A Higher Form of Killing (15 page)

As timescales continued to extend, the German commanders worried that their plans would be discovered. They might have been if the Allies had taken a slew of warnings more seriously. Toward midnight on April 13, 1915, twenty-four-year-old German private August Jaeger deserted, crossing the several hundred yards of scarred ground that separated the German and French lines to surrender to soldiers of the Fourth Battalion of Chasseurs. Taken to the headquarters of the French Eleventh Division, he startled his interrogators by reporting that “an attack is planned for the near future against the French trenches . . . Four batteries have been placed in position in the first line trenches; these batteries each have 20 bottles of asphyxiating gas . . . At a given signal—3 red rockets fired by the artillery—the bottles are uncorked, and the gas on escaping, is carried by a favourable wind towards the French trenches. This gas is intended to asphyxiate the men who occupy the trenches and to allow the Germans to occupy them without losses.” He added that German troops would use wads of chemically treated cotton to protect themselves from the fumes.

The Eleventh Division’s commander, General Edmond Ferry, sensibly pulled some of his men back from the front lines to lessen casualties in the event of a gas attack and ordered his artillery to concentrate its fire on the area where, according to Jaeger, the gas cylinders were buried. He passed the deserter’s information to the British Twenty-eighth Division positioned to the right of his own troops, urging them “to exercise the greatest vigilance and to seek suitable means to prevent inhalation of gas.” Having also warned the Canadian troops who were about to relieve his own men, Ferry believed he had done all in his power “to avoid surprise, the effect of terror, and the heavy losses the Germans counted on inflicting with this new and abominable weapon of war.” However, Ferry received no thanks for his timely actions from his seniors at French headquarters, who sent a liaison officer to reprimand him for breaking protocol by communicating directly with the British and the Canadians and to tell him that “all this gas business cannot be taken too seriously.” This was despite the fact that French spy Charles Lucieto had also been warning for some time that BASF was manufacturing poison gas at its factories in Mannheim in the Ruhr.

When Ferry’s report reached the headquarters of Lieutenant General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the three British divisions defending the Salient, it was greeted with similar skepticism and the suspicion that Private Jaeger’s confession was in fact part of some dastardly German plot to mislead and confuse the Allies. However, like the French commanders, the British had also received earlier warnings that the Germans were planning a chemical attack. In late March a captured German officer had told a British sergeant of the Leicestershire Regiment that gas cylinders were being buried ready for an attack “at the first favourable wind.” The sergeant had gone out with a small patrol and found “cylinders in dozens” but although his report “was passed to headquarters” no action was taken. On April 9, the
Times
carried a statement from a war correspondent that “it has been reported that in the Argonne [northeastern France], where the trenches are very close, the Germans have on several occasions pumped blazing oil or pitch on to the French, but, according to the statements of our prisoners, they are preparing a more novel reception for us in front of parts of our line. They propose to asphyxiate our men if they advance by means of poisonous gas. The gas is contained under pressure in steel cylinders, and, being of a heavy nature, will spread along the ground without being dissipated quickly.”

Further evidence that something was being planned continued to reach the British and French lines. A more detailed report from Jaeger describing exactly how the gas cylinders worked and enclosing a wad of cotton from his own gas mask reached Plumer on April 15. The same day, explicit intelligence Plumer received from the headquarters of his senior, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. Based on information from a Belgian agent it warned of an imminent gas attack: “Passages have been prepared across old trenches to facilitate bringing up of artillery. Germans intend making use of tubes with asphyxiating gas. They are placed in batteries of 20 tubes per 4 metres . . . A favourable wind necessary.” However, more attention was paid to the statement of a second German deserter, NCO Julius Rapsahl of the Fifty-second Reserve Division, that there were no gas cylinders in the German front lines and that the cotton mask found in his own kit was for protection should the Allies use chemical grenades.

Senior British officers met at Plumer’s headquarters to discuss how to cope with any casualties from an attack with asphyxiating gas. However, the war diary of one of those present which refers merely to “a rumour” of a gas attack shows that, though such an attack was not ruled out, it was considered a fairly remote possibility—a view confirmed when aerial reconnaissance by Royal Flying Corps aircraft flying slowly over the German lines failed to spot anything untoward. The night of April 15 duly came and went. A young Canadian officer wrote, “Last night [April 15] we got ready to receive a German attack . . . with tubes of poisonous gas; but it didn’t materialise . . . Today is quite normal.” A British report stated: “We were aware of the fact that the Germans were making preparations for the discharge of gas for several days previously . . . Nobody seems to have realised the great danger that was threatening, it being considered that the enemy’s attempt would certainly fail and that whatever gas reached our line could be easily fanned away. No one felt in the slightest degree uneasy.”

The date set by Grand Duke Albrecht for the first gas attack had indeed been April 15 but the conditions noted by the young Canadian had again frustrated it. Without a wind—and one blowing steadily from the right direction—a gas attack was impossible. On April 17 on orders from von Falkenhayn, German reserve troops began to pull back from the Salient and elsewhere to begin their long journey to Galicia to strike against the Russian armies on the eastern front to which von Falkenhayn was now shifting his focus—so much so that he refused the Grand Duke’s request for a division to remain in reserve to exploit a German breakthrough should the gas attack succeed. Von Falkenhayn was, however, still committed to the use of poison gas around Ypres to test its effectiveness on the battlefield.

That same day, Germany issued a communiqué accusing the British of using “shells and bombs with asphyxiating gas” near Ypres. Again that might have given the Allies some pause for thought. The British Official History later described the communiqué as typical of “the German mentality”—intending to do something themselves they “were putting the blame on their opponents in advance.” (In fact, the British authorities had looked very briefly at the possible use of tear gas but dropped work on it as they considered even the use of such a nonlethal gas breached the Hague Convention.)

Another action that began that day, April 17, should also have provided clues. British tunnelers detonated five mines beneath Hill 60 and as the mines exploded they observed that the enemy seemed more panic-stricken than usual, even seeming to turn their bayonets against their comrades in their desperation to scramble out of the trenches. The British moved in to occupy the hill before the Germans launched a counterattack in which James Franck joined with several of the other gas pioneers, winning a medal for bravery. Eventually after attack and counterattack British troops finally took and held the hill. They did not, however, find any of Haber’s gas cylinders that remained. Though some among the first wave of attackers reported a smell of gas, and that their eyes suddenly started streaming and they felt nauseous and weak, their commanders assumed they must have encountered some sort of tear gas.

Meanwhile, worried that the British might indeed have discovered the gas cylinders remaining on Hill 60, Grand Duke Albrecht set Tuesday, April 20 as the new day for a gas attack on the northern sector of the Salient. Its code name was “Disinfection” and its objectives were twofold. Two divisions of General Otto von Hügel’s XXVI Reserve Corps were to overwhelm French troops and seize Pilckem Ridge, high ground just two and a half miles north of Ypres which—according to the official German history—commanders assumed would render the Allied position in the remainder of the Salient untenable, allowing German troops to take the city. Meanwhile, soldiers of General Hugo von Kathen’s XXIII Reserve Corps, advancing on von Hügel’s right, were to dash westward to seize crossings over the Yser Canal. The day before—April 19—the Grand Duke ordered one of his giant seventeen-inch guns—a so-called Big Bertha—to start pounding Ypres with its one-ton shells to distract the Allies from observing his final preparations, which included bringing up one of his Fourth Army’s own reserve divisions to the front lines to await the attack. Their officers told the infantrymen who would lead the attack simply to await the order to follow the gas cloud that would knock out the opposition. There was no need to load rifles—steel bayonets were all that would be needed to dispose of the choking survivors.

Through the early hours of April 20, the men crouched in their trenches. However, at four
A.M.
the wind suddenly died. The next day a frustrated von Falkenhayn called on the Grand Duke at his headquarters at Thielt to insist on an attack as soon as even a “halfway favourable opportunity” offered. With predictions of strong winds gusting from the northeast on the following day, German troops were again put on alert. Infantry officer Leutnant Becker recalled how they “spent the night in the front line brimming with confidence. The pioneers came and checked the locking valves on the steel cylinders. The gas was trapped inside the cylinders under high pressure. Harmlessly the cylinders sat there in the Flanders mud. The pipes through which it would be released nestled in amongst the breastworks, hidden from view.”

However, April 22 dawned without a breath of wind. Not until late afternoon did a light breeze finally begin gusting toward the southwest. German commanders passed down the line the code words that would launch the attack “
Gott strafe England!
” (May God Punish England!). The German artillery opened up against the northern edge of the Salient held by French and Canadian troops. An hour later at five
P.M.
, as the three red flares Private Jaeger had warned of shot into the sky from an observation balloon, Haber was told to order his “Stinkpioneere” to open the valves on the canisters.

*
 After the war Duisberg showed an Allied officer a giant mural in Bayer’s offices, celebrating the company’s contribution to the war effort and depicting the manufacture of gas and shells being filled with it.

CHAPTER NINE

“Operation Disinfection”

The two French divisions dug in along the Ypres Salient’s northern front line around the village of Langemarck were about to experience the world’s first chlorine gas attack. The men of the Eighty-seventh Territorial Division were veterans recalled to military service at the outbreak of the war. Stationed to their right was the Forty-fifth Infantry Division—known informally as the Forty-fifth “Algerian” Division—which had served in France’s North African colonies. It included three Zouave regiments. Originally recruited from North African Berbers, the Zouaves by 1914 were conscripted Frenchmen who at this early stage in the war still wore the traditional Zouave uniform of baggy red pantaloons, braided blue jackets, and red fezzes.

The Forty-fifth also included a regiment of Tirailleurs or “sharpshooters”—native North Africans with French officers also wearing Zouave-style uniforms. In addition, two battalions of the Infanterie Légère d’Afrique (African Light Infantry) had recently joined it. The latter were composed of French convicts whose offenses ranged from vagrancy and pimping to theft and assault, and soldiers transferred from other regiments as punishment for deserting or disobeying orders. The members of the African Light Infantry had long ironically dubbed themselves “Les Joyeux” (The Happy Ones).

The Forty-fifth had only taken over their positions eight days earlier on the night of April 14. Captain Louis Botti of the Seventh Zouaves despaired at the problems of digging trenches in ground more resembling a cemetery than a defensive position: “In certain places shod feet stick out of the soil and at a place we pass a hundred times a day, red trousers appear. Everywhere, however little we seek them, the eye falls on out-stretched corpses . . . anonymous, not meaning anything to anyone.” Living conditions for all Allied soldiers around Ypres were indeed atrocious. The high water table and low elevation—barely above sea level—meant trenches flooded easily. Newcomers thought those already there “looked like tramps, all plastered with filth and dirt, and unshaven.”

One of the few consolations was smoking—sometimes, despite their “vile taste,” the tobacco leaves they found hanging in the lofts of farmhouses. But smoking required caution since as one soldier recalled, “if Jerry saw any smoke he would send a grenade over because he knew there was someone there.” The belief in the trenches that to light three cigarettes from one match was unlucky was not superstition but well founded—lighting up the first revealed your presence to the enemy, lighting the second allowed him to take aim, lighting the third gave him time to fire.
*
Then there were the rats. Some thought there was no point in killing them since “they would putrefy and it would be worse than if you left them alive. I think they lived in corpses, because they were . . . big as cats . . . horrible great things.”