A Higher Form of Killing (35 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Do You Know Anything About Gas?”

While the novel attacks at sea and from the air, with their long-term consequences for the conduct of warfare, had been taking place, fighting had continued on land. On the western front, German army gas attacks on Allied troops in the Ypres Salient persisted throughout May 1915. On May 2—the
Lusitania
’s first full day at sea—“Stinkpioneere” released chlorine against British troops in the trenches facing the German-held Mauser Ridge three miles due north of Ypres. Though British soldiers had been issued with basic gas “protectors.” many took too long putting them on. They held the line but casualties were high. A British medical officer described how “all night in the trenches one heard groaning, not that of pain, but just the low muttering that is often heard in disease.”

On May 6, the British withdrew from Hill 60 following a further gas attack. Methodist chaplain Owen Watkins, hurrying to a dressing station, passed “men lying all along the road gasping out their lives . . . The death cloud had swept down on them . . . These had run gasping until they fell, black in the face and dying.” Watching the dressing station staff struggling to cope with twelve hundred casualties, Watkins thought “nothing seemed bad enough for the men who had done this thing.” On May 24, in their final and greatest gas assault that late spring, the Stinkpioneere released chlorine along a two-mile front in an attack lasting four hours. Nearly three and a half thousand British soldiers needed treatment for gas poisoning.

In London, the request by Sir John French, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, for Britain to produce and deploy gas was urgently debated. The effect on international opinion of Britain taking such a step weighed heavily. Well aware that neutrals had been quick to condemn the German use of gas, the British government did not wish to lose sympathy by being seen to descend to the same level as their less civilized enemy. However, French’s arguments that his troops had to be provided with “similar means” of attack to the Germans prevailed.

On May 18 Lord Kitchener, minister of war, told Parliament that “His Majesty’s Government, no less than the French Government felt our troops must be adequately protected by the employment of similar methods so as to remove the enormous and unjustifiable advantage which must exist for [the Germans] if we take no steps to meet on his own ground the enemy who is responsible for the introduction of this pernicious practice.” In other words, the British would use gas when they could. An official record of the cabinet discussions states that “public opinion had compelled the Government to retaliate.”

To his own surprise, Charles Foulkes, a forty-year-old major in the Royal Engineers—career soldier, big game hunter, and competitor in the 1908 Olympics—was put in charge of Britain’s gas program. During a short interview with General William Robertson, French’s chief of staff, on May 26 Robertson asked simply: “‘Do you know anything about gas?’ . . . to which I replied quite truthfully, ‘Nothing at all.’ ‘Well, I don’t think that matters,’ he went on; ‘I want you to take charge of our gas reprisals here in France. Something is going on in London, and you must cross over and find out all about it. Then come back here and tell me what you propose to do.’”

As the army’s “Gas Advisor,” Foulkes quickly grasped that his task was to enable Britain to use gases “which were as harmful, but not much more so, than those used by the enemy, though preparations and experiments might proceed for the employment of more deadly things.” The immediate problem was how to produce enough poison gas—Britain’s production capacity was tiny compared with that of Germany’s chemical industry giants. Foulkes’s tour of British factories revealed reasonable stockpiles of chlorine but only one plant capable of converting it into liquid form for transport and deployment. He urged British scientists and chemical companies to find ways of increasing the production of liquid chlorine and the manufacture of gas cylinders. He also began exploring possible methods of deploying gas on the battlefield.

Foulkes recommended the immediate establishment of a specialist gas warfare unit within the Royal Engineers whose first duty would be “the production of gas clouds.” Civilian experts—science students and industrial chemists—and those already serving in the army with backgrounds in chemistry were recruited into the “Special Companies” (later the Special Gas Brigade), together with soldiers from infantry battalions “to supply experience of trench warfare.” Lieutenant C. A. Ashley was suddenly informed that he had been transferred into the Royal Engineers and to report to Chatham next morning. On arrival, he and some other young men “were told only that we were a Special Company of the Royal Engineers . . . The only thing we could discover that we had in common was a knowledge of chemistry.” They wondered whether their function would be “to test the water in wells as the army advanced.”

By late July 1915, Ashley was one of two thousand men assembled near Saint-Omer in northern France. Here he learned that “an attack was being planned and that our part in it would be to let off poison gas.” Foulkes later wrote that “I gave . . . every man the opportunity to return to England if he wished.” Ashley did not recall being given the choice but wrote that his subsequent experience “did not lead me to suppose that gas was more objectionable on moral or any other grounds than high explosives.” Soon the Special Companies were training in everything from meteorology to handling gas cylinders which, Ashley learned, “were to be placed in trenches in front of the infantry and the gas . . . let off through iron pipes to be attached to the cylinders and placed over the parapets. We practised with cylinders and pipes and thought that perhaps this was a job for plumbers but were gratified to hear that chemists were needed to give confidence to the infantry.” Convinced that British success in using gas depended on preserving the element of surprise, Foulkes forbade his men ever to mention “gas” and told them to call the cylinders “accessories.” They preferred “oojahs.”

On July 29, 1915, the German army used another novel form of warfare against the British for the first time—the flamethrower. Many considered it inhumane, violating The Hague’s prohibition on weapons that “caused unnecessary suffering.” Lieutenant Carey, a British platoon commander, recalled that day: “I was quite incapable of any sort of consecutive thought. The first idea that sort of flitted through my mind was the end of the world had come and this was the Day of Judgement because suddenly the whole dawn had turned a ghastly crimson and red. Then as I began to come to my senses, I definitely saw four or five jets of flame passing across the trench I had been in one minute before . . . with a horrible hissing sound. At the edge of the flame there was a nasty sort of oily black smoke.” Then he realized the German troops were attacking his trench and machine guns were opening up. Germans began to jump into the trench, bits of trees blew into the air, and he never saw four or five men of his platoon again. Although both sides would subsequently use flamethrowers (the German army had first deployed them without attracting attention against the French earlier in 1915), their utility beyond the initial terror was limited. This was particularly because the soldiers using them had canisters of flammable liquid strapped to their backs, making them highly vulnerable to being turned into human torches.

On August 22 Foulkes and his men demonstrated the principles of a gas attack to Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British First Army, by letting off a small quantity of chlorine gas. By September 1915, with British factories having worked round the clock to produce them, fifty-five hundred chlorine-filled “oojahs” had been shipped across the Channel in unmarked wooden boxes, then carried by train to two railheads where Foulkes’s men were waiting to unload them onto lorries and horse-drawn wagons that would carry them as far toward the front line “as the conditions of the road permitted.” In an attempt to preserve secrecy, the wagons’ wheels were muffled, the horse’s hooves fitted with mini-sandbags, and they traveled by night.

The place chosen by Sir John French, in consultation with Haig, for Britain’s first use of gas was Loos, a French mining village occupied by the German army some twenty miles south of Ypres. The attack at Loos was to begin a major Allied offensive agreed on with the French in July with the aim of breaking through the German lines before winter to restore a war of movement. These attacks would also relieve pressure on Russia on the eastern front by diverting German resources west. When they arrived at the British lines near Loos, Foulkes’s men—distinguishable from other troops by their pink, white, and green armbands—began maneuvering the heavy iron “oojahs” and the connecting pipework through the network of muddy trenches up to the front. They were helped by the infantry who, Ashley recalled, “did a lot of the carrying.” By September 20 they had dug in their fifty-five hundred cylinders which contained a total of around 150 tons of chlorine gas—close to the amount discharged by the Germans on April 22 at Ypres. While they waited for the attack, Foulkes’s men “walked the trenches or sat on sand bags playing chess.”

Haig scheduled the gas attack for the morning of September 25. The night before, Foulkes’s men took up their positions. Forty of them, spread along the front trenches and specially trained in calculating wind speed and direction, telephoned in hourly weather reports. The night was wet and for a while the desired westerly wind blew, albeit not strongly. However, as the first light appeared in the east, in some places the wind began to drop and even to die away altogether. In others, it seemed to veer round from south to north meaning, as some of Foulkes’s men warned, it would blow the chlorine back over the British lines.

At around five in the morning, Haig went outside his headquarters in a château near the lines to find only a slight breeze. His aide, Major Alan Fletcher, lit a cigarette. Haig noted the smoke was drifting “in puffs towards the N. E.”—the appropriate direction. His diary records his decision to proceed with perhaps a hint of hindsight: “At one time, owing to the calm, I feared the gas might simply hang about our trenches. However, at 5.15
A.M.
I said ‘carry on.’ I went to the top of
our
wooden look-out tower. The wind came gently from S. W. and by 5.40 had increased slightly. The leaves of the poplar trees gently rustled. This seemed satisfactory. But what a risk I must run of gas blowing back upon
our
own dense masses of troops!”

The exact time scheduled for the gas attack was five fifty
A.M.
“after the artillery bombardment had already started,” as Lieutenant Ashley wrote. The plan was complicated. “We were given watches which were to be synchronised . . . and a printed sheet of instructions. Gas and smoke were to be let off alternately over a forty-minute period, with thick smoke only during the last two minutes so that the infantry could follow immediately behind it.” The reason for supplementing the gas with smoke was that tests on masks found on captured German soldiers suggested they were only effective for about thirty minutes. Worried that he did not have enough chlorine gas to create a cloud that would last longer than that, and thus succeed in overcoming the defense provided by the masks, Foulkes had decided to use smoke to trick the German troops into keeping their masks on all the time. After forty minutes, with the German masks losing their effectiveness and the troops afflicted by the gas, the British infantry would charge from their trenches to attack the enemy lines.

At five fifty
A.M.
“the men of the Special Companies put on their gas helmets which consisted of a hood of grey flannel soaked in chemicals” and duly began releasing the chlorine. Some found that the spanners they had been issued did not fit the nuts on the cylinders. Writer and officer Robert Graves described how “the gas men rushed about shouting for the loan of an adjustable spanner.” Lieutenant Ashley later heard how “one man was so frustrated . . . that he carried his cylinders some distance forward and then tried to burst them by firing at them.” Lieutenant White found “great difficulty in letting off the gas owing to faulty connections and broken copper pipes causing leaks.” Having done his best to release the gas he watched it first drift “slowly towards the German lines (it was plainly visible owing to the rain) but . . . at about 6.20
A.M.
the wind changed and quantities of the gas came back over our own parapet, so I ordered all gas to be turned off and only smoke candles to be used.” Elsewhere along the line chlorine engulfed some British soldiers either when the wind blew it back or when German shells ruptured the cylinders of gas before it had been released.

Nevertheless, in some places the gas was proving effective. Soon after six
A.M.
, a report from aerial reconnaissance told Haig that “the gas cloud was rolling steadily over towards the German lines.” German officers had anticipated the possibility of British gas attacks and instituted a system of warning by drums. Now these began to sound along the lines where soldiers, caught unprepared just as the French troops had been on April 22, panicked. Some never had time to find and put on their masks. In other cases, just as the British had hoped, the masks were ineffective. An advancing British sergeant reported twenty-three dead Germans, all wearing respirators. Within an hour of the first gas release British troops had penetrated a mile behind German lines. They included infantrymen of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. As gas had blown back over them while they waited beneath their scaling ladders in the trenches, ready to attack, their piper, Piper Laidlaw, had torn off his mask, leaped on the trench parapet, and played “Scotland the Brave” on his bagpipes.
*
As British troops advanced further they found German soldiers and officers lying in heaps, “blue in the face and undoubtedly gassed to death.”