A Higher Form of Killing (19 page)

In Ontario, Canada, the
Windsor Evening Record
, spoke of “the terrors of gas” and “the seeming chaos of a new fog of battle” while insisting Canadian troops would fight on “coldly determined and undismayed.” A headline in another Canadian paper spoke of “Prehistoric Methods.” In France
Le Matin
reminded its readers that deploying poison gas was a breach of the Hague Convention but suggested that, considering German troops had already “burned down villages, shot civilians, slaughtered children and torpedoed merchant vessels without warning,” their resort to using gas was only to be expected. Furthermore, the “effects” of poison gas were not as “murderous” as the Germans hoped and less to be feared than machine guns and artillery. Though gas had taken French troops by surprise and caused them to fall back, the Germans would meet stiffer resistance in the future. The newspaper
La Croix
urged “the whole world to combine” to wipe out people who defied international law and “turned war into an unspeakable barbarity.” It also asked whether the Germans believed they “had the monopoly” on such weapons of destruction and asserted French scientists could easily outdo their German counterparts except that France “respected the treaties we have signed.”

In Britain, Sir John French’s account of the first gas attack was published on April 24. He related how the enemy had used “a large number of appliances for the production of asphyxiating gases. The quantity produced indicates long and deliberate preparations for the employment of devices contrary to the terms of the Hague Convention to which the enemy subscribe. The false statements made by the Germans a week ago to the effect that we were using such gases is now explained. It was obviously an effort to diminish neutral criticism in advance.” Also on April 24, the
Times
(London) published an official German statement received the previous day: “The [Allied] appeal to the laws of warfare is not to the point. The German troops do not fire any shells the sole purpose of which is the spreading of asphyxiating or poisonous gases, and the gases which do develop on the explosion of German shells are not as dangerous as the gases of the ordinary French, Russian and English artillery shells. Also the smoke-developing contrivances used by us in hand to hand fighting are in no manner contrary to the laws of warfare.”

In making this statement the German authorities were arguing that because the Hague Convention on asphyxiating gases was worded as if to ban only projectiles containing them and the chlorine had been released from canisters, their poison gas attack was technically, if not morally, outside the convention’s scope. However, in so doing they were ignoring Article 23 of the Hague Convention on land warfare that explicitly supplemented that on asphyxiating gases by banning all “poison or poisoned weapons.”

On April 26, a
Times
editorial told readers that

the enemy are fighting with desperation . . . the wholesale employment of asphyxiating gases against the French is a fresh indication of the temper in which the Germans are now waging war. It is to the use of these gases in a manner forbidden by the Hague Convention, which Germany signed, that the retirement of the French on Thursday is attributed. Sir John French speaks of “the large number of appliances for the production of asphyxiating gases” . . . The Germans are thus violating one more of the conventions of civilised warfare upon land, and continuing with ostentation to violate them by the drowning of non-combatants and the sinking of merchant ships without notice at sea.

On April 26 another paper called the gas attacks “but one more instance of the contempt for international law to which the Germans have accustomed the world and in which they persist as long as it is profitable.”

The
Times’
medical correspondent who visited gas victims in France wrote, “The Germans are a scientific people. These gases were chosen carefully, tested carefully, and their effects determined by means of experiments upon animals. The terrible sufferings about to be inflicted upon our men were fully understood and had been measured beforehand.” Gas was an “atrocious method of warfare . . . This diabolical contrivance will fill all races with a horror of the German name.” A letter from a British regular soldier to his sister in April 1915, published in his local paper, stated: “I had a good experience of warfare, so called, but this is not warfare, it is science against science, or deliberate murder.”

Such condemnation—and the shock that science could be put to such uses—of course ran counter to Haber’s thinking. He believed people criticized gas merely because it challenged orthodox thinking: “The disapproval felt by the knight for the man with a firearm is the same as that of the soldier who fires steel bullets towards the man who adopts chemical weapons.” The invention of chemical weapons was a logical step along the path of technological discovery to overcome new challenges such as the evolution of trench warfare, which had made devising ways of driving enemy soldiers from those defenses essential. He was proud that he and Germany—through its preeminence in the chemical industry—had gotten there first. Yet he also argued that the German gas attacks at Ypres were not a new phenomenon but a renewal of an ancient military tradition dating back as far as the Peloponnesian Wars in the fifth century
B.C.E.
between Athens and Sparta when “smoke and sulphuric acid” were used.

Reporting to Lord Kitchener in London on the first gas attack, Sir John French had written, “Apparently these gases are either chlorine or bromine . . . [I] strongly urge immediate steps to be taken to supply similar means of most effective kind for use by our troops.” The war minister had responded that since the use of poison gases was “contrary to the rules and usages of war,” before Britain stooped to the level “of the degraded Germans” he must consult his government colleagues. Prime Minister Asquith’s cabinet discussed the matter on April 26 during which some members expressed ethical reservations. However, Asquith’s handwritten note to the king reporting the cabinet discussion “on the recent resort by the enemy to the use of asphyxiating gases” hinted at the path Britain would follow: “As the gases are apparently stored in and drawn from cylinders, and not projectiles, the employment of them is not perhaps an infraction of the literal terms of the Hague Convention.” He was also aware that—as an official had pointed out—“the normally prevailing wind in France is westerly, so that if this form of warfare is to be introduced we, in the long run, shall have an enormous advantage.”

As Asquith well knew, in deciding whether to use chemical weapons, Britain faced practical as well as moral and legal problems. In April 1915 the country was producing barely one ton of liquid chlorine a day. Manufacturing an amount equivalent to that the Germans released at Ypres would take months. Therefore, government officials immediately consulted Britain’s leading chemical industrialists and scientists to see whether and how quickly production could be stepped up.

On April 28 the War Office appealed in the national press to British women to produce five hundred thousand gas masks, hoping to dispatch the first one hundred thousand to British troops on the western front within the week. Harrods department store displayed samples in their windows and set up counters selling the necessary materials to make masks conforming to War Office requirements:

A face piece (to cover mouth and nostrils) formed of an oblong pad of bleached absorbent cotton-wool . . . covered with three layers of bleached cotton gauze and fitted with a band, to fit round the head and keep the pad in position, consisting of a piece of ½in. cotton elastic 16in. long, attached to the narrow end of the face pad, so as to form a loop with the pad.

Meanwhile, the situation around Ypres remained critical as Allied troops faced further gas attacks. On April 26, during fighting around Saint-Julien Lieutenant Corporal Jack Dorgan of the Northumberland Fusiliers found a group of Canadian soldiers huddled in a reserve trench who told him: “You can’t go any further . . . The Germans have released gas and we’ve had to retire.” Crossing the trench Dorgan and his men got no more than a hundred yards when he found himself enveloped in gas: “We’d had no training . . . never heard of the gas business. Our eyes were streaming with water and pain, and all we had was a roll of bandages in the first aid kit . . . So we bandaged each other’s eyes and anyone who could see would lead a line of half a dozen or so men, each with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In this way lines and lines of British soldiers moved along . . . back towards Ypres.”

The next day General Smith-Dorrien reported to Sir John French’s chief of staff the recent heavy losses sustained by the Lahore Division and other British troops and his view that unless the French would “make a big push” to regain the ground they had lost “the area East of Ypres will be very difficult to hold, chiefly because the roads approaching it from the west are swept by shell-fire.” If no French push was forthcoming he proposed withdrawing his troops to defend a shorter perimeter within the northeastern portion of the Salient. French, long a critic of Smith-Dorrien, informed him he “had abundance of troops” and should act “vigorously with the full means available in cooperation with and assisting the French.” Within hours he ordered Smith-Dorrien to relinquish “command of all troops engaged in the present operations about Ypres” to General Herbert Plumer, commander of V Corps.

However, Plumer was, as he wrote to his wife, “in absolute agreement” with Smith-Dorrien “as to what should be done.” Furthermore, Sir John French began to come round to the view that little was to be expected from French troops, and the British should fall back from what had become an untenable position. On April 30, Sir John consulted his subordinate General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British First Army, who agreed with him that it was his duty as commander in chief to remove his men from “what was really a death trap.”

At eight o’clock on the evening of May 1 the first British troops began to withdraw from their forward positions in the Salient. Meanwhile, men of the British Dorsetshire Regiment dug in around Hill 60 and saw the German troops pulling back from their front lines barely forty yards away. Moments later they came under heavy German bombardment, then saw gas billow from projector pipes. Uncertain what to do, some men huddled in the bottoms of their trenches. Quick thinkers who realized that gas was heavier than air, leaped onto the fire steps. Meeting heavy rifle fire from the Dorsets, German troops advancing behind the gas faltered, allowing British support troops to rush forward. At the same time, British planes dropped improvised “bombs” like jam tins filled with nails and gun cotton on the enemy.

During the intense and bloody fighting, Private Edward Warner of the Bedfordshire Regiment, despite being gassed, cleared a trench of infiltrating Germans and then succeeded in holding it almost single-handedly to win the Victoria Cross. For the first time a German gas attack failed to capture any new ground. The British would hold on to Hill 60 until May 6, though at a cost, including Private Warner, who died from the effects of the chlorine. “Clean killing is at least comprehensible” wrote an officer, “but this murder by slow agony absolutely knocks me. The whole civilized world ought to rise up and exterminate those swine across the hill.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Solomon’s Temple”

The morning of May 1, the day of the German gas attacks on Hill 60 in Flanders, dawned gray and drizzly in New York. When over breakfast people opened their copies of the
New York Times
they found—on the very page where Cunard was announcing the departure that day of “The Fastest and Largest Steamer Now in Atlantic Service” (the
Lusitania
)—a small insert, framed in black:

NOTICE!

Travellers intending to embark on the

Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war

exists between Germany and her allies and Great

Britain and her allies; that the zone of war

includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles;

that, in accordance with formal notice given by

the Imperial German Government, vessels flying

the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies,

are liable to destruction in those waters and that

travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great

Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.

IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY

Washington D. C. April 21 1915

This was the warning that some weeks earlier his government had instructed German ambassador Count von Bernstorff to place in the American press. Although it did not refer to the
Lusitania
specifically, the threat to the pride of Britain’s merchant fleet seemed obvious and those due to sail on her wondered what to do. With the ship scheduled to depart at ten
A.M.
, many passengers were already on their way to Cunard’s Pier 54 at the foot of Fourteenth Street when they learned of the warning. Together with newspapermen they clustered around Cunard’s general manager, Bostonian Charles Sumner, on the pier. He assured them there was no danger: “The fact is that the
Lusitania
 . . . is too fast for any submarine. No German vessel of war can get near her.”