A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas

Introduction

Introduction OnMay , —WhitMondayandamonthafterthefirstgasattackofWorld War I—Sgt. Elmer Wilgrid Cotton of the Fifth Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers, woke up when a gas alarm sounded. He described the scene in vivid terms: I got out of my dugout very quickly—then I donned my respirator. . . . The flat country all around was covered to a height from to feet with a greenish white vaporous cloud of Chlorine gas. . . . Many, many men were being carried or were staggering towards the Ypres Canal—they were all suffering from the effects of gas poisoning. . . . [We] received orders to move forward and reinforce the front line. . . . On the way up we passed our own batteries, the artillery men were working like slaves and some were overcome with the gas—further on we passed a dressing station—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. As we advanced we passed many more gassed men lying in the ditches and gutterways. . . . The gas which I breathed in my dugout had told on me. . . . I was forced to lie and spit, cough and gasp the whole of the day in that trench. . . . That was a fearful day for the British—they sustained , —gas—cases alone.1 Later his diary contains an undated and unpaginated entry describing the horrors of chemical warfare: “Chlorine Gas produces a flooding of the lungs—it is an equivalent death to drowning only on dry land—the effects are these:—a splitting headache & a terrific thirst (to drink water is instant death) a knife edge pain in the lungs the coughing up of a greenish froth off the . . . lungs and stomach ending finally in insensibility & death—the colour of the skin from white turns a greenish black or yellow, the tongue protrudes & the eyes assume a glassy stare—it is a fiendish death to die.”2 The frightening aspects of gas—the terror of the soldiers, the suffering of the victims, the helplessness of the men—were not unique to Cotton’s perception of chemical warfare, nor were they the only negative images associated with gas. Louis Raemaekers’s wartime sketch captured other attributes commonly associated with gas during the conflict, particularly its underhanded nature. Raemaekers was a Dutch artist who became outraged at the German invasion of Belgium and the horrors of war. He created images for British and Allied audiences conveying his outrage, and his work led to a German bounty on his head. In his efforts to condemn the enemy, he created The Gas Fiend, published in a collection of his work.3 In the picture , a French soldier lies sleeping in his trench, vulnerable and unaware of the danger that looms over him. A serpent, nearly the size of a human, blows poison gas down on the unsuspecting man. The treacherous symbolism of snakes and the creature’s menacing, cold expression add to the evil aura of the scene. The poison, a snake’s natural weapon, is toxic and sneaky, espe- . Louis Raemaekers’s The Gas Fiend. Courtesy Wellcome Library, London. cially since it is deployed against an unsuspecting man during the darkness of night. (The moon provides just enough light to allow the viewer to see the situation.) Although the soldier sleeps with his hand on a rifle and in a semiprone position, ready to fight, these precautions do not protect him from the gas. Even worse, the image involves the viewer in the nightmare; the scene compels us to feel horror at the situation without being able to do anything for the victim. The crowning element of Raemaekers’s commentary about gas is the title of his drawing. He evokes poison, deception, and helplessness in his sketch and evil with his words: The Gas Fiend. Gas was condemned by some soldiers as “unsportsmanlike” and “dishonourable”; Raemaekers saw that from the very beginning.4 However, there was another, and largely forgotten, vision of gas prevalent . Frank Reynolds’s The Old Formula. Reproduced with the permission of Punch, Ltd. www.punch.co.uk.  | Introduction during World War I. This perception is illustrated by a Punch cartoon in which the artist, Frank Reynolds, found humor in a weapon that others often found terrifying. In The Old Formula, a woman shows off her gas mask to her husband, much as she would display a new frock.5 Reynolds implied that the wife...