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By Root 1109 0

was haphazard in Belgium and France; during one particularly heavy German attack with mustard near Armentieres in July 1917, 86 civilians died and nearly 600 others were injured. Haber estimates conservatively—his figures include no Germans—that 5,200 civilians were poison-gas casualties during the First World War. By the war’s end, technicians were experimenting with a variety of ways to deliver gas so as to achieve the greatest and quickest effect, including the use of long-range artillery shells filled with gas and chemicals disbursed from airplanes. That the latter innovation was a likely feature of the next war was little disputed by scientists, novelists, and strategists of battle. American planners imagined attaching gas sprayers to the wings of aircraft. Others pictured gas bombs. Amos A. Fries, head of the US Chemical Warfare Service during and after the war, meant to reassure when he wrote (with Major C. J. West) in 1921: ‘As to noncombatants, certainly we do not contemplate using poisonous gas against them, no more at least than we propose to use high explosives in long range guns or aeroplanes against them.’ The nature of gas as a substance able to drift over distance and penetrate standard defenses of populations made it a terrible, logical weapon to envision as useful against civilians.21

There is also the matter of how gas kills. While burning and blinding are common injuries resulting from gas attacks, death from gas is most often caused by suffocation. Chlorine and phosgene are lung irritants. They inflame respiratory tissue, causing in it lesions and drawing fluid from elsewhere in the bloodstream, thus overwhelming the lungs with congestion. ‘In severe cases,’ writes Edward Spiers, ‘the victims die from asphyxiation, drowning in the plasma of their own blood.’ A British sergeant recalled seeing a dozen men gassed with chlorine in May 1915: ‘Their colour was black, green, and blue, tongues hanging out and eyes staring—one or two were dead, and others beyond human aid, some were coughing up green froth from their lungs. It is a hateful and terrible sensation to be choked and suffocated and unable to get breath: a casualty from gun fire may be dying from his wounds, but they don’t give him the sensation that his life is being strangled out of him.’ To be sure, dismemberment by explosive, multiple gunshot wounds, or burns from incendiary bombs are awful too, and horribly painful. But the thought of suffocation, slow and uncontrollable, touches the deepest place of human fear. It is a primal, helpless death, one of betrayal by the silent unbreathable air; it is slow, unheroic, panic-inducing, ugly. It is not unlike death by radiation.22

The scientists and soldiers who developed chemical weapons for their belligerent nations during the First World War seemed to establish a camaraderie one finds in those who come together for a noble cause. An interviewer once told Otto Hahn that he was surprised so many noted German chemists had joined the war effort in such dangerous work as gas provided. ‘Why?’, asked Hahn. ‘We volunteered, we offered our services.’ A British chemist recalled that ‘we were, with one or two exceptions, a band of brothers’, and French planners met frequently, if not always effectively, to coordinate offensive and defensive chemical strategy. They were professionals, called upon by their government to help protect soldiers and civilians. They were doing patriotic service, an argument that may have been especially meaningful to Fritz Haber, a Jew who was, according to his son, ‘well aware that his Jewish origin was both obstacle and spur’ to his loyalty. They could tell themselves—some did—that gas was far more likely to disable enemies than kill them, so it was an oddly humane weapon.

What the chemists and users of gas told themselves above all was that their weapon worked best if men and women perceived it to be horrible, because the graver the apparent threat from the weapon, the more likely an early concession by its victims. Leaders of warring nations, behaving rationally, like scientists,