mad, and tried to burrow into the ground to escape from imaginary pursuers.’⁵¹ For their part the Germans had perfected a new projector – the Gaswerfer 1918 – capable of hurling canisters filled with phosgene-impregnated pumice granules over a distance of up to two miles. Chemical warfare had come a very long way from tear gas grenades and simple cylinders of chlorine. Weapons which four years before had been beyond the pale of civilized warfare now employed vast numbers of scientists, technicians and soldiers in large research and development installations.

At Edgewood Arsenal in the United States, the Americans had ‘probably the largest research organisation ever assembled for one specific object’:⁵² 1,200 technical men and 700 service assistants researching into more than 4,000 potentially poisonous substances. It was a scientific project on a scale unrivalled until the Manhattan Project twenty-five years later. The entire arsenal had cost around $40 million, and within its walls were 218 manufacturing buildings, seventy-nine other permanent structures, twenty-eight miles of railway, fifteen miles of roadway and eleven miles of high tension electrical transmission lines. Its factories were capable of producing 200,000 chemical bombs and shells per day.

Institutions on this scale are not easily disbanded. The Americans in particular, having suffered such a high proportion of gas casualties, were not keen to turn their backs on the potentialities of chemical warfare. Victor Lefebure recorded landing in America early in 1920 to ‘find New York plastered with recruiting posters setting forth the various reasons why Americans should join their Chemical Warfare Service’.⁵³ The strength and skill of the US prochemical warfare lobby in resisting disarmament, first shown at the time of the Armistice, continued to overcome the periodic hostility of successive Presidents, senators, Chiefs of Staff and peace groups for the next seventy years.

In Britain, the Government appointed the Holland Committee to report on chemical warfare and suggest what the country’s future policy should be. Its members – who included Foulkes, now promoted to General – met in May 1919 and agreed ‘with no shadow of doubt’ that ‘gas is a legitimate weapon in war… and that it will be used in the future may be taken as a foregone conclusion’.⁵⁴ This decision was not accompanied by any American razzmatazz or propaganda campaign. On the contrary, British gas warfare became subject to a policy of strict official secrecy. Carefully ‘weeded’ files about chemical warfare in the First World War were not released to historians until 1972. An eighteen-year-old wounded in the first phosgene attack would have had to wait until he was seventy-five before he could read about it. War memoirs were also stringently vetted, and even titles were censored. Foulkes had wanted to call his account of the work of the Special Brigade either Frightfulness or Retaliation. Both were considered too provocative by the War Office and the book – which was eventually published in 1936 – was called simply Gas!

At the same time there appears to have been a deliberate campaign to underestimate the number of men killed and wounded by gas, possibly by tens of thousands. Officially, 180,983 British soldiers were gassed, of whom just 6,062 were killed. However the list of categories these figures do not include is staggering. They do not include the number of men gassed in 1915 (estimated at many thousands) for which no records exist; nor any gas victims – alive or dead – captured by the enemy; nor any who may be among the quarter of a million British soldiers described as ‘missing’ in the First World War; nor any of the men who died outright on the field of battle and were later recorded as having been simply ‘killed in action’; nor any of the men with relatively minor injuries retained by the Field Ambulances until fit to rejoin their units; nor any gas casualties who later died after being evacuated to the UK; nor any casualties dying of illnesses brought on by their exposure to gas, etc, etc… One gets the impression that becoming an official gas casualty required roughly the same amount of verification as winning a medal.

Apologists for gas warfare used the statistics to argue that gas was ‘humane’, that it wounded rather than killed. Haldane attacked the ‘group of sentimentalists who appear to me definitely to be the Scribes and Pharisees of our age’⁵⁵ who made a distinction between gas and conventional weapons. It was, he argued, certainly no worse, and possibly more civilized, to kill or wound a man with chemicals rather than with shrapnel or bullets.

And what of the victims of these ‘civilized’ weapons? In Britain in 1920, 19,000 men were drawing disability pensions as a result of war gassing.⁵⁶ A report drawn up by the Physiology Department of Porton in June 1927 examined a group of eighteen pensioners:

In 1929, Porton investigated a further seventy-two cases of mustard gassing and found evidence of fibrosis, TB, persistent laryngitis, TB of the spine, anaemia, aphonia, conjunctivitis and pulmonary fibrosis.⁵⁸

These, of course, were secret reports, only declassified years later. In public, Porton maintained that the popular press ‘scaremongered’ about the long-term effects of gas poisoning. Porton physiologists sat in on Medical Boards which judged the records and examined the bodies of men laying claim to war pensions. The criteria for granting them, not surprisingly, were made exceptionally harsh. A definite causal link had to be established between disability and the actual gassing – an increased susceptibility to TB or bronchitis (though admitted) was not in itself sufficient grounds upon which to claim a pension.

Many thousands of men continued to suffer from the effects of gassing in the First World War for the rest of their lives. One survivor of a phosgene attack, Fred Cayley,⁵⁹ admitted in 1980 that he had been seeing a doctor every week since 1917.[1] Britain was still awarding pensions to gas victims in the 1980s. How many have never claimed but suffered and died in ignorance is not known. Modern investigations have revealed that munitions workers who were employed in the manufacture of mustard gas are ten times more susceptible to cancer than the average;⁶⁰ there are no cancer figures for men actually gassed on the field of battle. In 1970 the World Health Organization reported that ‘an examination of the mortality data on 1,267 British war pensioners who suffered from mustard gas poisoning in the 1914-18 war, and who were still alive on 1 January 1930, showed that almost all (over 80 per cent) had chronic bronchitis at that date. In subsequent years an excess of deaths attributed to cancer of the lung and pleura was observed amongst them (twenty-nine deaths found compared with fourteen expected).’⁶¹

Such grisly after-effects were neither foreseen nor understood in the 1920s. Porton merely admitted that ‘ten years after gassing there are patients who exhibit definite residua both anatomically and clinically that are definitely due to either one or a combination of gases.’⁶⁴ The wounded and disabled were largely forgotten except in so far – as one expert put it – they provided valuable data ‘which it would be impossible to obtain elsewhere’. Gradually the image of the line of blinded mustard gas victims, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front, shuffled away into the folk memory of the First World War. Poison gas, the once-forbidden weapon, now took its place in the world’s arsenals. It has remained there ever since.