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By Root 1130 0

—on the Western Front. Deadly and painful as it could be, later forms of gas would be still worse. Like so much else about the war, chlorine was the product of an industrial economy, in this case made by a complex of eight large chemical firms in Germany's Ruhr region known as the IG cartel. Chlorine and its compounds had a long history in manufacturing, but its new use in warfare was an ominous landmark, seeming to open up a range of horrifying possibilities that had previously existed only in the realm of early science fiction.

Allied generals and cabinet members railed against the Germans, accusing them of unprecedented savagery. Groping for the ultimate insult, Kitchener used the word by which the British had referred (incorrectly) to their Arab opponents at Omdurman: "Germany has stooped to acts which vie with those of the Dervishes." But, gruesome as choking on gas undoubtedly was, was it really any worse than having your body riddled with steel shrapnel? Or than having your lungs bruised to pulp by an artillery shell's blast even if the shrapnel missed you? What made gas warfare provoke such rage, the historian Trevor Wilson suggests, was something else. For all of recorded history, soldiers had believed that victory went to the manly, the fearless, and the daring. Now, with deadly gas brought to you not from the hand of an enemy you could see and slay, but by the very wind, all bravery seemed useless.

Not only had British and French generals been unprepared for gas, they had refused to even imagine it. Allied commanders around Ypres had had ample warning that a gas attack was coming: from an intercepted German message requisitioning 20,000 gas masks, from a deserter who, more than a week before the assault, brought one of the masks with him, and from captured German soldiers who told of masses of gas canisters lined up near their trenches. But they made not the slightest preparations, reluctant yet again to acknowledge that warfare could take a radically new direction.

The British generals' bewilderment at the war in which they found themselves was reflected in the very language they used. "An abnormal state of affairs," the director of military intelligence called trench warfare, while a major general termed it downright "peculiar." The chief of the Imperial General Staff thought conditions at the front "were not at present normal," although he hoped "they may become normal some day." "I don't know what is to be done," a despairing Kitchener said to the foreign secretary more than once. "This isn't war"

Gas added a new dimension to the fighting but did not break the deadlock. In a pattern that was to repeat itself with each new weapon introduced to the battlefield, the innovators seemed almost as surprised by their success as the other side. The Germans failed to take advantage of the fear, confusion, and temporary breach in the Allied lines their first gas attack caused.

As a defense against gas, the Allies began hastily improvising masks of tape and wet lint (chlorine dissolves in water). Not long after, all soldiers on both sides would be equipped with gas masks—as would tens of thousands of horses. This pattern, too, would become familiar as the years dragged on: for every weapon there would be countermeasures, and usually effective ones. Against the machine-gun bullet and the artillery shell there were ever deeper trenches; against airplanes, antiaircraft guns; against the periscope binoculars for seeing out of a trench, the well-aimed sniper's bullet, which could fill the viewer's face with ricocheting shards of glass.

In May 1915, the Allies staged another round of attacks from Haig's sector. Sir John French watched from a church tower as guns pounded the German positions with nearly 1,000 shells a minute, yet failed to break open paths through the enemy barbed wire, cleverly concealed in long, deep ditches up to 20 feet wide, or to destroy most of the German concrete-and-steel machine-gun bunkers. Germans sheltering in reinforced underground dugouts climbed back to the surface as soon as the British