A Higher Form of Killing (18 page)

Wafted by a steady northeasterly wind, the gas engulfed the Forty-eighth Highlanders. Lieutenant Maxwell-Scott recalled how “Captain McLaren gave an order to get handkerchiefs, soak them and tie round our mouths and noses. Some managed to do this, others, myself included, didn’t owing to a scarcity of the necessary articles . . . It was hopeless to try to stand up against the stuff . . . We just lay in bundles at the bottom of the trench, choking and gasping for breath.” McLaren’s company was forced back to its reserve trenches, many too weak even to hold let alone fire a rifle. Maxwell-Scott himself, by now “barely conscious,” was saved by two of his men who “coaxed, dragged and pushed” him to the rear.

By now German shells were ripping into the Canadian parapets and dugouts. Lance Corporal Jim Keddie of the Forty-eighth Highlanders had “managed to get a mouthful of rum” before the attack began but no sooner had he swallowed it than “the enemy started an attack, beginning with gas. They then began to shell the reserve trenches . . . You could hardly get breath for the concussion!”

Lieutenant Colonel Lipsett, gasping from the gas fumes that had rolled over his headquarters, got off an SOS message to brigade artillery, which began firing on the German lines but could not halt the mass of advancing German troops. The immediate danger was to the Canadians’ left flank where a one-hundred-yard gap had opened between the Eighth and Fifteenth Battalions. Lipsett ordered his only reserve—two platoons—to secure the exposed flank. Private Tom Drummond was among them. With the German guns pounding, he thought “all hell” had been let loose: “high explosive, shrapnel, coal boxes, whizz bangs, machine gun fire. Men went down like ninepins and looking around, I found myself and one other man to be the only ones still standing of our platoon . . . We both dived into shell holes and then the nature of the greenish cloud became apparent. Gas! I wet my scarf and wound it about my face, but this did not seem to have much effect, although there is no doubt that it helped.” Moving to another shell hole Drummond found two soldiers with “strings of sticky saliva” drooling from their mouths. Peering over the edge he saw other men leaving the line, throwing away their rifles and ripping off clothing as they ran. “Some managed to get halfway to where they were going only to fall writhing to the ground, clutching at their throats, tearing open their shirts in a last struggle for air, and after a while ceasing to struggle and lying still while a greenish foam formed over their mouths and lips.”

Five hours after the attack started, German troops had penetrated one thousand yards on a half-mile front to the far right of the Canadian lines and were fanning out to threaten both the Canadians’ right and left flank. The history of the German Reussner regiment likened the German advance in which they took part to that of “a fiery steed that can be reined in only with difficulty.” A day of ferocious fighting and at times considerable confusion followed during which Canadian and British reinforcements were rushed to the front line, Colonel Mordacq’s French troops launched an abortive counterattack, and the Germans took Saint-Julien in desperate hand-to-hand fighting, only to be pushed out again. It was also a day during which a significant number of German atrocities were reported. Private Thurgood described how when he and his colleagues surrendered the Germans “started to wipe us out. Three of our men were bayoneted before an officer arrived and saved the rest of us.” Even so, Thurgood’s captors kicked and beat him with their rifle butts. A major described German troops firing on wounded men “with some sort of projectile that set fire to their clothing.” This day too a Canadian sergeant was said to have been found crucified with bayonets on a barn door.

Yet except for those caught in the heart of the chlorine cloud, the effects of the gas had not been as devastating as in the attack of April 22. Only one part of the Canadian line had been forced back and as the gas had begun to disperse most of the Canadian troops had held their ground, allowing time for reinforcements to reach them. By the day’s end the Germans had been fought to a standstill and had made only a modest dent in the Allied line. As the official German account acknowledged, their troops had “encountered strong opposition and progressed but slowly.”

By now, the city of Ypres and the surrounding countryside “beggared description” according to a seventeen-year-old British private who had enlisted under age in hopes of “adventure”: “The Cloth Hall in Ypres itself . . . burning . . . and all the little farms around . . . alight” so that “around the Salient . . . it made as awful a picture of warfare as anyone could imagine.” Another soldier marching with British reinforcements to the Salient on the night of April 24–25 as German artillery shelled the city saw the sky become “a whirling and twisting mass of red and yellow flames, and enormous volumes of black smoke. A truly grand and awful spectacle. The tall ruins of the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were alternately silhouetted or brightly illuminated in the yellow glare of the flames.” Another soldier marched through the narrow cobbled streets of a city burning so ferociously “that the men on the flanks had to creep in to the middle to avoid the blistering heat.” Elsewhere food rotted on the counters of abandoned cafés, dogs howled, and the stink of burning horse carcasses filled the nostrils. The scenes filled the soldiers with “a terrible sense of decay and desolation.” A Canadian officer reflected that “Dante lacked imagination when he wrote
Inferno
. He ought to have ridden with me through Ypres.” Gas had blighted the landscape, yellowing grass, shriveling the leaves on the trees and destroying wildlife—birds, rabbits, mice, and hares—and farm animals.

With fragile Allied frontline positions suffering further heavy bombardment as well as infantry attacks, General Smith-Dorrien, commander of the British Second Army, was contemplating an orderly withdrawal within the Salient. However, Sir John French, who was still trying to discover how or whether the French intended to reinforce their positions, ordered him to stay put. The result was two days of futile and exhausting fighting, including on April 26, when French troops arrived to assist yet a further attempt to retake Mauser Ridge by the British whose forces now included reinforcements from the Lahore Division of the British Indian Army—Pathans and Gurkhas among them— recently arrived from India via Hong Kong. As the Allied troops approached the wire protecting the enemy positions, the Germans released gas that was blown by the wind toward them, turning the attack into a scrambled retreat as men fled the engulfing vapor.

German—as well as Allied troops—were becoming increasingly exhausted. Since the first gas attack, von Hügel’s men had advanced to within three miles north of Ypres itself while von Kathen’s troops had gotten across to the west bank of the Yser Canal. However, though the Germans had taken a large bite out of the northern part of the Salient, “Operation Disinfection” had not delivered the hoped-for breakthrough. In particular, the most recent gas attack had failed to dislodge the Canadians, and Ypres remained in Allied hands. A British soldier summed up the current position nicely. German troops had made

a huge effort to cut across the Salient and so capture Ypres and probably capture a big slice of the British Army and the situation was desperate. Reinforcements were sent to fill the gap and the effects of the gas gradually wore off. The Canadians distinguished themselves and were largely responsible for holding the line. The Germans did not succeed in gaining their objective but they advanced several kilometres, closing in and making the Salient round Ypres smaller and our positions more hazardous. They could concentrate fire from three sides and some of our positions could be infiltrated and at times we appeared to be shelled from the rear.

Many German officers remained unconvinced about the new weapon. Cavalry commander Rudolf Binding thought “the effects of the successful gas attack were horrible. I am not pleased with the idea of poisoning men. Of course, the entire world will rage about it first and then imitate us. All the dead lie on their backs with clenched fists; the whole field is yellow.”

Though the German army would soon launch further gas attacks around Ypres, toward the end of April Haber returned to Berlin, himself a disappointed man. He would later recall his frustration with the German high command which, focused on its campaign on the eastern front, had treated the gas attacks at Ypres as a sideshow and a “
Versuch
”—experiment. They had failed to provide enough troops to capitalize on the gas attacks and thereby squandered the chance he had given them of making a major breakthrough in the west that could have carried them to the Channel ports. Major General Deimling agreed: “Had we had enough reserves to hand, our troops could have broken through the [Allied] front all the way to Ypres.”

The kaiser, though, was delighted when von Falkenhayn told him the results of the first gas attack. He embraced the general three times and promised pink champagne to Colonel Gerhard Tappen, von Falkenhayn’s chief of operations and brother of the creator of T-shells. Haber was promoted from sergeant of the reserves to the rank of captain. Though the exact date is unclear, Otto Hahn recalled attending a meal shortly after the Ypres gas attack to celebrate Haber’s new status. Another member of the gas fraternity recalled him “proudly appearing among us in his new uniform instead of . . . the military official’s uniform that we called his ‘pest controller’s outfit.’ ”

On the night of May 1, soon after Haber’s return to Berlin, Clara Haber took her husband’s army pistol into their garden in Dahlem and shot herself. She left no suicide note; however, she had deplored the idea of using poison gas. James Franck, Haber’s collaborator and friend, thought that “the fact that her husband was involved in gas warfare definitely played a part in her suicide.” Furthermore, a family friend of the Habers’ revealed many years later that shortly before her death Clara had told his own wife of her “despair over the horrible consequences of gas warfare, for which she’d seen the preparations, along with the tests on animals.”

Haber himself certainly felt some guilt for Clara’s death, writing on June 12, 1915, that he could still hear “the words the poor woman once spoke, and in my weariness I see her head appear between orders and telegrams and I suffer.” However, within hours of the discovery of her body, he had boarded a train to the eastern front to superintend the deployment of poison gas against Russian troops west of Warsaw, and he did not attend her funeral.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the first attacks, the psychological as well as the physical effects of poison gas were becoming yet clearer. Canadian major Harold Mathews thought it impossible “to give a real idea of the terror and horror spread among us by this filthy loathsome pestilence. Not, I think, the fear of death or anything supernatural but the great dread that we could not stand the fearful suffocation . . . Many of the physically strongest men were more affected than their apparently weaker comrades.”

Haber always believed the chief value of gas lay in its ability to inspire fear and uncertainty, undermining the enemy’s power to resist by causing him “to imagine defeat.” By manipulating “psychological imponderables,” gas turned soldiers “from being a sword in the hand of their commander into a heap of despairing people.” Compared with weapons like artillery, poison gas caused “more fright and less destruction.”

The Allies were considering urgently what else they could do to protect their troops against Haber’s new weapon. After the first attack officers were dispatched to Paris to buy gauze, flannel, and elastic to make masks like “mouth protectors” found on captured German soldiers, and Allied medical staff appealed to women in the small towns around Ypres—like the nuns of Poperinghe Convent—to start sewing masks. Gas casualties were evacuated to hospitals in and around Boulogne and their symptoms closely studied. In London, the British War Office asked eminent Scottish physiologist Dr. John Haldane to assess the gas’s effects. By April 27 he was at a casualty station at Bailleul in France, near the Belgium border, where he saw “men . . . struggling for breath and blue in the face . . . There was nothing to account for the blueness (cyanosis) and struggle for air, but the one fact that they were suffering from acute bronchitis, such as is caused by the inhalation of an irritant gas.” A postmortem confirmed that that one victim had died from “acute bronchitis” and “accompanying slow asphyxiation” caused by an “irritant gas.” Having reviewed the available evidence—including examining brass buttons that the gas had turned green—Haldane concluded that the Germans had probably used chlorine or bromine “for the purposes of asphyxiation.”

While Dr. Haldane was still preparing his report, which was published on April 29, the gas attacks were, as Rudolf Binding predicted, already being condemned around the world. On April 25, Will Irwin of the
New York Tribune
pointed out that the Hague Conferences had positively banned poison gas—prohibitions that “have prevented the more civilised nations of Europe from going far with experiments in this line.” He added that “the gaseous vapour which the Germans used against the French division near Ypres . . . introduces a new element into warfare.”

Such opinions were in the majority, but a few U.S. publications suggested gas was a humane weapon. In doing so they followed the line taken in German papers like the
Frankfurter Zeitung
of April 26 which questioned “the serious difference” between conventional explosives “which break to atoms everything living” and gas “which takes effect over a wider area, produces a rapid end and spares the torn bodies the tortures and pains of death.” The
Chicago Tribune
of April 28, 1915, carried a cartoon titled “Anaesthetics in Military Operations,” depicting marching German troops of the “Chloroform Brigade,” “Ether Battalion,” and “Twilight Sleep Reserves” and asked “will trenches be taken without casualties on either side . . . ?” The
New York Evening Sun
concluded that Germany’s success in developing gas derived from its scientific ingenuity, especially in applied chemistry, and predicted a new type of warfare, “the chemist’s battle.”