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By Root 1090 0

Estimates made during the two decades following the war ranged from 560,000 to nearly 1.3 million dead or injured. L. F. Haber refuses to try to count Russian casualties—the figures are wholly unreliable, he says— and estimates about half a million gas casualties. While many more men were killed or wounded by explosives or bullets, these are nevertheless substantial numbers, and use of gas later caused reflection and remorse among some of the chemists who had participated in its manufacture. Otto Hahn struggled to absorb the sight of Russians killed by his chlorine cloud in Galicia in 1915. One of Hahn’s contemporaries, Hermann Staudinger, argued that scientists ought to renounce the use of chemical weapons and work to educate their fellow citizens about the special horrors of gas. (Staudinger’s suggestion brought a sharp rebuke from Fritz Haber.) Some American scientists expressed disgust with gas; in France, an eminent chemist urged that chemistry not be used for destructive purposes. Two weeks after the Armistice, a group of British medical researchers, in a letter to The Times of London, criticized the use of gas because (they said) it could not be contained to military targets and because it killed in a particularly heinous way. Sir Edward Thorpe decried ‘the degradation of science’ that resulted from the battlefield use of gas. For scientists to contribute to the death of innocents at the behest of the state was wrong. The critics of gas were to some extent vindicated by future decisions: chemical weapons were evidently not used in the Second World War, and only in a few other instances—by the British against Bolsheviks in 1919, by the Italians against Abyssians in 1935, and by the government of Iraq, against Iran and its own citizens, in the 1980s and 1990s—during the twentieth century.

4. The ethics of battlefield gas

What was it about chemical weapons, and gas in particular, that made it the subject of special opprobrium by scientists and others after the war? It was not that gas killed more men more efficiently than other weapons, as the First World War casualty figures indicate. Gas-protection technology advanced quickly beyond Haldane’s urine-soaked sock, so that with enough warning and proper discipline soldiers in gassed trenches could remain undamaged. But there lingered what was called the ‘subjective effect’ of gas. In an English test of a lachrymator abbreviated SK in early 1915, an officer standing well upwind of a burst shell later complained of weakness and illness, despite his having done no more than observe the explosion. Haber explains the man’s fear as the product of an overactive imagination. That is precisely the problem with gas, or part of the problem: it insinuates itself into the atmosphere that people must breathe to live, thus destroying any idea of a boundary between what brings death and what sustains life. Unlike a bullet or a bomb, it kills quietly, insidiously, masquerading as something innocuous or even pleasant. ‘The English gas is almost odorless and can only be seen by the practised eye on escaping from the shell,’ recalled a German infantry officer. ‘The gas steals slowly over the ground in a blueish haze and kills anyone who does not draw his mask over his face as quick as lightning before taking a breath.’ Mustard gas smells like horseradish, though the Germans would later mask it with the scent of lilac. Phosgene bears a faint odor of cut grass and may not immediately affect those who breathe it; twelve hours later its victims’ lungs fail.20

Not only does gas refuse to acknowledge the elemental boundary between life and death: it also resists containment, and it is thus inherently indiscriminate. Infantry soldiers hated it when their own side attacked with gas, since a change in wind direction could reverse the direction of the cloud and envelop them. (A few of their officers thought the use of gas unsporting.) Civilians near the Western Front were increasingly subject to the vagaries of gas during 1916-18. Distribution of gas protection and information to local residents