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

This well-researched study offers a creative and long-overdue interpretation of the subjects of gas and gas warfare in World War I Britain. Based on the author’s doctoral thesis completed at Yale University, as well as research she undertook thereafter (and currently) as an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, this work is a welcome addition to the growing number of cultural histories of the Great War.

Girard marshals an impressive variety of evidence to offer interlocking portraits of gas and gas warfare framed by the observations and experiences of a variety of groups. While the military, and specifically leaders of the war effort, had to embrace gas after Germany introduced it into warfare, politicians faced a “dilemma” about gas as it “forced them to choose between victory and Britain’s image as a civilized nation” (13). Scientists, depending on their specialties, held various views of gas and gas warfare, but both the substance and the act of using it in warfare provided this group with an “opportunity for increased prestige among leaders of the war effort” (14–15). For physicians, Girard explains further, gas was “a challenge that they could combat, but never conquer,” as treatment protocols were developed but never standardized with confidence (15). For owners of factories that produced gas, the substance also posed for them both an opportunity—specifically to demonstrate patriotism—and a dilemma—because as companies they needed to seek profit but not be seen as profit-seeking during wartime. For factory workers gas was a danger, and one result of this situation was regulation—in the form of the Welfare and Health Department of the Ministry of Munitions among others—which “brought physicians, businessmen, employees, and the government into contact and reshaped the traditional employer–laborer relationship” (15–16). For the general population, gas and gas warfare were not phenomena they experienced first-hand but rather “mentally and emotionally” through fear, humor, and the purchase of gas masks, all to the end of not only closing the gap between war front and home front but also serving as means for “the British to emphasize their national identity and contrast it with that of the Germans; the enemy used underhanded poisons, but Britons were a heroic people able to withstand the barbaric attacks” (16).

Two of Girard’s six chapters will be of particular interest to readers of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Chapter three, entitled “The Scientific Divide: Chemists versus Physicians,” offers insights into how the “controlled approaches” of both groups largely shaped their views of gas not “as a weapon of terror or atrocity” but rather as helping to define professional challenges. This chapter also presents a valuable comparison of shell shock to gas-related injuries, which were notoriously difficult to identify in light of bronchitis causing similar ailments (93–94). Chapter five, entitled “Gas as a Symbol: Visual Images of Chemical Weapons in the Popular Press,” carefully draws on a range of photographs, illustrations, and cartoons to show “the multifaceted perceptions of gas in British society” and more importantly how gas served symbolically to help civilians make sense of the war and its impact on politics, culture, and society.

In revealing these associated views and interactions around gas and gas warfare, indeed how the very subject of gas literally permeated wartime society as it did physically on the war front, Girard argues not merely that “each group viewed gas differently based on its particular interaction with gas” but ultimately that “the foundation for today’s outlook and policies regarding gas lies in World War I” (13). To this end, Girard rightly concludes that “when the negative perceptions of gas became dominant over the gas-tolerant or cautiously positive views in the interwar period . . . half of gas’s history was largely forgotten: the portion in which gas was seen as humane and...