To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [81]
Out of loyalty to her brother, Despard visited military units in France and England, formally presenting, for example, a set of fifes and drums to the band of the 5th North Staffordshire Regiment. In March 1915, she set up the Despard Arms, a teetotal pub, on Hampstead Road, near several of the big London railway stations through which troops passed on their way to France. Men heading for the front could find food, baths, a dormitory, a clubroom, artistic performances, and a soccer team—the Despard Uniteds. On a trip back to London, her brother visited the pub and exhibited his usual common touch in chatting with the soldiers.
But Despard could not be tamed for long. In April, along with Sylvia Pankhurst and some 180 other British women, she tried to attend the Women's International Peace Congress at The Hague in Holland. In the letters columns of newspapers, Britons thundered against this "pow-wow with the fraus." Among those most outraged at what she called "the peace-at-any-price crowd" was Emmeline Pankhurst: "It is unthinkable," she stormed in a magazine interview, "that English-women should meet German women to discuss terms of peace while the husbands, sons and brothers of those women ... are murdering our men."
Cleverly attempting to sow jealousy in the pacifist ranks, the British government granted passports only to some 20 "women of discretion" among the would-be delegates. But even this select group, arriving at the dock, found that their ship and all others had been suddenly banned from sailing to Holland. Only three British women, already out of the country, managed to join the 1,500 others—mostly from neutral nations—at the conference. Beneath the fronds of potted palms in an ornate hall in The Hague's Zoological and Botanical Gardens, the women passed resolutions calling for an end to the fighti ng and for peace by negotiation. The German delegates were given no less of a hard time by their government: 28 German women who managed to attend were arrested on their return.
Only 100 miles from the peace conference, a terrifying new weapon had made its appearance. On April 22, 1915, near the battered city of Ypres, French soldiers and troops from French colonies in North Africa noticed a strange, greenish yellow mist billowing out of the German positions and blowing toward them in the wind. An unfamiliar smell filled the air. When the acrid cloud reached them, it was so thick that they couldn't see more than a few feet. Soldiers quickly found themselves gagging and choking, yellow mucus frothing out of their mouths. Hundreds fell to the ground in convulsions. Those who could still breathe fled, staggering into first-aid posts blue from suffocation and coughing blood, speechless but pointing desperately to their throats. In the next few days, Canadian troops fell victim as well. Whatever this mysterious cloud might be, it was heavier than air and sank into the trenches, hugging the earth and forcing soldiers to stick their heads out into a hail of bullets. "The chaps were all gasping and couldn't breathe," a sergeant remembered later. "And it was ghastly, especially for chaps that were wounded—terrible for a wounded man to lie there! The gasping, the gasping!"
The spring leaves just coming out on the trees shriveled; grass turned yellow and metal green. Birds fell from the air, and chickens, pigs, cows, and horses writhed in agony and died, their bodies rotting and bloating. The ever-fatter rats that normally swarmed through the trenches, keeping men awake by running over them in the dark on the way to feast on soldiers' corpses, themselves died by the thousands.
This was the first widespread use of poison gas—chlorine