Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  The German infantry advanced cautiously behind the cloud of gas. At the last minute they had been issued with improvised cotton mouth-pads. Only the troops of the Pioneer Regiment had been issued with respirators. They were in charge of releasing the gas from the six thousand or so cylinders that had been dug in along a four-mile sector of the line. Fritz Haber had personally supervised the installation of the heavy steel cylinders. They were, said the men, as unwieldy as a corpse.

  The go-ahead for the experimental attack had been given in January. It was Haber’s show from beginning to end. He had come up with the idea of releasing chlorine from thousands of cylinders and had even organized their supply. He personally tested the effectiveness of the poison gas clouds. Once he almost died when the wind changed and he was caught in the chlorine without a mask. The Pioneer troops began digging holes for the cylinders on 5 April. Ten cylinders were connected to one lead outlet pipe, which pointed towards French lines. On 22 April about 150 tons of chlorine was released.48 For the first time, scientists were at the front line, leading an attack.

  The terrain around Ypres was not ideal for a gas attack. The advancing German soldiers had to pause at patches of low-lying land where the heavy gas still lingered, wraith-like, in the air. But they encountered no resistance; the enemy had either run from the gas or had been overwhelmed by it. A rifleman from Cologne recalled that they walked with their guns tucked under their arms, as if on a casual hunt for wild game.49 Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the scientific detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote angrily that the German soldiers ‘took possession of… trenches tenanted only by the dead garrisons whose blackened faces, contorted figures and lips fringed with blood and foam showed the agonies in which they had died’.50 The Germans took two thousand prisoners. British soldiers reported that Germans bayoneted many of those they found overcome by fumes.51

  The number of casualties remains disputed. The Allies claimed five thousand dead and twice as many injured in the attack, but those figures were almost certainly exaggerated.52 Depending on how long they were exposed to the gas, some men recovered quite quickly. Others spent their last desperate hours coughing and retching as they gasped for breath. The strain on their hearts, as their lungs gradually filled with fluid, was usually fatal. Many of those who survived faced a future of illness. The threat of chronic bronchitis and lung cancer would plague gas victims for the rest of their lives.53

  The individual fear and suffering of the victims cannot be doubted. The outrage felt by Lieutenant Colonel G. W. G. Hughes of the medical corps was typical:

  I shall never forget the sights I saw by Ypres after the gas attacks. Men lying all along the side of the road between Poperinghe and Ypres, exhausted, gasping, frothing yellow mucus from their mouths, their faces blue and distressed. It was dreadful, and so little could be done for them. I have seen no description in any book or paper that exaggerated or even approached in realization of the horror, the awfulness of those gassed cases. One came away from seeing or treating them longing to be able to go straight away at the Germans and to throttle them, to pay them out in some sort of way for their devilishness. Better for a sudden death than this awful agony.54

  Like the British public, The Times was furious at Germany’s flouting of the Hague conventions. It was, said the newspaper, a method of war ‘up to now never employed by nations sufficiently civilized to consider themselves bound by international agreements’.55 British researchers had been exploring the possibilities of tear gas since the end of 1914 and had developed a ‘stink bomb’ codenamed ‘SK’ after South Kensington, where the Imperial College scientists who invented it were based.56 But soldiers on all sides hated the idea of such weapons. As the cold-war military strategist Bernard Brodie put it, rather unsympathetically, it was the ‘traditional reluctance of the military professions to be killed by anything but traditional weapons’.57 Most German commanders refused to take part in Haber’s ‘experiment’ in gas warfare. One general admitted that ‘the commission for poisoning the enemy just as one poisons rats struck me as it must any straightforward soldier; it was repulsive to me’.58

  Many thought that gas warfare was unchivalrous. But the gentlemanly values displayed in no man’s land at Christmas 1914 were outmoded in a war fought with artillery and machine guns. Many writers, such as Malraux, saw chemical warfare as symbolic of the inhuman nature of war in the twentieth century. But the horrors of what we would now call ‘conventional’ weapons are often overlooked. A French soldier described the appalling fate of his friend:

  The death of Jégoud was atrocious. He was on the first steps of the dugout when a shell (probably an Austrian 130) burst. His face was burned; one splinter entered his skull behind the ear; another slit open his stomach, broke his spine, and in the bloody mess one saw his spinal cord gliding about. His right leg was completely crushed above the knee. The most hideous part of it all was that he continued to live for four or five minutes.59

  Such individual tragedies were part of the daily experience of soldiers at the front line. In 1916 at the Battle of the Somme,20,000 British soldiers were killed by machine gun fire in the first bloody minutes of the assault. For those, such as the German writer Ernst Jünger, who lived through that unimaginable carnage, it was obvious that chivalry was a thing of the past: ‘Like all noble and personal feelings it had to give way to the new tempo of battle and to the rule of the machine.’60 A new age of warfare had dawned in which scientists and engineers joined forces with the military to find the most efficient means of destruction for the least expenditure of men and materiel.61 It was the age of the superweapon.

  6

  The Man Who Ended War

  ‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,

  And pay a million priests to bring it.

  After two thousand years of mass

  We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

  Thomas Hardy, Christmas: 1924

  Francis Bacon, one of the founders of what we now call the scientific method, argued that knowledge is power. Nowhere has this been more powerfully demonstrated than on the battlefield. People have always exploited nature’s secrets to gain the upper hand in war. Gunpowder is said to have been discovered in ancient China by Taoist monks searching for the alchemical elixir of eternal life. If that is true, no discovery could ever have so profoundly disappointed its creator. Humankind, it seems, is fated to fall victim to its own ingenuity.

  The Catholic Church once tried to put a stop to the science of destruction. A twelfth-century pope banned the cutting-edge battlefield technology of the day – the crossbow. Such a mechanical killing machine was unchivalrous, he said. However, he saw nothing wrong with using it against ‘heathens’, such as Muslims.1

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred Nobel set scientists a bad example when he invented an explosive which he called dynamite, from the Greek word for power, dunamis. ‘I would like’, he told a friend in 1876, ‘to produce a substance or a machine of such frightful, enormous, devastating effect, that wars would become altogether impossible.’ The man whose name became synonymous with scientific achievement made his fortune from the science of destruction. He justified his profits with the hope that ‘on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops’.2

  Nobel was not alone in this hope. In 1890, an article on ‘War in the Future’ predicted that in coming conflicts whole regiments would be ‘annihilated’ at a stroke. The new sciences of destruction meant, said the writer of the article, that ‘none but the best troops will endure the prolonged and severe trial to their nerves’.3 Within a generation these predictions had begun to be realized.

  According to historian John Bourne, World War I was the first modern war, the result of ‘a century of economic, social and political change’.4 Advances in technology, such as the electric telegraph, telephones, typewriters, railways and the internal combustion engine, meant that armies could be
mobilized quicker than ever before. Military inventions such as machine guns and quick-firing rifled cannon allowed armies to deploy fearsome firepower. As one writer correctly anticipated in 1891, attackers could be ‘mown down as corn falls, not before the sickle, but the scythe’.5 Machine guns and improved artillery forced soldiers to take shelter in trenches. Then poison gas and high explosive shells were invented to drive them back out again.

  Even the appearance and role of the infantry changed in the course of the war:

  In 1914 the British soldier went to war dressed like a gamekeeper in a soft cap, armed only with rifle and bayonet. In 1918 he went into battle dressed like an industrial worker in a steel helmet, protected by a respirator against poison gas, armed with automatic weapons and mortars, supported by tanks and ground-attack aircraft, and preceded by a creeping artillery barrage of crushing intensity.6

  The military required devastating force to guarantee victory, and the key to ever greater firepower lay in the hands of the scientist.

  If physics – especially atomic physics – was the science of World War II, then chemistry was the science of World War I. The German public in particular was fully aware of the key role played by their chemists, such as Fritz Haber. In 1915 The Times reported one German civilian as saying: ‘The health and physical welfare not merely of the troops in the field but of the nation at large, and the security of the Empire, rest upon our chemists’ shoulders.’7

  Before the war, Haber’s process for synthesizing ammonia, which allowed nitrogen to be harvested from the air, was rightly hailed as a great breakthrough. As populations rapidly increased across Europe, there arose an urgent need for artificial, nitrogen-based fertilizers. In 1898, Sir William Crookes had conjured up a Malthusian demon: unless chemists could find a way to utilize the nitrogen in the air around us, ‘the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life’.8

  It was Haber who saved Europe from hunger. His revolutionary method for capturing atmospheric nitrogen, discovered in 1911 and quickly developed on an industrial scale by Carl Bosch at the Badische Anilin-und Soda-Fabrik (better known today as BASF – the ‘Chemical Company’, as their advertising puts it), gave the world for the first time cheap and plentiful artificial fertilizer. But as well as being necessary for healthy plants, nitrogen is an essential ingredient of explosives, an irony Tony Harrison explores in his witty yet powerful play about Fritz Haber, Square Rounds: ‘The nitrogen you brought from way up high / now blows the men you saved into the sky.’9 (Haber would have been delighted that Harrison wrote his play in verse, for the cultured chemist loved versifying, even in his laboratory.)

  It has been estimated that without Haber’s process for manufacturing ammonia, Germany would have exhausted its supplies of explosives within a year. Rather than bringing war to a speedy end, science prolonged the slaughter. In Harrison’s play, Haber washes his hands of responsibility for this: ‘I’m only the inventor how can I guarantee / no one will turn my nitrates into TNT?’10

  Harrison memorably describes Fritz Haber as ‘the Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front’.11 Every German soldier marched off to the mechanized slaughter of World War I with a copy of Goethe’s Faust in his knapsack. In Goethe’s classic play based on the life of the sixteenth-century alchemist, Faust’s insatiable lust for knowledge raises awkward questions about the modern quest for scientific understanding. Haber was just as passionate as Faust about uncovering nature’s secrets, and like him Haber also failed to grasp the human cost of his search. Scientific knowledge is worthless – even dangerous – without self-knowledge, suggests Goethe. That is an important but often overlooked moral for the technoscientific age in which we now live.

  In October 1914, when Frederick Soddy gave his inaugural lecture at Aberdeen University, he used Haber’s process for taking nitrogen from the air as an example of how science could be ‘used for evil as well as good’. There was, he said, no better evidence of this than the use of ‘scientific weapons of destruction’ in the war that had just begun.12 Soddy’s real, but premature, fear was that the secret of atomic power was just around the corner. As early as 1904 he had predicted that whoever discovered how to release the energy of the atom would have ‘a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose’.13 But before atomic bombs became a threat, chemistry had yet to do its worst.

  For the Hampshire poet Edward Thomas, Easter 1915 was not a time of celebration as it should be, but of mourning:

  The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

  This Eastertide call into mind the men,

  Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

  Have gathered them and will do never again.14

  For those men far from home – like Thomas himself, who was killed at Arras in 1917 – the war was about to become still more terrible. When Fritz Haber’s new weapon was first used a couple of weeks after Easter, the Allies didn’t know what had hit them. First carbon monoxide gas was suggested. Then, due to the yellow colour of the cloud, sulphur dioxide. Ironically, this gas – which produces spasms of coughing – had first been proposed as a weapon a century before by a British naval officer.

  In 1812, Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, suggested using fireships laden with sulphur as a way of flushing Napoleon’s troops out of French coastal fortifications. Although a governmental committee rejected the plan as inhumane, the idea did have enough military potential to merit keeping it top secret. Cochrane doggedly resurrected his plan in subsequent campaigns up to the 1850s, and it was also considered for use in the Crimean War. By then the British even had a defence against chemical weapons. In 1854, the industrial chemist John Stenhouse proudly showed off his charcoal respirator to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. It was, he said, a defence against infectious ‘miasmas’ and the ‘suffocating bombshell’, invented as a result of ‘the longing for a short and decisive war’.15

  But Thomas Cochrane was not the first chemical warrior. The Byzantine navy had used a chemical weapon against Arab ships in AD 673. It was an incendiary whose secret composition remains unknown to this day, but was probably a fiery mix of naphtha or sulphur and quicklime.16 The multi-talented Leonardo da Vinci, who was a gifted military engineer as well as a great artist, invented a ‘deadly smoke’ (in effect a tear gas) consisting of a shell containing sulphur and arsenic dust.17 And much later, in the American Civil War, there were many plans for chemical weapons, including chlorine gas shells.

  But if the idea of chemical warfare was not new, the scale of the attack at Ypres in 1915 certainly was. According to Samuel Auld, the British officer and chemist who saw the first gas attack, it ‘left a battlefield such as had never been seen before in warfare, ancient or modern, and one that has had no compeer in the whole war except on the Russian front.’ A deserter had warned the Allies that mysterious steel cylinders were being readied for an attack with a terrible new weapon. ‘No one believed him at all, and no notice was taken of it,’ said Auld bitterly.18 Soldiers were not issued with gas masks, even though the technology had existed for sixty years. After the attack, the Daily Mail had to appeal to the women of Britain to make homemade face masks for their men at the front. The upmarket department store Harrods encouraged its wealthy customers to make ‘Respirators for the Troops’, advertising products ‘as per official requirements’, such as ‘absorbent cotton wool covered gauze, with wide elastic band, 3/9 per doz’.19 The appeal was successful and millions of masks were made. As a defence against poison gas they were worse than useless.

  It was surprise that made the gas attack so effective, both at Ypres and on the Eastern Front. In André Malraux’s novel The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, Vincent does not understand whether the gas works ‘chemically, or by means of bacilli, or simply by restricting the air supply of whoever it encircled’.20 He is an educated man, an academic, yet even he doesn’t understand what kind of threat the
gas poses. Before the attack, Vincent listens to the ordinary soldiers around him as they wait to advance behind the gas cloud. For them the gas is a total ‘mystery’, with almost magical powers. They have heard that it kills without any outward signs. One soldier speculates that the victims will be left rigid, frozen ‘like dead men in a shop window’. Another wonders whether the river too will be stopped dead in its tracks, as if frozen in time.21

  The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, whose father identified the gas used at Ypres, claimed after the war that science offered ‘the humanization of warfare’ with gas weapons. He even wrote a book to argue his case, called Callinicus after the man who invented Greek fire. (It means ‘he who conquers in a noble or beautiful manner’.) Haldane, who fought in World War I, tells how soldiers at the front ‘removed their respirators from their faces and tied them round their chests, as it was there that they felt the effects of the gas’.22 For the ordinary soldier, poison gas was a strange and frightening weapon. In the 1950s the public fear of fallout was also made more terrifying by the strangeness of the new threat created by scientists.

  When, on 29 April 1915, The Times printed the scientific report in which Haldane’s father concluded that chlorine was the gas used at Ypres, such was the revulsion at this new form of killing that the paper compared the effects with biological warfare:

  Men have died in the hospitals who had struggled out of the gas zone thirty or even forty hours before. The entire system is poisoned. The bodies turn purple, a form of galloping pneumonia follows, respiration runs up to as high as fifty per minute. To all intents and purposes the man dies of pneumonia. The Germans might as well shoot diphtheria, enteric [typhoid], or Asiatic cholera germs as this disease-producing gas.23