The Forbidden Weapon

It was, in fact, chlorine gas. The Germans had launched, on April 22, 1915, the first lethal gas attack in the history of war. It was a stark violation of an international treaty negotiated and signed at The Hague in 1899 by all the combatants in this war. The Germans, nevertheless, insisted they had done nothing wrong. According to the strict language of the treaty, signatories were “to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gasses.”

Their gases had been released from cylinders, not projectiles, the Germans argued, so this didn’t count as a violation.

The legalistic distinctions were, almost certainly, a matter of indifference to the troops against whom the attack was directed. When they inhaled the green mist, it burned the lining off their lungs, and they choked on it—choked, in many cases, to death, after going blind and mad with pain and terror.

In just a few minutes, the gas had killed some 5,000 men and opened a four-mile breach in the French lines as men either died or left their trenches and fled for the rear, leaving the way open for a German attack. The opportunity was there, perhaps, to roll up the enemy’s flanks along the breach and then push on, even to the Channel.

In strict military terms, this first use of gas in a surprise attack was an impressive success. But, as so often in what became known as the Great War, the advantage was temporary and the opportunity wasted. The German command might have won the war if it had acted on the appeal of Fritz Haber, who later won a Nobel Prize for chemistry and was urging the leaders of his nation’s army to go all in on the gas attack in Ypres. But the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, did not have the troops on hand to exploit the opportunity that the chlorine gas had given him. This was typical of Falkenhayn, who later missed another opportunity against the French, at Verdun. In the words of the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart, “Like Napoleon’s opponents, [he saw] ‘too many things at once,’ and above all saw the enemy’s strength too clearly. .  .  . [He] ruined his country by a refusal to take calculated risks.”

But that was for later. In April 1915, the German Army attempted to duplicate that first attack a few days later, north of Langemark. German units opened canisters holding chlorine under pressure, and the wind carried the gas toward the enemy’s lines, followed by German infantrymen wearing crude respirators.

British and Canadian troops had not been issued equipment for protection, so they did what soldiers always do. They improvised: held scarves, handkerchiefs, and towels soaked in their own urine to their faces and breathed through the wet cloth. It worked, in many cases. Still, there were another 5,000 casualties, and ground was lost in the British section of the line, just as it had been in the French. Though there were several follow-up gas attacks in Ypres that spring, the Germans never achieved the total break-through that would lead to victory, and they had soon exhausted their stores of gas. Also, the winds changed and could not be counted on to blow in the right direction. 

The gas attacks ceased. Temporarily.

Outrage had followed the news. One feels outrage, even today. The catalogue of horrors from the First World War is extensive. As Winston Churchill wrote, “All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. .  .  .  [And] when all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.”

But of all those horrors, there is something uniquely repellent about chemical warfare. Perhaps it is simply that the very air one breathes has been turned into a weapon, and that it kills in a way that is only slightly less agonizing than being buried alive. The horror of gas warfare was rendered in oils by John Singer Sargent in the work he called, simply, Gassed. The painting, which is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, captures the awful pity of the men who have been blinded and nearly suffocated and who are standing in line, each with a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead, waiting for medical attention.

And then there are the lines from Wilfred Owen, greatest of the British war poets:

The great paintings and poems came later. The first impulse of the allies, in the immediate aftermath of the German attacks, was .  .  . retaliation. There was never any question of holding back. The British quickly developed their own capacity to wage chemical warfare—and began producing adequate protection for their troops—and a few months after that first German attack at Ypres, they were ready.

Like the Germans, they used steel canisters in which the gas was held under pressure. When the time came, specially trained troops would open a valve and the gas would be released and carried across no man’s land to the enemy’s trenches. That, anyway, was the plan.

Robert Graves took part in the battle during which the British first used gas. It was called Loos, and it was bloody and botched and inconclusive, like so many of the war’s battles. To insure secrecy, British troops were ordered to refer to the gas (when they had to) as the “accessory.” In Goodbye to All That, Graves’s classic memoir, his Captain Thomas says of the gas attack,

How, indeed? In some cases, the men from the “gas-companies” had been issued wrenches of the wrong size, and “the gas-men rushed about shouting for the loan of an adjustable spanner.”

In other cases, the wind was not strong enough to carry the gas toward the German lines, and it settled in British trenches. Even so, the attack went on and lessons were learned. Gas became a part of the arsenal of war and there were, inevitably, advances in technology and tactics. The most transformative of these was the Livens Projector, which worked something like a mortar and allowed the gas to be contained in drums that were fired over the enemy’s trench line. An air burst released the gas, and it settled onto the ground and its target. Men did not now need to advance across no man’s land through gas that had been released by their own units. Also, the Livens device increased the element of surprise, eliminating an early warning system. When gas was released to be carried on the wind, the rats between the trenches would race ahead of it for safety and survival. A stampede of rats was an almost sure sign that a gas attack was on the way.

New gases were developed to improve on chlorine. The most notable were phosgene and mustard gas. Thousands of tons were used in the war, and they became an element in the planning and execution of most attacks. In the end, not quite 100,000 men were killed by gas. Many more were injured, and a substantial number of these suffered the effects for the rest of their lives.

After the war, there was another effort to ban the use of gas. It resulted in the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of War. This was shortened, commonly, to the Geneva Protocol.

The protocol prohibited the use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices” as well as “bacteriological methods of warfare.” It went into effect in 1928. In less than 10 years it had been openly and defiantly violated by one of the signing nations. When Italy began using mustard gas in Mussolini’s war for African empire, it claimed, as the Germans had after history’s first gas attack, that it was exempted from the treaty since the gas had been used in reprisal for brutality against prisoners of war by the Ethiopians. That, somehow, made it legal.

It was widely assumed, on the eve of World War II, that the Geneva treaty was a dead letter and that gas would be used, and perhaps used extensively, against civilians. Gas masks were issued to everyone in England. There was one in red and blue for children between 2 and 5 years old. It was called the “Mickey Mouse” mask in hope that the name, along with the colors, would soothe a child’s natural reluctance to put the thing over his or her head. Parents were urged to let children learn to put on their own masks and to make a game of it.

Things never, mercifully, got beyond that stage, and this is still something of a mystery and a marvel. The most likely nation to break the Geneva Protocol would seem, of course, to have been Germany. Hitler broke agreements when he believed it would work to his advantage. So why didn’t he—even near the end, when his most devoted and fanatical followers were urging it—resort to gas? Why didn’t he drop gas on London, as many assumed he would? Or use gas against the advancing Russians when it was stand and die for him and the Reich?

You can find vague suggestions, here and there, that Hitler was reluctant to authorize the use of gas in World War II because he had been a gas casualty himself in the first war. He was, as it happens, in a hospital, recovering from blindness caused by mustard gas in fighting near Ypres, when he learned of the armistice. His later descriptions of this moment made it sound like a conversion experience. But not one, certainly, that turned him against using gas on his enemies. Poison gas, after all, was his weapon of choice in the extermination camps.

The most plausible explanation for his never giving the fatal order is that he feared reprisal by the Allies and suspected that Germany would not prevail if it came down to who had the more lethal gas and greater quantities of it. In one meeting he was urged to employ the newest nerve agent, a gas called “tabun,” forerunner of sarin. There were large German stocks, Hitler was told, ready to be deployed. But when someone at the meeting warned that the British possessed the same gas and, perhaps, more of it, Hitler left the room.

Whatever his reasons—unknowable since Hitler acted mostly on intuition and impulse—he never gave the order.

Churchill, in fact, came much closer. Intensely frustrated by the German V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks on London, against which there was no defense, he wrote a famous memorandum, one paragraph of which reads:

Things moved fast enough on the European mainland that the rocket attacks diminished and these gas attacks never took place. Clearly, though, Churchill was prepared to order them and take the consequences. Which, by this time, did not include much in the way of retaliation from the Germans.

But while gas did not play much of a role in history’s greatest war, the sense of a special horror about those weapons did not vanish. They became, along with nuclear bombs and biological agents, “weapons of mass destruction.” Both the United States and the Soviet Union built huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and trained their troops in tactics that would enable them to survive and fight on a battlefield where they had been deployed.

Which, of course, never happened.

One wonders if it would have, had there been a war in Europe, if the columns of Soviet tanks had come through the Fulda Gap as so many scenarios for war had them doing. The United States and NATO were pledged to “no first use,” in the spirit of the Geneva agreement. So was the Soviet Union, but then .  .  .

The prospect of retaliation remained the most plausible defense against the use of chemical and biological weapons. Retaliation and plenty of it. The lesson of the First World War was that the other side would retaliate and that neither side would gain an advantage. The lesson of World War II was that by the time a country was desperate enough to use gas, it was too late.

Still, even with the advent of nuclear weapons, gas remained something separate and peculiarly horrifying. This, even though it could never be deployed in a fashion that would kill, instantaneously, as many people as a small nuke. There were some who argued, after the First World War, that gas was actually a more humane weapon than high explosives. Liddell Hart made this case, and he had been gassed on the Somme and suffered the effects for the rest of his life.

But this argument never took hold. Nor did gas go away, even as the United States and Russia began destroying some of their stocks after the Cold War’s end. Gas is cheap and not hard for even a Third World power to manufacture and accumulate. After which it becomes a matter of will and sometimes, it seems, a determination to establish, by the very use of gas, that you recognize no moral boundaries.

Saddam Hussein had a sufficiency of will and may have wanted the world to know this. So Iraq used both mustard and nerve gas in its 1980 war with Iran, which did not retaliate because, at the time, it lacked the resources. One wonders if Saddam would have gone ahead with his own attacks if retaliation had been a possibility. Or if, like Hitler, he would have held back.

Saddam also used gas against his own people. This, increasingly, seems to be the logical conclusion to the 100-year history of gas warfare. When a tyrant gasses his own people, he has no reason to make sure he knows where his own gas mask is and to keep it close. And those of his enemies who are fortunate enough to survive will get the message. If he will do this, then he recognizes no limits.

Thus the gassing of his own people by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Last month, CBS aired film from the aftermath of this attack three days short of the 100th anniversary of that first attack by chlorine, near Ypres, not far from where Corporal Hitler was disabled by gas. Assad’s attack killed nearly 1,500 people. It was conducted in August 2013, and CBS teased its broadcast this way: Generally, mankind does not outlaw weapons. Anything a military can think of is in the arsenals of the world. But there are a few exceptions, and one of them is for a weapon so hideous that virtually every country has banned, not only its use, but the mere possession of it. The weapon is sarin. It’s nerve gas.

The footage that CBS used was especially gruesome, but the shock and the horror it evoked changed nothing. One hundred years later, gas warfare still horrifies. And it is still with us.

Assad might have been persuaded not to gas his own countrymen if there had been any reason for him to fear retaliation—to dread—as even Adolf Hitler had—what might happen if he crossed that “red line.”

Plainly, he did not.

The treaties outlawing the use of gas warfare are still in place. The question, as always, is, who will enforce them?

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.