An anonymous eyewitness account from the British lines leaves little to the imagination:
Utterly unprepared for what was to come, the [French] divisions gazed for a short while spellbound at the strange phenomenon they saw coming slowly toward them. Like some liquid the heavy-coloured vapour poured relentlessly into the trenches, filled them, and passed on. For a few seconds nothing happened; the sweet-smelling stuff merely tickled their nostrils; they failed to realize the danger. Then, with inconceivable rapidity, the gas worked, and blind panic spread. Hundreds, after a dreadful fight for air, became unconscious and died where they lay – a death of hideous torture, with the frothing bubbles gurgling in their throats and the foul liquid welling up in their lungs. With blackened faces and twisted limbs one by one they drowned – only that which drowned them came from inside and not from out. Others, staggering, falling, lurching on, and of their ignorance keeping pace with the gas, went back. A hail of rifle fire and shrapnel mowed them down, and the line was broken. There was nothing on the British left – their flank was up in the air. The northeast corner of the salient around Ypres had been pierced. From in front of St. Julien away up north toward Boesinghe there was no one in front of the Germans.6
As the effects of the gas spread, birds literally fall from the skies. The fresh green shoots of early spring that have erupted on the still-standing trees of the Ypres Salient turn brown and wither. Even the rats that swarm and multiply in the fetid trenches succumb to the poison, dying in their thousands.
In the trenches next to the French, on 22 April 1915, was the 3rd Canadian Brigade, which now rushed men into position to cover the gap in the front lines caused by the shock of this new German offensive – the Second Battle of Ypres. To their right were units of Tirailleurs (Riflemen) from French Algeria, who had so far escaped the gas and held their positions. Together, they faced the inevitable German attack through the breach in the lines. On this day, in this war that many were still calling the ‘Great European War’, few among the desperate defenders on the Allied side were men whose homes were now in Europe.
Canada was, in 1914, a nation of both immigrants and indigenous peoples. Two-thirds of the Canadian Expeditionary Force may have been born in Britain, but there were also Japanese Canadians, French-speakers from Quebec, and Canadian Flemings whose forebears were from Belgium and who, in effect, were fighting for their ancestral homeland in the trenches of Flanders; some were now within miles of their parental homes. Among the Canadian ranks were also Native Canadians. It is likely that the first man from the indigenous peoples of the American continent to die in the First World War was killed on 22 April 1915. Angus Laforce had come from his home in Kahnawake, Quebec, to fight on the Western Front. A man from the Mowhawk people, he was reported missing on the night of 22 April. His remains were never found. Another Native Canadian, Lieutenant Cameron D. Brant of the Six Nations people from the Grand River, died in one of the counter-attacks at Ypres.7 For him, fighting for Britain was in effect a family tradition. Lieutenant Brant’s great-grandfather had fought against the French in the Seven Years War and taken up arms for the British during the American Revolution one-and-a-half centuries earlier, and now the same warrior tradition had led Brant to the trenches of Ypres. Among those who survived the attacks of 22 April was Albert Mountain Horse, from the Blood Indian reserve in Alberta. One of three brothers, Albert wrote to his brother Mike just after these events:
As I am writing this letter the shrapnel is bursting over our heads. I was in the thick of the fighting at Ypres and we had to get out of it. The Germans were using the poisonous gas on our men – oh it was awful – it is worse than anything I know of. I don’t mind rifle fire and the shells bursting around us, but this gas is the limit.8
Despite the prompt actions of the Algerians and Canadians, the Germans forced their way through the four-mile-wide gap opened up by the gas attack. They overran the abandoned French trenches and advanced two miles, capturing a considerable portion of the Ypres Salient, including the shattered village of Langemarck and territory near the village of St Julien. French artillery had been seized and for the first time since November 1914, before the Western Front had solidified, the Allied forces faced the prospect of Ypres itself being overrun and the British driven back towards the coast. Yet the Germans, having severely underestimated the power of their new terror weapon, failed to amass enough troops to fully take advantage of the situation, and their first attacks were halted by nightfall and by the effects of British artillery. Allied counter-attacks were launched on 23 April, in which the Canadians were again heavily involved, and there was a second gas attack by the Germans on 24 April.
Among the divisions now rushed to the Ypres sector was the Lahore Division of the Indian Corps. Between 24 and 25 April, the Indians endured a gruelling march north from their recently won positions around the French village of Neuve Chapelle. They marched with heavy loads, sometimes over a hundred pounds in weight, over muddy, shattered roads; some suffered from the effects of ‘trench foot’ after so long in the front lines; others had been hobbled by frostbite. They had little food and almost no rest en route. On the next day, 26 April 1915, at 2.05pm a combined Allied force was assembled to attack. It included Englishmen from the hills of Northumbria and the ancient cities of Durham and York; Irishmen of the Connaught Rangers; Indian sepoys from the Punjab, Afghanistan and Nepal; men from across France; and ‘Turcos’ of the French Colonial Army – Algerians and Moroccans. Together, this unlikely multiracial force, still without gas masks, attacked a dug-in enemy of whose exact positions they were unsure and whom they knew to be equipped with chemical weapons. After enduring heavy losses from well-targeted artillery, which was directed from above by German spotter planes, and facing concentrated rifle and machine-gun fire, their attack was halted. No units of this highly variegated Allied army reached the German front lines; they became mixed up in the chaos – men from four continents trapped a maelstrom of incoming fire. The 47th Sikhs, who were in the first wave, lost 348 men out of an attacking strength of 444. In all, there were 2,000 men killed, wounded or listed as missing from the Indian regiments alone.
Twenty minutes into the attack, at around 2.30pm, with the assault having effectively stalled and the troops struggling to secure any viable defensive positions, a series of nozzles was raised above the parapets of the German trenches, and again the green clouds of chlorine gas poured forth. Carried by the wind, the mist moved silently towards the attackers. They had been instructed to tie to their faces handkerchiefs or the ends of their turbans, dipped in chloride of lime or, more distastefully, urine: the ammonia in urine went some way to neutralizing the effects of the gas, which had now been identified by a Canadian chemist as a form of chlorine. This improvised measure offered some protection; but it was no guarantee:
The most they [Indian troops] could do was to cover their noses and mouths with wet handkerchiefs or pagris [turbans], and, in default of such a poor resource, to keep their faces pressed against their scanty parapet. It was of little avail, for in a few minutes the ground was strewn with the bodies of men writhing in unspeakable torture, while the enemy seized the opportunity to pour in a redoubled fire.9
The casualty rate – those killed, wounded or ‘missing’ – among the Indian regiments at the Second Battle of Ypres reached over 30 per cent, slightly higher than the rate for the British soldiers fighting with them.10
Among the Indians struggling for breath within the clouds of gas was Mir Dast, then a jemadar (officer) assigned to the 57th Rifles of the Ferozepore Brigade. An Afridi Pathan, from the Maidan Valley in Tirah, on the North-West Frontier of the British Raj, he was a decorated career soldier of long experience. After all other officers in his vicinity had been killed, Mir Dast attempted to hold his position against German counter-attacks. Gathered around him were the survivors of the gas attack, many of whom were severely weakened by the effects of the chlorine. They managed to hold their trenches until nightfall, when they were able to
retreat under the cover of darkness. Withdrawing across the body-strewn battlefield, Mir Dast encountered small groups of survivors who, sick and terrified, were huddled in abandoned sections of trench or cowering in shell holes. He and his unit gathered up these unfortunates and led them to safety. Although himself wounded and weakened by gas inhalation, Mir Dast then repeatedly left the British lines and ventured back out into no man’s land to bring back a further eight injured officers, both British and Indian. For this act of extraordinary bravery, Mir Dast received yet another wound from German gun fire – and a recommendation for the Victoria Cross.
It was on the afternoon of 22 April 1915 that Europe – so it is said – entered a new age of barbarism. Gas was the weapon that more starkly than any other stripped solders of their ancient position of warrior and reduced them to mere victims. It was not a weapon that was wielded in any finely targeted way but merely ‘released’ or ‘deployed’. Death was carried by the wind, and although there was skill in its use, it was the skill of the chemist and the meteorologist rather than the craft of the soldier. No weapon made men feel more vulnerable, and no weapon was more of an equalizer. Debilitated, blinded and haggard, its victims were literally forced to hold onto one another, irrespective and unaware of rank, race or nationality. That moment of history is one that we think we know well, yet our image of it – and so many others – has been shaped and influenced by historiographical traditions that have tended to marginalize the role of, and even overlook the presence of, colonial and non-European soldiers. Although most of the men who fought and died in defence of the Ypres Salient in April and May 1915 were white Europeans, many thousands were drawn from distant lands, the colonial subjects of two empires.
Speaking to the House of Lords five days after 22 April, Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, reported that:
The Germans have, in the last week, introduced a method of placing their opponents hors de combat by the use of asphyxiating and deleterious gases, and they employ these poisonous methods to prevail when their attack, according to the rules of war, might have otherwise failed. On this subject I would remind your Lordships that Germany was a signatory to the following Article in The Hague Convention – ‘The Contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.’11
The Dutch city of The Hague, where the Convention of 1907 had been held, is only about 100 miles to the north of Ypres. Both The Hague and Ypres are ancient cities steeped in the highest traditions of European culture. The chlorine gas used in the attack had been produced in the factories of the great German chemical firms of the IG cartel, clustered around the Ruhr, less than 200 miles away from Ypres. The development of chlorine as a weapon had been masterminded by a German Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Fritz Haber, who worked in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute set in Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. Haber was one of the academic stars of one of the most cultured nations in Europe. In the weeks that followed the attack, the French would turn to their own Nobel Prize-winner, Victor Grignard, to help them develop their own terror weapons. Everything about the gas attack on 22 April 1915, other than the range of races and ethnicities among the victims, was firmly European.12 Yet when searching for a precedent, or an act of comparable ‘frightfulness’ against which Germany’s newest crimes could be compared, Kitchener felt compelled to look beyond Europe to Africa, where he had spent much of his military career. In the same speech, the old colonial soldier suggested that in using chemical weapons Germany ‘has stooped to acts which will surely stain indelibly her military history, and which would vie with the barbarous savagery of the dervishes of Sudan.’13
It was, in truth, artillery that most profoundly de-skilled the profession of soldiering in the First World War. It was the guns, not gas nor even the machine gun, that killed the most men. But while the calibre of the guns that appeared on the Western Front was new and the explosive yield of their shells vastly increased, the weapon itself was seemingly familiar. Poison gas was suitably novel to be shocking in a way that artillery was not. And despite Kitchener’s condemnations, gas would not stay an exclusively German affair for long. The British, within months, had synthesized their own gas weapons and used them against the Germans at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 – another attack in which thousands of men from India were to fight and die.
At Loos, those Indian troops at least had primitive gas masks to defend them. This piece of personal protection evolved at an incredible pace over the course of the conflict, soon taking on its modern configuration. In doing so, it became the emblem of total war, other-worldly and hyper-modern, the face of Europe’s home-produced barbarism. The gas mask became, ultimately, the European equivalent of the ceremonial war masks of tribal societies, which so fascinated early twentieth-century European ethnographers, who regarded them as symbols of the supposed backwardness and savagery of the peoples ruled over by the imperial powers. The innovation and use of poison gas on the Western Front made a nonsense of the supposed superiority of white, European civilization over the subjects of empire.
In the storage vaults of the Esplanade Museum in Medicine Hat, Canada is a century-old, decorated calfskin. It was once the property of Corporal Mike Mountain Horse, younger brother of Albert who was gassed at Ypres. After being exposed to the effects of chlorine gas on two further occasions, Albert was invalided home, but he died one day after reaching Quebec in November 1915, succumbing to tuberculosis. Generations earlier, Albert Mountain Horse’s people, the Bloods, had been encouraged to denounce their warrior culture by the Canadian authorities. Albert had been drawn into the army and then into the First World War through the influence of Samuel Henry Middleton, a local missionary who had encouraged him to leave his reserve and go to war. After receiving the news of her son’s death, Albert’s mother took a knife and attempted to kill Middleton. She was dragged away by her remaining sons. At Albert’s funeral, the Blood men followed the procession on horseback, and the older men voiced the ancient war chants as the coffin approached them.14 Mike Mountain Horse, who later wrote an autobiography, described how the effect of his brother’s death on him was to awaken long-suppressed warrior traditions:
Reared in the environment of my forefathers, the spirit of revenge for my brother’s death manifested itself strongly in me as I gazed down on Albert lying in his coffin that cold wintery day in November 1915. Soon after the funeral I obtained leave from my work as an interpreter and scout for the Royal North-West Police at Macleod, and with my brother Joe Mountain Horse and a number of Indian boys from neighbouring reserves, I enlisted in the 191st Battalion for service overseas.15
As he followed in his brother’s footsteps and prepared to depart for France, Mike Mountain Horse went through the traditional ceremonies given in honour to a warrior leaving to go to war – as his ancestors had enacted for generations. Arriving in France in 1917, he fought at Vimy Ridge, in a battle that – according to war-time legend – was the event that made Canada into ‘a true nation’ rather than a mere dominion of the British Empire. His description of the battlefield is as powerful, literary and evocative as any passage in one of the great European war memoirs:
Lying on top of Vimy Ridge one night along with a number of the other Indian boys, the scene before our eyes might best be described as that of a huge stage with lighting effects – Verey lights from the Hun lines, and flames from bursting shells in the city of Lens. The red glare thrown back appeared like a great fire in the sky all the time. The trenches ran through almost to the heart of the French coal mining city. Here a brigade of the Germans had entrenched themselves so well that incessant bombardment by artillery and bombing from the air did not aid the boys from the Dominion to any great extent… Along the miles of trenches one could see planes dropping bombs on German lines, followed by geysers of smoke and dirt shooting skywards like volcanoes in eruption. One could witness houses bursting suddenly into flame as projectiles from heavy artille
ry of the enemy struck them. One could walk past Canadian howitzer batteries about a mile from the trenches and hear the 57 inch shells from these guns screaming overhead on their errands of death and destruction.16
After surviving the great fiery cauldron of Vimy Ridge, Mike Mountain Horse fought again at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, the first massed tank attack in history, and was buried under the ruins of a shelter for four days after it was covered by rubble thrown up by explosions. Before one offensive, he and his fellow Bloods gathered in a small clearing in the shattered woods behind the front lines to pray together. Under the trees, beyond the easy reach of artillery, they made their offerings. ‘Some made supplication for the successes of the allies while others prayed for a happy return to their fathers and mothers or to their families.’17 One of the Bloods, the unforgettably named George Strangling Wolf, took a knife and cut off a strip of his own flesh from around his knee. Holding up the bloody offering towards the sun, he prayed aloud: ‘Help me, Sun, to survive this terrible war, that I may meet my relatives again. With this request, I offer you my body as food.’18 He then buried his flesh in the mud of northern France. Strangling Wolf, whose official army records list his religion as ‘Church of England’, survived the war under the gaze of the Sun Spirit of his ancestors.
Mike Mountain Horse also survived, and in 1919 he returned to the Blood Reserve with the Distinguished Conduct Medal on his chest. Years later he dictated his Great War Deeds to his friend the artist Ambrose Two Chiefs, which the latter painted onto calfskin in the traditions of the Indians of the Great Plains.*1 Between them, the two men created an object that seems out of time, not of the early twentieth century or the modern, industrial age. The War Deeds is an attempt at a realistic depiction of war, yet it also contains traditional symbols. The black, stick-like figures painted onto the skin fight with rifles; they are shown in what are clearly the trenches and the dugouts of the Western Front. Lines of artillery are shown, high-explosive shells detonating over the heads of the simple figures. The Germans wear their pointed Pickelhaube helmets. Each of the twelve panels is a representation of a real event, ordered not chronologically but ranked in order of importance to Mike Mountain Horse. One panel records those four days in 1917 that he spent buried in a collapsed bomb shelter at Cambrai; another depicts an attack on a German position, where the Canadians captured the artillery. The figures fire at one another, the bullets marked as black dots. There are panels that tell of trench raids in 1917 and some that relate to the Battle of Amiens in August 1918. The Great War Deeds of Mike Mountain Horse is a work of art in the tradition of those painted by his forefathers, whose war deeds recorded mounted skirmishes between men armed with bows and arrows or the trade muskets of the nineteenth century. They celebrated the taking of horses and the capture of knives and European guns, recording the events through which men could lay claim to status and chieftaincies. But Mike Mountain Horse took that tradition into a kind of war his ancestors could never have imagined.
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