A Higher Form of Killing (38 page)

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light.

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
*

The P Helmets had been rushed to the front in late 1915 in the hope they would better protect British troops against a new chemical that intelligence reports suggested would soon be used against them—phosgene, described by Douglas Edwardes-Ker, the British assistant director of gas services on the western front, as “much nastier than what the Germans had started with.” After German organic chemist Emil Fischer had first pointed out its potentially lethal qualities in early 1915 and industrialist Carl Duisberg had begun experimenting with it, Fritz Haber and his teams had developed it into a weapon. Haber believed that the longer the war went on, the greater the imperative to develop new poison gases: “A good army must change the gases it uses as often as possible in order to cause the enemy . . . anxiety and insecurity and the difficulties of devising fresh countermeasures.”

In the summer of 1915 in Britain Foulkes had also realized phosgene’s potential after having a sample tested in a laboratory. Having negotiated with a French factory owner for the rights to a formula for producing it, he had arranged for the United Alkali Company to manufacture quantities in great secrecy at a new plant at Lancaster in northern England. However, Germany was the first to use phosgene in battle.

At five thirty on the morning of December 19, 1915, again near Ypres, Haber’s gas pioneers loosed fast-moving clouds not only of chlorine but also of phosgene. The chlorine had the familiar if horrific effects—some men died quite quickly, their skin discolored and spewing green froth. The effects of the colorless, odorless phosgene were quite different. Victims were unaware they had been poisoned until a terrible lethargy overtook them. A report by a British army doctor described how

some 30 or 40 men left the trench to report sick. To get to the road the men . . . had to go across about 100 yards of very rough muddy ground. The exertion in heavy wet great-coats, and with all their equipment, caused great alteration in their condition, and by the time they reached the road they were exhausted and were quite unable to proceed any further . . . The history of the men who remained at duty in the trenches was still more striking. One man, feeling fairly well, was filling sandbags when he
collapsed and died suddenly
. Two more men died in the same way that evening.

Phosgene’s delayed action made it seem especially frightening and sinister. A gassed man at first felt little except a slight prickling in the nose and throat that soon passed. For the next two days or so, he might even feel a little exuberant. However, all this time his lungs were filling with fluid. Victims could take forty-eight hours to die, coughing up four pints of yellow, blood-streaked liquid an hour. As a soldier recalled, “the victim virtually drowned.” Phosgene also brought on heart attacks.

The French used phosgene in the defense of Verdun in February 1916. The British first used it at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 when they released gas containing both chlorine and phosgene along a seventeen-mile front. The gas cloud rolled twelve miles behind German lines. The
Frankfurter Zeitung
described the hundreds of dead rodents left in its wake. In the first eighteen days of the Somme, Foulkes’s men launched “more than fifty gas cloud attacks” and in the next nine months would release more than fifteen hundred tons of phosgene—“our main battle gas for the remainder of the war”—against the enemy lines. In Britain the
Daily Chronicle
reported jubilantly that “the effects of the new gases experimented with are terrible . . . Two hundred and fifty corpses were counted lying huddled together.”

Foulkes himself took a sharp interest in any available information about the gas’s effects, not “for ghoulish reasons” but because “we were really carrying out experiments on a gigantic scale and were in the same position as a chemist in a laboratory who, unless he can observe the reactions taking place in his test-tubes, is wasting his time.” Despite reports of “immense numbers of corpses” the new gas gave the British army little lasting strategic advantage. When the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916 the Allies had lost more than six hundred thousand men and advanced barely seven miles.

As gas warfare became routine, the belligerents sought more precise ways of delivering poison gas to the enemy than release from cylinders. In Britain, Captain F. H. Livens of the Special Gas Brigade—a former civil engineer with, according to Foulkes, a “strong personal feeling” against the Germans motivated by “the sinking of the
Lusitania
”—invented the Livens Projector. This was a three-to-four-foot-long, eight-inch-in-diameter steel tube that could be dug into the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees. When triggered, the projector could hurl a drum filled with thirty pounds of phosgene up to a mile toward enemy lines. The only warning to the enemy before the drum’s TNT core exploded was the dull red flash of the firing mechanism. The Livens Projector was not only simple but cheap. Livens himself calculated that if manufactured “on a large scale the cost of killing Germans would be reduced to only sixteen shillings apiece.”
**

The British first used Livens Projectors at the Battle of Arras in April 1917. A captured German report described the horror of the exploding drums: “volcanic sheets of flame . . . thick black smoke clouds, powerful concussion, whistling . . . the noise [resembling] that of an exploding dump of hand-grenades.” Soon British troops were using the projectors in batteries of thousands. Sometimes they simply filled the drums with noxious smelling substances to compel the enemy to endure the misery of wearing their gas masks. A German diary that fell into Allied hands described not only the “many casualties through gas poisoning” but the writer’s feelings: “I can’t think of anything worse; wherever one goes one must take one’s gas mask with one, and it will soon be more necessary than a rifle. Things are dreadful here; one can’t talk about them.” German engineers attempted but failed to make an effective version of the projector themselves.

The British army also used in large numbers at Arras the Stokes mortar—a device invented by Wilfred Stokes that consisted of a steel tube capable of firing four-inch mortar bombs each holding two liters of gas up to one thousand yards. It was more accurate than the projector and an experienced crew could launch fifteen bombs before the first had hit its target. In addition, by 1917 the British, French, and German armies were all making extensive use of gas-filled artillery shells.

By late 1916, the kaiser was again coming under pressure to authorize unrestricted submarine warfare. At the end of May, the British and German High Seas Fleets had clashed at Jutland. Although the British had lost more ships and at nearly sixty-eight hundred suffered twice the casualties, dead and wounded, than had the German fleet in what was the biggest naval battle of the war, after returning to base to replenish fuel and ammunition the British fleet commander Admiral John Jellicoe had signaled that his ships were ready to put to sea again at four hours’ notice. In contrast, the German fleet was not. Many of the surviving German vessels were badly damaged. Britain retained the crucial mastery of the sea, never again to be seriously challenged by the German surface fleet. In the mind of the German naval command, the only remaining way of reversing British supremacy and breaking the maritime blockade was unrestricted submarine warfare.

The blockade was proving increasingly effective. With many supplies reserved for the fighting troops, German civilians referred to the winter of 1916–17 as the “turnip winter” since turnips were the main component of their diet following a failure of the potato crop. At the beginning of the war Berlin abattoirs were killing twenty-five thousand pigs a week. Now the number was less than five hundred. Sugar and butter were scarce as well as potatoes and rationing had been introduced. Only one egg per person was allowed every fortnight. “We are all gaunt and bony now,” a female member of the German court wrote. “We have dark shadows around our eyes and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering what our next meal will be.” The blockade was also diminishing the supply of raw materials for the war effort despite the work of German scientists and industrialists to find substitutes, while American-manufactured supplies flooded into Allied arsenals. In an effort to sustain output and replace workers now in the trenches, the German authorities had begun to transport Belgians forcibly to Germany to work in their industries.

On land the German army had repulsed the British army on the Somme and the Turks forced the British to evacuate Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. (The British authorities had not taken up a suggestion from Churchill that they should use gas against the Turkish forces. Churchill had argued that “the massacres by the Turks of Armenians and the fact that practically no British prisoners have been taken on the peninsula, though there are many thousands of missing, should surely remove all false sentiment on this point.”)

However, elsewhere the war was not going as well as the German authorities might have wished. German forces had not broken through at Verdun despite inflicting massive casualties on the French. Portugal had joined the Allies in March 1916 followed by Rumania in August 1916. A Russian offensive had inflicted such severe setbacks on the Austro-Hungarians that Germany had had to transfer divisions to reinforce them. Austro-Hungary’s new emperor Karl—Franz Joseph had died in November at eighty-six—had told Berlin that Austria would not last another winter and hoped for a compromise peace. Paul Von Hindenburg, who had replaced von Falkenhayn as army commander in chief, and his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff, were arguing in support of their naval colleagues and claiming that if the flow of arms across the Atlantic to the Allies were not stopped, they might well give a decisive advantage to them.

An additional factor in German thinking was President Wilson’s re-election in November 1916. Although he won by only a very narrow margin, his victory suggested to many in the German hierarchy that Americans preferred a “writing” to a “fighting” president and that his campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” symbolized American attitudes. Ambassador Gerard was convinced that the German administration believed “America could be insulted, flouted, and humiliated with impunity.”

In late December 1916, Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral von Holtzendorff produced a two-hundred-page document advocating the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. In it he presented a multitude of statistics and details to substantiate his case. If the war was not to end badly for Germany, it had to be concluded before “the autumn of 1917.” Britain was the strongest of Germany’s enemies and the best way of weakening it would be to cut off its maritime trade using unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany’s expanded submarine fleet, including many advanced vessels, would be able to sink six hundred thousand tons of shipping per month as well as frighten many neutral vessels from Britain’s shores. If this figure was achieved, von Holtzendorff stated, “we may reckon that in five months shipping to and from England will be reduced by 39%. England would not be able to stand that. I do not hesitate to assert that . . . we can force England to make peace in five months.”

At a meeting at the German supreme headquarters in the three-hundred-room white castle of Pless in early January 1917, von Bethmann Hollweg objected that unrestricted submarine warfare was likely to bring the United States into the war. Von Holtzendorff responded, “I pledge on my word as a naval officer that no American will set foot on continental soil.” England would indeed be forced to capitulate. Both von Hindenburg and Ludendorff backed him up. Von Hindenburg asserted, “We are in a position to meet all eventualities against America . . . We need the most energetic and ruthless action possible. Therefore the U-boat war must begin not later than February 1, 1917.” Ludendorff said unrestricted U-boat warfare would “improve the situation even of our armies . . . We must spare the troops a second Somme battle.” Left without allies, von Bethmann Hollweg acquiesced in the decision to resume the submarine campaign although telling a colleague it was “
Finis Germaniae
” (the end of Germany).

The kaiser signed the authorization for the new campaign. “I order that unrestricted submarine warfare be launched with the utmost vigour on the 1st of February . . .Wilhelm I. R.” All ships—enemy and neutral, armed and unarmed—would be attacked in the war zone. The decision would only be announced on the evening of January 31 within hours of the first potential attacks. The United States was to be offered a small concession—one specially marked American vessel a week would be allowed to enter and leave the English port of Falmouth.

When the announcement of the campaign was made, President Wilson responded on February 3 by severing diplomatic relations with Germany. The British naval attaché in Washington dispatched a jubilant telegram to Reginald Hall, the head of the British Admiralty’s intelligence unit who was responsible for Room 40: “Bernstorff goes home. I get drunk tonight.”

Wilson decided to see whether the Germans carried out their threat before taking the final step of declaring war. Hall, however, had in his London safe a document that would increase the pressure on the president. In case the declaration of Germany’s new submarine campaign brought the United States into the war, the German administration had made plans to keep them occupied at home. On January 16, 1917, Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, using facilities granted by the United States for diplomatic purposes, sent a telegram to von Bernstorff in Washington for onward transmission to the German embassy in Mexico. It baldly proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico: “Make war together, make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.” The message went on to suggest that Japan should be
invited to switch
sides and declare war against the United States.
***