About the Authors

ROBERT HARRIS was a reporter on the BBC’s Panorama and Newsnight programmes before becoming Political Editor of the Observer in 1987, and then a columnist on the Sunday Times. He has written five non-fiction books, including A Higher Form of Killing which was his first book, and three novels. Fatherland (1992) was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel prize, and was followed by Enigma (1995) and Archangel (1998). His novels have been bestsellers worldwide and have been translated into 30 languages. Robert Harris lives in Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby, and their children.

JEREMY PAXMAN has been a reporter ever since he left St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. He began his journalistic career covering the troubles in Northern Ireland. After three years in Belfast, he moved to London, from whence assignments took him all over the world. He began presenting Newsnight in 1989. He is also familiar to radio and television audiences through University Challenge and Start the Week and has written widely for newspapers and magazines. A Higher Form of Killing was the first of five books he has produced to date. His most recent bestseller is The English: Portrait of a People.

About the Book

The proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is the greatest threat the world faces today. Far easier to make than nuclear bombs, their effects are scarcely less devastating. And many of the world’s most dangerous regimes – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea – either possess them, or are trying to get hold of them. In the hands of terrorists, they could kill thousands, or even millions.

Updated in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, this classic account of the history of chemical and biological warfare, by two of Britain’s leading journalists, spans almost a century of horror, from the mustard gas of the First World War to the germ weapons built up by Saddam Hussein.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book grew out of a film we made for the BBC television programme Panorama, and we would like to thank Roger Bolton, Panorama’s editor, for the encouragement and advice he gave us at that time, and for the understanding that he, and others at the BBC, have shown since.

Thanks are due to so many people who helped in the actual research of this book that we cannot list all of them here. Considerations of space aside, many felt free to talk only with a promise of anonymity.

Among those who can be mentioned, however, we must record our gratitude to the staff of the Public Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, Churchill College, Cambridge, the US Army Public Affairs Department, and Edgewood Arsenal, all of whom assisted with documents and advice. The Church of Scientology also made available to us documents they had unearthed in their campaign against chemical warfare. Among other individuals who gave us their advice and information thanks are due to General Allan Younger, Professor John Erickson, General T. H. Foulkes, David Irving, Lord Stamp, Air Marshal Sir Christopher Hartley, Professor Henry Barcroft and Paul Harris.

Nicholas Sims, Lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics, and Adam Roberts, Reader in International Relations at Oxford University, were both kind enough to read and comment on portions of the typescript for the publishers.

Additional research in Washington was carried out by Scott Malone.

We would also like to thank Jeremy Lewis of Chatto & Windus, without whose initial enthusiasm this book would never have been written; and Elizabeth Burke, who steered our battered manuscript into production.

Although it is invidious to single out particular individuals from the many who have helped us, two in particular deserve our special thanks. One is Dr Rex Watson, the Director of Porton Down, who, within the confines of the Official Secrets Act and with no guarantee of a ‘good press’, gave us invaluable assistance. With his approval, we also enjoyed the help and advice of Porton’s information officer, Alex Spence.

Our other great debt is to Julian Perry Robinson of the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University. He helped generously, both with time and advice, and read the book in its early stages, making many valuable suggestions. All students in this field owe Julian Perry Robinson a debt for the work he did in pulling together the information contained in the first two volumes of the six-part study of chemical and biological weapons published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Where we have drawn upon this, and upon the work of others who have investigated this subject in the past, acknowledgement is made in the notes at the end of the book.

If, despite the best efforts of all the above, we have made errors of fact or judgement, responsibility rests with the authors.

Robert Harris wrote chapters one to five of this book; Jeremy Paxman wrote chapters six to ten. The authors collaborated on chapter eleven.

Also by Robert Harris

FICTION

Fatherland

Enigma

Archangel

NON-FICTION

Good and Faithful Servant

Selling Hitler

The Making of Neil Kinnock

Gotcha!

Also by Jeremy Paxman

Through the Volcanoes

Friends in High Places

Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (editor)

The English

ONE

‘Frightfulness’

THE 22ND OF April 1915 had been a warm and sunny day, but towards the end of the afternoon a breeze sprang up. It came from the north, from behind the German lines, blew across No Man’s Land, and gently fanned the faces of the Allied soldiers in position around the village of Langemarck, near Ypres.

They were new to the trenches – French reservists and Algerians from France’s north African colony. To them the fresh wind must have seemed a good omen, for a few seconds later, as if on cue, the German guns which had been bombarding them all day suddenly stopped firing. An abrupt silence descended over the front.

A few hundred yards away, four divisions – of the 23rd and 26th German Army Corps – crouched in their trenches. They had waited there since dawn, unable to move for fear of giving away their presence. Now, just as it had begun to seem too late, the moment had come. The wind had changed. An attack.

At five o’clock, three red rockets streaked into the sky, signalling the start of a deafening artillery barrage. High explosive shells pounded into the deserted town of Ypres and the villages around it. At the same time the troops sheltering near Langemarck saw two greenish-yellow clouds rise from the enemy’s lines, catch the wind, and billow forwards, gradually merging to form a single bank of blue-white mist: out of sight, in special emplacements protected by sandbags and concrete, German pioneers were opening the valves of 6,000 cylinders spread out along a four mile front. The cylinders contained liquid chlorine – the instant the pressure was released and it came into contact with the air it vaporized and hissed out to form a dense cloud. At thirty parts per million of air chlorine gas produces a rasping cough. At concentrations of one part per thousand it is fatal. The breeze stirred again, and one hundred and sixty tons of it, five feet high and hugging the ground, began to roll towards the Allied trenches.

Chemical warfare had begun.

The wave broke over the first line within a minute, enveloping tens of thousands of troops in an acrid green cloud so thick they could no longer see their neighbours in the trench. Seconds later they were clutching at the air and at their throats, fighting for breath.

Chlorine does not suffocate: it poisons, stripping the lining of the bronchial tubes and lungs. The inflammation produces a massive amount of fluid that blocks the windpipe, froths from the mouth and fills the lungs. In an attempt to escape the effects, some men tried to bury their mouths and nostrils in the earth; others panicked and ran. But any exertion or effort to outdistance the cloud only resulted in deeper breaths and more acute poisoning. As the tide of gas washed over the struggling men their faces turned blue from the strain of trying to breathe; some coughed so violently they ruptured their lungs. Each man, as the British casualty report was later to put it, was ‘being drowned in his own exudation’.¹

Advancing cautiously behind the chlorine cloud came the German infantry, all wearing crude respirators of moist gauze and cotton tied round their faces. They passed through an unprecedented scene of horror. The dead lay where they had fallen, arms outstretched trying to escape the gas. Interspersed with the corpses, the wounded and dying sprawled gasping and choking as their agonized lungs coughed up mouthful after mouthful of yellow fluid. Any metal object the chlorine had come into contact with was tarnished. Buttons, watches, coins; all had turned a dull green. Rifles were rusted and looked as if they had been left out in the mud for months. Most of the breech blocks on the sixty guns the Germans captured that day were unusable.

Any of the French still capable of movement fled. The British suddenly found the roads and bridges of their sector clogged with retreating soldiers, many of whom could only point at their throats in explanation. By six o’clock, even as far back as ten miles, the chlorine cloud was still making men cough and their eyes smart. By seven o’clock, the few French guns which had been left in action were ominously silent.

The first large-scale gas attack had taken the Allied commanders so completely by surprise that it was not until the early hours of the morning that they began to appreciate the scale of the disaster that had overtaken them. The Germans had torn a hole four miles wide in the Western Front, smashing in an afternoon defences which had held for months. The German commander, Falkenhayn, was as startled as his opponents by the overwhelming effect of chemical warfare. He had seen gas merely as an experimental aid to his attack and had insufficient reserves ready to exploit his advantage. But for that he might have been able to drive right through the Allied line to the Channel ports: the gas attack could have won the war for the Germans. Instead, as night fell over Ypres, the German soldiers dug in. Falkenhayn’s ‘experiment’, the Germans reckoned, had cost the Allies 5,000 men dead and 10,000 wounded.

Thirty-six hours later, while the British and the French were still struggling to fill the breach in their defences, the Germans struck again. At 2.45 am, shortly before dawn on the 24 April, Captain Bertram of the Canadian 8th Battalion noticed some greenish-white smoke rising from the German front line about 600 yards away. Travelling at eight miles an hour, the cloud ‘drifted along the ground towards our trenches, not rising to more than seven feet from the ground when it reached our front line’.² The bank of high-density chlorine rolled over the Canadians, whose only protection was handkerchiefs, socks and towels which they urinated on and then stuffed into their mouths. Over the next few hours they were subjected to successive waves of gas so thick they blotted out the sun. Once or twice through the clouds they caught glimpses of German troops apparently dressed as divers, wearing large hoods with a single glass eyepiece set in the front.

There was the same panic-stricken scramble for the rear. On a small stretch of ground leading from the advanced trenches to the supports Bertram counted twenty-seven bodies of men killed trying to outrun the gas; he himself collapsed with vomiting and diarrhoea, unable to breathe, with a feeling ‘of great heaviness in the bottom of the chest’.

The German gas and artillery attack killed 5,000 men. Sergeant Grindley of the Canadian 15th Battalion was one of hundreds carried off the battlefield into the primitive medical posts. The doctors had no idea how to treat gas casualties and two days later Grindley died, gasping for breath. The surgeon who treated him called it ‘air hunger’. In blue pencil he scrawled a post-mortem report:

Of those who survived the gas attack, 60 per cent had to be sent home; half were still fully disabled at the end of the war.

Neither for the first time nor the last, men like Grindley – ‘lions led by donkeys’ – suffered for the blunders of their commanders who for weeks beforehand had been warned of what the Germans were planning. Although the facts were suppressed at the time, we now know that on 13 April, over a week before the first attack, a French patrol had captured a German soldier actually carrying a respirator. The soldier, a twenty-four-year-old private called August Jager of Germany’s 26th Army Corps, revealed the German plan to use gas and described the position of the cylinders (the existence of which had already been confirmed by aerial reconnaissance). Jager’s information was passed to the French divisional commander, General Ferry, who in turn passed it on to the British and French High Commands with the advice either that the men threatened be withdrawn or the gas emplacements bombarded. Both his warning and his advice were ignored. As the official British report on the affair – classed ‘secret’ until almost sixty years after the attack – put it:

Neither Ferry nor Jager profited when their predictions were proved correct. Ferry was dismissed from his post by the French High Command, furious at having their incompetence revealed. Jager’s fate was grimmer. In a memoir published in 1930, Ferry imprudently named him as the source of his information. Jäger, now a civilian, was promptly arrested, and at Leipzig in 1932 he was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, the court deciding that his betrayal of German plans had helped cost them the war – the last and perhaps saddest casualty of the first gas attack.

The victims of Ypres were evacuated to the area around Boulogne, where they became the focus of intense scientific curiosity. What gas were the Germans using? What protection could be devised against it? The British ransacked their universities and hospitals for experts who might be able to provide the answers to these questions, and by the end of April the seaside town was filled to overflowing with wounded and dying men, attended by a small army of specialists and academics.

The largest hospital was housed in the famous pre-war Casino at Le Touquet, one of the great symbols of the Golden Era that came to an end in August 1914. Now – wrote one of Britain’s leading physiologists, Joseph Barcroft – in elegant rooms which had once echoed to the sound of the roulette wheel, ‘one simply wades through wounded’. Another hospital, in the Pleasure Pavilion at the end of the pier, was ‘so full that it was almost impossible to move about. All the beds full and all available space on the floors. All the other hospitals are the same. Sometimes the beds are made and three cases pass through the bed in a day.’⁵

The feelings of shock and outrage were compounded by the fact that poison gas was specifically outlawed by international law. The Hague Declaration of 1899 had helped lay down the principle that there were certain methods of combat which were outside the scope of civilized warfare. The signatories, including Germany, had pledged among other things ‘to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’.

To the gassed soldiers sixteen years later, this Edwardian gentlemen’s agreement must have been as far removed from the realities of 1915 as the ornate chandeliers and paintings crated away at the Casino. With extraordinary cynicism, the Germans claimed that by not using projectiles but instead releasing the cloud of gas from cylinders, they had avoided breaking the Hague agreement. The German newspaper, Kölnishe Zeitung, went so far as to claim that ‘the letting loose of smoke clouds, which, in a gentle wind, move quite slowly towards the enemy, is not only permissible by international law, but is an extraordinarily mild method of war’.⁶ The British Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, did not think so. On 23 April he telegraphed London asking for the means to retaliate. On the 24th, as the Canadians were enduring the second gas attack, Lord Kitchener, the War Minister, replied. ‘Before we fall to the level of the degraded Germans,’ he informed French, ‘I must submit the matter to the Government.’ It was clear, international agreements notwithstanding, that general chemical warfare could not now be far off. While the Cabinet considered the British position with regard to gas, news of the attack was spread to the general public.

There was a great spasm of anti-German feeling. The press fuelled the anger, printing vivid accounts of the suffering of the wounded. ‘Their faces, arms, hands were of a shiny grey-black colour,’ wrote ‘The Times, ‘with mouths open and lead-glazed eyes, all swaying slightly backwards and forwards trying to get breath.’⁷ Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail appealed to the women of England to make respirators using a simple pattern of cotton wool in a gauze envelope. The response to the Mail’s call was enormous: a million of these embryo gas masks were made in a single day. Thousands unfortunately reached the front and were issued; they were useless when dry and caused suffocation when wet. A week after they arrived, the British High Command ordered them to be withdrawn; by the time the last one disappeared from the battlefield some days later, the Mail’s respirator had been responsible for the deaths of scores of men.

Not that the official policy was much better. The army relied on the advice of two English professors, Haldane and Baker, who visited the front on 27 April. They recommended as protection the ‘use of cloths etc moistened with urine, earth folded in cloth or enclosed in a bottle from which the base has been removed’.⁸ These stop-gap measures were all that the Allies had to carry them through three gas attacks on 1, 6 and 10 of May.

The last and greatest attack of the summer came on the 24th. At dawn, under cover of a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans released chlorine along a two-mile sector of the front, between the Menin Road and Sanctuary Wood, south-west of Ypres. The men who held the line – soldiers of the British 1st Cavalry, 4th and 28th Divisions – clutched hastily-issued respirators consisting of two layers of flannel (with tapes attached to tie over the mouth) which were meant to be dipped in soda solution before use, bottles of which were placed in the trenches.

The menacing cloud of greenish-white gas swirled over the British positions as it had over the French and Canadian, but this time at a totally unexpected density. The chlorine reached a concentration which proved fatal a mile and a half away; it was still strong enough to cause vomiting and smarting of the eyes nine miles from the front. Three miles back, at Ypres, houses and trees were completely blotted from view and the cellars of the hospital ‘became filled with a fog’. In the trenches themselves – only a few hundred yards from the cylinders – the gas produced desperate scenes, as General Wilson recorded:

The attack lasted for over four hours. During the next few days, nearly three and a half thousand men were treated for gas poisoning; more than half of them had to be sent home to England. There were no figures for the number of dead.

Two days later, on 26 May, a strange figure clad in a uniform ‘bearing tell-tale marks of long association with mud and barbed wire’, a cap split by a shell splinter and a pistol strapped to his belt, appeared at the Advanced General Headquarters of the British Army at Hazebrouck. Major Charles Howard Foulkes of His Majesty’s Royal Engineers had an appointment with General Robertson, Chief of Staff to Sir John French. It was an interview, Foulkes later recalled, of few words:

The British Army had, in Foulkes, appointed as ‘Gas Adviser’ a figure seemingly straight from the pages of Kipling or Rider Haggard. Foulkes was one of seven sons of a British chaplain in India, all of whom grew up to serve the Empire, and five of whom were buried overseas. By the time of his appointment in 1915 Foulkes was forty. He had spent twenty-three years in the Army, and had seen service in Sierra Leone. (‘The White Man’s Grave’ where he had twice nearly died of malaria), Gambia, the Gold Coast, South Africa, the West Indies, Nigeria and Ceylon. During the Boer War he had devised bicycle-mounted photo-reconnaissance equipment and several times narrowly escaped being shot while photographing Boer positions. In 1902, posing as a newspaperman and ostensibly covering the eruptions of the Mont Pêlee volcano, he had secretly photographed the French fortification in Martinique for the Secret Service. In the same year, travelling on horseback and by canoe, he penetrated deep into hostile and largely unexplored country to chart the boundary between Northern Nigeria and the French Sahara. A big game hunter, a First Division football player (for the Scottish side, Heart of Midlothian), a competitor at the 1908 Olympic Games, this remarkable, archetypal son of the Empire was to crown his career as ADC to the King and die in his bed – in the same year that men landed on the moon – at the age of ninety-five.

In 1915 the task facing him was to tax even his ingenuity to the utmost. The British High Command wanted gas ready to employ in their autumn offensive. Foulkes had five months to devise a gas weapon, get it into production, recruit and train men to use it, and work out how best to employ it. Fortunately for the British, these attempts would not be hampered by further German gas attacks. After the attack on 24 May, the wind began to blow from the west, and the Germans transferred their Gas Corps to the Eastern Front, where it was employed with devastating results against the ill-equipped Russian Army. Apart from two attacks against the French in October, no more gas was discharged against the Allies in France until December.

The major problem confronting Foulkes was the one which he, as a soldier, could do least about: the weakness of the British chemical industry. There was nothing in the United Kingdom, or even in the rest of the world, remotely to match the productive capacity of Germany’s eight giant chemical combines huddled together in the massive concentration in the Ruhr known as the Interessen Gemeinschaft – the IG.

To fight a war with poison gas requires highly efficient massproduction, a demand which the IG (then capitalized at an estimated $400 million) was ideally suited to meet. Most First World War gases could be manufactured in bulk using the methods and machinery normally employed in making dyestuffs. By the start of the war, Germany had a virtual world monopoly in the production of dyes; Britain on the other hand could produce only a tenth of what she needed. The imbalance was to be a serious handicap to the Allied chemical warfare effort, which right up to the end of the war lagged behind the efficiency of their enemy’s. Indeed it was this unchallengeable superiority in chemical production, together with the fact that the British naval blockade was starving them of supplies of nitrate for making high explosive, that first led the German High Command to contemplate using gas.

They had introduced a form of tear gas (called T-Stoff after its inventor, Dr Tappen) on the Russian Front in January 1915. T-Stoff, one of the precursors of modern riot gas, was considered just within the scope of weapons permitted by the Hague Convention. The Allies had similar weapons. In March, the French, on the initiative of a conscripted policeman, introduced tear gas cartridges and grenades. The British were developing a ‘stink bomb’ for clearing dug-outs named ‘SK’ after South Kensington where it was invented. In the stress of war, it seemed but a short step from the use of gases which ‘incapacitated’ men by temporarily blinding or choking them, to the introduction of lethal agents.

The introduction of chemical warfare was in fact actively canvassed by the IG cartel from the outset of the war, most notably by its head, Carl Duisberg. An ‘imperious Prussian who would not tolerate dissent in either his personal or his business life’,¹¹ a man who (specifically) spoke of and believed in the ‘Führer Principle’ long before Hitler was ever heard of, Duisberg belonged to the scientific and industrial elite whose skill and unscrupulousness was to enable Germany to fight the world for ten out of the next forty years.

The chemical industry was the foundation of Germany’s war machine. Without Duisberg’s factories’ discovery and mass production of synthetic nitrates, the Kaiser would have been forced to sue for peace in 1915. Now, the initiation of poison gas warfare promised both to strengthen further the IG’s position in Germany, and to revive the moribund dye industry, which had been at a virtual standstill since the start of the war. Duisberg urged the employment of chemical warfare at a special conference of the German High Command in the autumn of 1914 and he personally investigated the toxicity of the various war gases. (Later he arranged for the offices of his own company, Bayer, to be decorated with a giant frieze depicting all the various aspects of the factory’s war work: one panel showed gas being made, another shells being filled, a third gas masks being assembled. At the end of the war he proudly displayed this work of art to a bemused Allied officer.)

To Duisberg’s enthusiasm and the productive power of the IG was added the genius of Germany’s leading industrial scientist. The man today generally credited as the ‘father’ of chemical warfare was the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin: Fritz Haber. Forty years old, a brilliant chemist, a future Nobel Prizewinner and a fervent patriot, Haber energetically set about the task of finding the world’s first, practical, lethal chemical weapon. Work began in the autumn of 1914. ‘We could hear,’ stated a witness at the end of the war, ‘the tests that Professor Haber was carrying out at the back of the Institute, with the military authorities, who in their steel-gray cars came to Haber’s Institute every morning . . . The work was pushed day and night, and many times I saw activity in the building at eleven o’clock in the evening. It was common knowledge that Haber was pushing these men as hard as he could.’¹² In one of these early experiments a laboratory was blown up killing Haber’s assistant, Professor Sachur.

By January Haber had a weapon ready to show the Army. Instead of filling the chemical into shells, he proposed to discharge it from cylinders. The chemical he chose was chlorine, a powerful asphyxiating gas which could be easily stored in the cylinders in liquid form; on contact with the air it evaporated into a low-hanging cloud which, with a favourable wind, could be carried into the heart of the enemy’s positions. In addition, there were large stocks of chlorine to hand. Even before the war, the IG was producing forty tons per day; British production was less than a tenth of this.

The shock of the new weapon, the scale upon which an attack could be mounted, and the ability of gas to penetrate even the strongest fortifications, gave the Germans great hope that chemical warfare might end the deadlock in the west. Haber himself went to Ypres to supervise the attack. Yet despite the fact that between 22 April and 24 May, 500 tons of chlorine were discharged from over 20,000 cylinders, the Allied line held. Gas could not win the war alone – it had to be backed by a powerful offensive, which at Ypres the Germans failed to mount. Haber was bitterly disappointed. The military commanders, he wrote later, ‘admitted afterward that if they had followed my advice and made a large-scale attack, instead of the experiment at Ypres, the Germans would have won.’¹³

Haber returned to Berlin where his wife Clara pleaded with him to give up his work and stay at home. Haber refused. In May he left for the Eastern Front where in three devastating attacks forty miles west of Warsaw the Russians lost around 25,000 men killed and wounded. Throughout the war the poorly-protected Russians suffered the worst of all the countries engaged in the chemical war: by the end of the war they were said to have suffered almost half a million casualties. In just one of the early attacks the Siberian Regiment was virtually eliminated – it began with thirty-nine officers and 4,310 men; it ended with four officers and 400 men.¹⁴

In the west, however, it was the Germans who were about to suffer. Duisberg had made a fatal miscalculation about the Allies’ inability to respond with chemical weapons. Far from breaking the stalemate as he and Haber had hoped, gas was to become a major part of it. A pattern was established which was to persist to the end of the war: the Germans would initiate the use of a new gas to try to break through; it would fail, be copied by the Allies, and the cycle would repeat itself. In the summer of 1915, as work began in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on the next war gas – phosgene – Foulkes struggled to find the men and material for the Allies’ first gas attack – using chlorine.

Haber himself was left to mourn the personal cost of his work on chemical warfare. On the night that he left for the Eastern Front, Clara Haber committed suicide.

And so, by a combination of industrial might, military expediency, and the skill of a handful of patriotic scientists, the world drifted into chemical warfare. Britain’s poison gas offensive was waged by an elite section of the army, raised by Foulkes and known as the Special Companies (later the Special Brigade). Everyone was given extra pay and all held a rank at least equivalent to corporal. Most of them were new recruits, science graduates or industrial chemists. After the war many of them became key figures in Britain’s fledgling Imperial Chemical Industries. In 1915 they carried revolvers instead of rifles, were largely excused the discipline of the parade ground, and learned instead to handle the ‘oojahs’, the great 190 lb cylinders of chlorine which required two men to carry them and which were to be the basis of Britain’s first chemical attack.

By 25 September, 5,500 of these cylinders, containing 150 tons of gas, had been manhandled into position at Loos in Belgium ready for the British offensive. They had been shipped across the Channel in the greatest secrecy, each in an unmarked wooden box carried at a cost of twelve shillings each. A patrol of aeroplanes ensured that the Special Companies were not observed as they prepared the attack.

The need for surprise was paramount. In all plans for the attack distributed to company commanders, gas was referred to simply as ‘the accessory’, and severe penalties were imposed on anyone who accidentally described ‘the accessory’ as gas. The attitude of most officers to ‘the accessory’, and to the ill-assorted soldiers in charge of it, was well summed up by the old-school Captain Thomas in Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That:

Yet, for all the suspicion, Foulkes could, on the eve of the Battle of Loos, look back on a remarkable achievement. Five months after the German initiation of gas warfare had caught the Allies by surprise, he had 1,404 men, including fifty-seven officers under his command. As they moved into position at midnight on the 25th, Foulkes waited nervously at Sir Douglas Haig’s battle headquarters at a nearby château, a large-scale trench map spread out on the table in front of him, with small flags representing each of his commanders. At 5 am Haig considered calling off the attack. The wind was so slight that stepping into the grounds of the château, he asked one of his officers to light a cigarette; the puff of smoke scarcely drifted in the still morning air. Nevertheless, the attack went ahead. At 5.50 am the cylinders were opened. One gas officer, in a sector where the wind was least favourable, refused to discharge the gas. His refusal was relayed to Headquarters who instructed him to do as he was told. A few minutes later he was horrified to see the cloud drift back, gassing hundreds of British troops.

Graves was scathing about the efficiency of Foulkes’s men in his sector of the front. The spanners they had been provided with for unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders were the wrong size and ‘the gas-men rushed about shouting for the loan of adjustable spanners.’ Only one or two cylinders were released. Warned of the attack the Germans opened fire: ‘direct hits broke several of the gas cylinders, the trench filled with gas, the gas-company stampeded.’

The original order given to Sergeant J. B. Moss of the Special Brigade’s ‘B Company’ on 25 September 1915, instructing him to prepare for Britain’s first gas attack (Imperial War Museum).

Things went better elsewhere along the front. An aerial reconnaissance report handed to Haig shortly after 6 am reported that ‘the gas cloud was rolling steadily over towards the German lines’. As the chlorine reached the first trenches, warning drums began to sound along the length of the German Front. In the trenches themselves the scenes were a virtual replay of those at Ypres in April. Officers and men were equally unprepared. Masks had been lost or forgotten, most of the respirators they had were useless (after the attack one British sergeant reported burying twenty-three gassed Germans: all were wearing respirators). German commanders reported complete panic. Men who had been given no rations for four days as a result of the constant bombardment which had preceded the gas attack were already weak and quickly collapsed. Some tried to crouch in dug-outs – these were at first free from gas, but gradually it accumulated and forced them out. Seventy Germans tried to come over the top to surrender but were mown down by their own machine gunners who were better equipped than the ordinary troops, with divers’ helmets and oxygen cylinders. Eventually though even they succumbed: their oxygen supply lasted thirty minutes; by carefully interspersing the clouds of chlorine with waves of smoke, the British padded out the attack to forty minutes. The smoke had an additional psychological effect, blotting out the autumn morning with a fog so thick that as far back as four miles behind the German line visibility was less than ten paces.

An hour after the first discharge of gas, the British infantry charged the German line, penetrating a mile in the first rush. ‘Behind the fourth gas and smoke cloud,’ reported the war correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, ‘there suddenly emerged Englishmen in thick lines and storming columns. They rose suddenly from the earth wearing smoke masks over their faces and looking not like soldiers but like devils. These were bad and terrible hours.’¹⁶ A soldier of the 1st Middlesex Regiment, in a letter which was stopped by the censor, wrote:

British soldiers fought their way through German trenches that were a wasteland of dead. The 20th Brigade reported ‘whole machine gun crews lying gassed to death’. Other troops described ‘five men and two officers lying heaped in one place, blue in the face and undoubtedly gassed to death’. Men lay face down in the trenches; one officer reported a German still seated in his chair – gassed. Elsewhere, six dead Germans were found huddled together, as if trying to ward off the cold. Many of the dead were in the second and third lines, and in the communicating trenches where they had died trying to scramble to the rear. ‘We saw the deadly effects of our gas,’ wrote one officer to a London paper. ‘The Germans had suffered as we too had suffered in the past.’¹⁸

In some places, the German line was penetrated by British troops to a depth of three miles. But, as in so many battles of the First World War, the gains were transitory and small, the sacrifices enormous. Although eighteen guns and 3,000 prisoners were captured, the Battle of Loos cost the British over 50,000 casualties. There was no breakthrough. As at Ypres, gas – unpredictable in its effects and heavily dependent upon the weather – had failed to achieve the decisive victory each side sought. Like Haber, Foulkes was left after the battle to sigh a series of ‘ifs’: ‘if fortune had been a little kinder, if the wind had been only slightly more favourable, there is no doubt whatever that Sir John French would have gained a smashing victory on this day.’¹⁹ As it was, within a week the Germans had recaptured almost all the ground they had lost.

After Loos, gas was an even more unpopular weapon than it had been before. In the three weeks after the first discharge, 2,000 British troops reported as casualties of British gas; fifty-five cases were ‘severe’ and ten died. Pipes and cylinders often leaked, frequently they were damaged by enemy shells; and when a gas attack occurred, the wind often wafted the cloud over the wrong side. Even the commanders viewed it with distaste.

In the ordinary soldier there was born a hatred of gas that steadily deepened as the war progressed. For the next three years men were kept constantly on their guard. Allied anti-gas schools were set up at Havres, Rouen, Etaples, Abbeville, Boulogne and Calais. Every soldier was put through a standard course which included an hour immersed in a cloud of gas (to give him ‘confidence in his respirator’) and half a minute exposed to tear gas (to give him a fright and teach him to take anti-gas precautions seriously). Masks had to be put on in a regulation six seconds – but before being allowed to do so, and while still exposed to the tear gas, men had to repeat their name, number and battalion; sometimes they were made to do it twice. ‘It was,’ as one historian has put it, ‘a brisk business, which sent men back to the front with an aggrieved feeling of the unfairness of gas.’²⁰ It was believed that gas casualties were a result of slack discipline. Courts of Inquiry were held on the victims, and each gas case had to wear a ‘wound stripe’ – visible evidence of his neglect in allowing himself to be gassed. (This practice was only stopped after the introduction of mustard gas, when there were simply too many casualties for the system to cope with.)

The effectiveness of these stern measures is reflected in the statistics for gas casualties. Of the 180,983 British soldiers officially accounted as having been gassed in the First World War, only 6,062 are recorded as having died, giving a mortality rate of around 3 per cent²¹ (although, as will be discussed later, this figure is almost certainly well below the true number).

Using these figures, advocates of chemical warfare later argued that gas was actually the most humane of the weapons used in the First World War, wounding far more than it killed. But the figures do not reveal either the horror or persistence of gas wounds. Nor do they show the psychological casualties. As the fighting dragged on, the constant state of gas readiness imperceptibly sapped men’s strength and fighting spirit. Fear was omnipresent. Every few miles along every road, signs warned of the danger of gas. As far back as twelve miles you had constantly to carry your mask. In the event of a gas alarm a deafening racket arose along the front. Bells were rung, empty shell cases beaten, and the great Strombus horns – twenty-eight to the mile, powered by compressed air and audible nine miles away – let out warning screams. One eyewitness recalled:

In June 1915, 2,500,000 ‘Hypo Helmets’ were issued – bags of flannel which had been chemically impregnated against chlorine. The bags were placed over the head and tucked into the collar; two eyepieces cut into the front and made of celluloid enabled the wearer to peer out at the scene around him. In the autumn the British added modifications – the helmet was better impregnated and a rubber exhaust tube was added. Nine million of these ‘P Helmets’ were issued by December.

The shapeless hood, the twin eyeholes, the elephant’s trunk of rubber hanging down from the mouth – the respirators gave the men a nightmarish quality as they moved around in the dense clouds of gas. To wear, the masks were extremely uncomfortable. Often they leaked around the mouthpiece, or the eyepieces cracked and let in the gas. They produced a feeling of suffocation. A dangerous concentration of carbon dioxide was likely to build up inside. They made you sweat, and when that happened the eyepieces steamed up and the chemical solution the flannel had been dipped in began to run, stinging the face and dripping down the neck. And in a long attack, the effectiveness of the helmets could come dangerously close to exhaustion; with the chemical protection worn away, the gas was able to seep through.

The P Helmet had been hastily improvised to provide protection against phosgene, another chemical used in the dye industry, whose potential as a war gas had been noticed by the Allies in the summer of 1915. The helmet arrived at the front in the nick of time.

At 5.30 am on 19 December, the German Gas Corps broke their six month silence on the British Front with an attack at Ypres using phosgene for the first time. Captain Adie of the Royal Army Medical Corps recalled a loud hissing sound. ‘Almost at the same moment red rockets went up from the German lines . . . I was at Headquarters drinking a cup of tea with the Colonel. At first I thought the water from which the tea was made had been over-chlorinated – a moment later I thought I could smell gas.’²³

Travelling at great speed, the cloud – a mixture of chlorine and phosgene – outstripped the alarm system of gongs and klaxons and took hundreds of men unawares; one man was gassed five miles behind the front line. Panic set in on the dark winter morning as shell fire cut all the telephone wires to the front. It was mid-afternoon before Adie could reach the first trench. Most of the chlorine victims were already dead, ‘blue and puffed out’, the wounded frothing from the mouth. The phosgene victims began to feel worse as the day progressed. Men who thought they had escaped being gassed suddenly found the slightest effort made them ill.

One officer died suddenly in an ambulance, another collapsed while walking to report his symptoms. A third reported to a medical post at 8.30 pm. ‘He said he didn’t feel very well, but he did not look very bad. I gave him a cup of tea which he drank and we talked for a little while. Suddenly he collapsed in the chair he was sitting on. I gave him some oxygen but he died an hour afterwards.’ 1,069 men were gassed that day; 116 died.

The appearance of phosgene greatly deepened the fear of gas. Like chlorine it had quirky side-effects – for example it made pipe tobacco taste like hay. But it was, at a rough calculation, eighteen times as powerful as chlorine, practically colourless and odourless, and much more difficult to detect. Effective in concentrations of just one part in 50,000 it had a deadly delayed action. A victim who has inhaled a lethal dose at first feels nothing more than a mild irritation of eyes and throat which quickly passes off; for up to two days afterwards a man might actually feel mildly euphoric. Throughout this period his lungs are filling with fluid. Collapse comes quickly. The slightest action – turning over in bed for instance – can send the respiration rate rocketing to 80 breaths per minute, the pulse to 120. The ‘drowning period’ begins. Official reports describe ‘an abundant flow of thin watery fluid, often streaked with blood, which simply flows from the mouth as the dying patient loses the power to expel it. After death, the foam from this fluid may dry to a white efflorescence around the mouth.’²⁵ Victims were known to cough up four pints of this yellowish liquid every hour; it could take forty-eight hours to die.

The gas produced some of the most curious stories of the war. Foulkes recalled a German taken prisoner after a British phosgene attack. At his interrogation, in high spirits, he ridiculed the ineffectiveness of British gas. Twenty-four hours later he was dead. One German died while writing a letter home to his family. Because of its delayed action, phosgene caused many casualties among the men of the Special Companies, unaware that they were being poisoned.

At the Battle of the Somme alone, fifty-seven of Foulkes’s men died from the effects of their own gas.

Frankfurter Zeitung²⁷