The 19th Century

The 19th Century and the First World War.

Between the Napoleonic war and the Crimean war Europe was generally at peace. In this period Britain prospered as it led the Industrial revolution and had a protected agricultural economy. However, agriculture was still a risky undertaking with all the hazards of Nature essentially untamed and animal and crop diseases capable of destroying a harvest or the prospects of livestock. This was most dramatically demonstrated in Ireland during the 1840's. Almost half of all potato crops in Ireland failed, but this had never happened two years in a row. When the pathogenic alga Phytophthora infestans invaded Irish potato fields it destroyed a second crop in two years for the first time ever. A nation that was largely at subsistence level and at odds with its foreign landlords and political masters was devastated with over a quarter of its people either dying in the famine that resulted or emigrating to North America or Australia. The bitter aftermath of what was called the Great Hunger lingers to this day and teaches many lessons about the vulnerability of agriculture, the need for continued research, and the need for contingency planning and government involvement in reacting to the disease.

The rise of science in the 19th Century led to people looking at chemicals in particular as an alternative to shot and shell. There was little enthusiasm in the military establishment for them. The first coherent proposal by a British officer to use chemical weapons during the Napoleonic Wars was neatly buried and a proposal during the Crimean War (1853-1856) that the British look into using the fumes of burning sulfur (sulfur dioxide) in the reduction of Fort Malakoff during the Siege of Sevastopol was brusquely rejected. Several countries also developed internal prohibitions against the use of poisons.

The 1863 (U.S.) General Orders War Department No. 100, stated that:

"The use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells or food or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare."

The first efforts at preventing the development of chemical weapons took place shortly after the Crimean War beginning with the Brussels Convention of 1874 and continuing at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1902. The Hague Conference issued a resolution seeking to get the Contracting Powers (the nations and empires represented at the conference) to abstain from the use of projectiles with the sole aim of distributing deleterious or noxious gases.

Circumstances chipped away at these prohibitions as the British used picric acid-filled grenades as harassing weapons (to no great effect) during the Boer War and the French used a little chemistry to help with the Miracle of the Marne in World War I. As Paris taxis were shuttling French poilus forward, German troops were being held up in part by the use of a tear gas - bromoacetic acid ethyl ester.

Up until this point, chemical weapons had been marginally effective harassing agents that provoked no strong response. The conventions were thrown aside at the first use of a lethal agent in August 1915. Germany, at the urging of the great chemist Fritz Haber, released chlorine, a toxic, corrosive gas into French trenches near Ypres. The Germans used gas cylinders rather than projectiles in a finesse of the Hague Conference resolution that they were signatories to. The effects were devastating and whole units collapsed.

The German military had tried using the tear gas-like harassing agent T-Stoff (benzyl bromide) at Bolimov on the Russian front in January 1915 but the low temperatures of the Russian winter greatly limited its effectiveness. The commanding general on the Western front - von Falkenhayn - did not believe that the chlorine would be particularly effective and made only a single company available to exploit the hole that the gas was to eat in the French lines. Within a few months the Allies retaliated in kind and by the end of the war over 110,000 tons of chemical weapons were used by the two sides. Chemical weapons casualties were estimated at over 1,300,000 with approximately 90,000 of them dying. The true numbers of victims of chemical weapons remain disputed to this day. The Hague Convention was ignored as both sides developed improved delivery methods and mortar and artillery projectiles to deliver their chemical weapons in drenching barrages. In the battle for the village of Armentiéres the German mustard gas bombardment was so intense that it ran in the gutters like water.

Chlorine turned out to be highly disabling, but killed only 1-2% of those exposed. Most victims recovered and were returned to duty in a few weeks. Gas masks, although uncomfortable and physically and psychologically taxing for the wearer, eventually gave adequate protection against chlorine. Alternatives were sought that could either bypass gas masks or act on the skin and therefore force them into cumbersome protective clothing. The search began for more effective weapons and thousands of chemicals were tested by both sides. The Germans introduced sixteen chemicals as weapons, including mustard gas, and the Allies introduced thirteen, including cyanides and phosgene.

A Chronology of Introduction of Major
Chemical Weapons in World War I

Chemical Weapons used in World War I

The Allies and the Germans both came up with the idea of using bombardments of a combination of lethal agents and mask-penetrating irritants (mask breakers) that would force victims to take off their masks. German chemical shells were coded with colored crosses according to the agent used to fill the shell. The Germans, somewhat incongruously, gave artillery patterns using such combinations of weapons the bucolic name of Buntkreuz (colored cross) bombardments.

Phosgene, deployed by the British, bypassed the gas mask because it is more or less without odor and slow acting. The victim inhaled a significant dose before symptoms appeared, often hours or days later when their lungs filled with fluid and they dropped dead in their tracks. Mustard gas, developed by the Germans remains in use today because of its properties. It attacks not only the lungs and eyes but also the skin causing painful blisters and it is highly persistent. When it is dispersed, it settles on the ground and does not evaporate for days or weeks. Residues of mustard gas used in World War I were still causing some casualties in the 1960's. Mustard gas was used on an enormous scale (12,000 tons) and although disabling, it again was not particularly lethal.

Terms such as irritating or disabling probably fail to convey the dread of gas attacks in the Great War as it was then called. In the early days, there was little or nothing in the way of protection for soldiers, although gas masks and protective suits evolved rapidly during the war, they were heavy and uncomfortable to wear and some of the early efforts were dangerous. Also, the face masks cut off face-to-face contact and isolated the individual from his comrades and helped further to degrade unit moral and cohesion. Gas attacks became common relatively quickly with up to a half of all artillery rounds in some engagements containing gas. A British officer termed gas weapons "frightfulness" and this may be the closest we come to describing gas attacks with perhaps the exception of Wilfred Owen who wrote these words in 1917.

GAS! GAS! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
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.

From Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen.

The Tsarist Russian army was not only the first of the Allies to be exposed to chemical weapons, albeit ineffectively, it was also the one to suffer the greatest number of chemical casualties. Russian technology lagged behind that of Western Europe and the practice of trading lives for land meant that Russian soldiers were unprepared and unprotected. Russia was also only able to mount a feeble response in kind. The Russians did manage to come up with the first activated charcoal filter gas mask. They were not lacking in men of intelligence, but they lacked them in the right places. These were lessons that the Soviet military were to take to heart.

Estimated Gas Casualties in World War I
Country	Theater of Operations	Casualties	Fatalities
Austro-Hungary	Predominantly Eastern front	100,000	3,000
Germany	Eastern and Western fronts	200,000	9,000
Russia	Eastern front	475,000	56,000
Western Allies (Britain, France, Italy, United States)	Western front (Italy also on Eastern)	510,000	22,000

The use of chemical weapons sparked furious debate. Allied and neutral politicians, soldiers and the public alike were horrified by the thought of young men being poisoned in masses. This view was well-stated by Sir John French, one of the British commanders in northern France, shortly after the use of chlorine at Ypres. French, however, was to show little compunction in using chemical weapons himself.

"As a soldier, I cannot help expressing the deepest regret and some surprise that an Army which, hitherto, has claimed to be the chief exponent of the chivalry of war, should have stooped to employ such devices against brave and gallant foes..."

Sir John French, 12 July 1915.

The debate was not completely one-sided. Fritz Haber had urged the use of chemical weapons because they were more effective than conventional weapons because they coulds pread into bunkers shielded against shot and would end the war quickly. In essence, he was arguing that they were a more humane weapon and was to describe chemical weapons as a"higher form of killing." Haber was apparently unmoved when his wife committed suicide in despair over his work on chemical weapons. He fled to Switzerland as the war ended and, amid controversy over his role in the development of chemical weapons, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1919 for his development of a method for the manufacture of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.

The Germans also argued that chlorine was less toxic than the fumes generated by Allied high-explosive shells using the picric acid-based explosive Lyddite. Haber was supported on the Allied side by the leading British biologist and occasional iconoclast J.B.S. Haldane. Haldane wrote a small book (Callinicus: a defence of chemical warfare.) that was largely ignored and the US naval theorist Alfred Mahan argued that there was no real difference between gassing five hundred men and drowning them by blowing the bottom out of their ship. Physicians and chemists lined up on both sides of the argument. As thing stand, the ratification and passing into effect of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997 and the continuing maturing of the oversight mechanisms of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention has ended the debate for most nation states in favor of abolition. Despite this, several nations are still prepared to use chemical weapons in defiance of these Conventions, and the use of chemical weapons became attractive to some apocalyptic sects peopling the end of the millennium. The idea has been released, and it will not die and the debate will not end.

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