Part 1

CALLINICUS

A DEFENCE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE

OTHER VOLUMES IN THE TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future _By J. B. S. Haldane_

ICARUS, or The Future of Science _By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S._

THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST _By F. G. Crookshank, M.D._

New light on Man and the Great Apes. _Fully Illustrated_

WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES _By Prof. A. M. Low_

Wireless in war, crime, business, and pleasure. _With 4 Diagrams_

TANTALUS, or The Future of Man _By F. C. S. Schiller_

Man has still the primitive animal passions. He will destroy himself, unless....

THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS _By Professor Patten_

Experiments on animals’ intelligence throw light on the evolution of morals in men and animals.

LYSISTRATA, or Woman and the Future _By Anthony M. Ludovici_

PERSEUS, or Of Dragons _By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A._

NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes _By Gerald Heard_

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

CALLINICUS

A DEFENCE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE

BY J. B. S. HALDANE

_Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry, Cambridge University_

_Author of “Daedalus or Science and the Future,” etc._

[Illustration]

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVE.

Copyright, 1925 By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All rights Reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CALLINICUS

The public mind has to a large extent reacted against the opinions impressed on it during the war by official propaganda. Some of these have been overcome by counter-propaganda in the Press and on the platform; others have been dropped because they led to effects which, though admirable during a war, were undesirable in peace-time. But, as chemical warfare will not assume importance until the outbreak of the next serious war, and figures on the programme of no party, people still think about it as they were told to think by the newspapers during the Great War.

Now, I am to some extent a chemist, so I can no more be expected to be impartial in my estimate of the value of chemistry than a politician or a clergyman can be expected to give an unbiassed view of the value of politics or religion. I can only plead that, unlike the average clergyman or politician, I have warned my audience in advance, and shall attempt (though no doubt vainly) to be impartial.

A few of my hearers hold the view that, while war in itself is a noble occupation, the use of poisonous gas is an innovation as cruel as it is unsoldierly. The majority are probably pacifists in the sense that they prefer almost any peace to almost any war, support the League of Nations or other devices for the prevention of international strife, and look askance at preparations for future warfare, more particularly for future chemical warfare. If so, I certainly share their objection to war, but I doubt whether by objecting to it we are likely to avoid it in future, however lofty our motives or disinterested our conduct. War will be prevented only by a scientific study of its causes, such as has prevented most epidemic diseases. For many centuries people had guessed that epidemic diseases constituted a punishment for human misconduct of some kind. They tried to prevent them by prayer and almsgiving. Christians gave up washing, Hindus liberated rats captured during plague-epidemics. Religious orders and priests of the church gave the most magnificent examples of self-sacrifice in times of pestilence. But that was not the way in which pestilences can be prevented. Besides good intentions, a special type of accurate thinking was needed. We have not yet made a scientific study of the causes of war, and, until we do, may expect more wars. If we are to have more wars, I prefer that my country should be on the winning side. That is why I am speaking on warfare to my fellow-countrymen.

In general, pacifists are a very great military advantage to Britain. On the outbreak of war the large majority of them become intensely patriotic, whereas beforehand they lead our own military authorities and also those of our potential allies and enemies to underestimate our strength. This keeps us out of some wars, and leads to our showing unsuspected power in others. After a few years of war, when the originally bellicose politicians like Lord Lansdowne are getting tired, ex-pacifists like Lloyd George and Pitt have just got into their stride. The national staying-power is thus greatly increased. I need hardly remark that future governments will not enter on war without first persuading the vast majority of the people of its justice. This appears to be a relatively simple process under modern conditions.

At the present moment, however, pacifists are combining with the less competent soldiers in an attempt to check the progress of chemical warfare. This I believe to be neither in our national nor in the international interest.

Until 1915 the soldier’s business was to push or throw pieces of metal at the enemy. Various devices had been employed for throwing them fast or far, and some of them threw other pieces on arrival at their destination, thanks, in the main, to the genius of the unforgotten Major-General Shrapnel. It is true that early in the eighth century A.D. the appropriately named Syrian Callinicus had prolonged the life of the Eastern Roman Empire for another 750 years and saved a large part of Christendom from Mahommedan domination by his invention of “Greek fire,” an inflammable liquid which was, however, later superseded by gunpowder. In the fifteenth century the defenders of Belgrade against the Turks had hit upon a similar device, under the direct inspiration, it was claimed, of the Holy Ghost, but these weapons had fallen into desuetude, their effect being largely psychological.

Chemical warfare had been so far foreseen by statesmen that in 1907 the signatories of the Hague Conference agreed to renounce the use of projectiles the sole object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating or harmful gases. They were thus debarred from using lachrymatory gas, the most humane weapon ever invented; but permitted to discharge gas from cylinders on the ground, an exceedingly cruel practice. This regulation was well meant, but the path to August, 1914, was paved with good intentions. In 1914 none of the great powers had made any preparation for poison-gas warfare, and it was not till April 22nd, 1915, more than eight months after the beginning of the war, that the Germans began its use.

During the war, twenty-five different poisonous weapons were employed. Of these only three are gases at ordinary temperatures, and can be discharged from cylinders in which they are stored under pressure. The remainder are liquids which gradually evaporate, yielding a poisonous vapour, or solids which are poisonous in the form of smoke.

These poisonous substances so far used fall into four classes according to their effect on men. First come gases and vapours which are poisonous when breathed, but have no effect on the skin, and affect the eyes or nose only when present in concentrations which are poisonous to the lungs. They can all be kept out by respirators, and were of military value only against unprotected troops, or in local surprise-action. This group, which included chlorine and phosgene, are probably almost as obsolete as muzzle-loading cannon.

A second group are poisonous only in very high concentrations, but irritate the eyes when present in amounts so small that one part in five million may render a man blind with weeping in a few seconds. There is no evidence, so far as I know, that anyone was killed or even permanently blinded by these substances; but they had a great momentary effect. They can be kept out by respirators, or even goggles.

The third group of poisonous smokes, mostly arsenic compounds, were little developed during the war. They are, however, weapons of very great efficiency, and it is well known that they would have been used by the British at any rate on a very extensive scale in 1919.[A] In small amounts, these smokes merely make one sneeze. In somewhat larger amounts they cause pain of the most terrific character in the head and chest. The pain in the head is described as like that caused when fresh water gets into the nose when bathing, but infinitely more severe. These symptoms are accompanied by the most appalling mental distress and misery. Some soldiers poisoned by these substances had to be prevented from committing suicide; others temporarily went raving mad, and tried to burrow into the ground to escape from imaginary pursuers. And yet within forty-eight hours the large majority had recovered, and practically none became permanent invalids. These substances, when in the form of smoke, will penetrate any of the respirators used in the late war, though the British box-respirator would stop all but a little of them in the concentrations then used. In future they will probably be used in much larger concentrations and in finer particles than those formed by the German smoke-shells. It is extraordinarily difficult to produce a respirator which will completely stop very fine smoke, for the following reason. In a gas the molecules (or ultimate particles) are moving very rapidly, with speeds of several hundred yards per second, continually colliding and rebounding. A gas molecule, therefore, will probably hit the sides of a fairly narrow passage through which it is drawn. But a smoke particle is moving at a speed measured in inches per second, and is far less likely to hit the wall of the respirator, and be held by its absorbent surface. If we try to make the passages through which air is drawn very narrow, as by sucking in our air through cotton-wool (which will stop most smokes), we find that we have created an appalling resistance to breathing. There is an electrical method of removing smoke-particles completely, but it would probably more than double the weight of respirators, and does not appear to be either water-proof or fool-proof.

[A] The American “Lewisite,” of which so much was heard in 1918 and 1919, is a substance of this class.

The fourth group, of blistering gases, contains only one substance used during the war, dichlorethyl sulphide, or “mustard gas.” This is really a liquid, whose vapour is not only poisonous when breathed, but blisters any part of the skin with which it comes into contact even. To take an example, a drop of the liquid was put on a piece of paper and left for five minutes on a man’s sleeve. The vapour penetrated his coat and woollen shirt, causing a blister the effects of which lasted six weeks. And yet evaporation is so slow that ground contaminated by the liquid may remain dangerous for a week. Mustard gas caused more casualties to the British than all other chemical weapons put together.

Such are the weapons which chemistry has given us. It is often asked why chemists cannot produce something which will put our foes comfortably to sleep and allow us to take them prisoners. The answer is that such substances exist, but that in small amounts they are harmless, in large amounts fatal. It is only over a moderate range of concentrations that their effect is merely stupefying. One has only to think of the familiar case of chloroform vapour, and the skill required to give neither too much nor too little.

It would be logical to speak of explosives under the heading of chemical warfare, but there is curiously little chance of explosives becoming any more effective. We know fairly well the maximum amount of energy which can possibly be got out of a chemical action, and, though explosives might perhaps be made which were about twice as destructive as our best (or worst) to-day, they would probably be far less stable, and therefore less safe to their users.

Of course, if we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation. But the remoteness of the day when we shall use these forces may best be judged by an analogy. Some thousands of years ago someone first realized that the sun, moon and stars were not mere bodies as large as a plate or a house, but very large, and moving very fast. It was an obvious idea that their motions might be exploited in some way. Wise men observed them and hoped, for example, to increase the probability of success in their own enterprises by beginning them when Jupiter was in the ascendant. These attempts were unsuccessful, though far more valuable to humanity than most of the methods successfully employed for the same purposes, such as fraud, violence and corruption. They led to astronomy, and so to all modern physics. We now know that the only probable way of harnessing the kinetic energy of the heavenly bodies is to employ tidal power to create electric currents. But five thousand years ago “hitching one’s wagon to a star” was a reasonable project and not a poetic metaphor. The reason we cannot do it is a simple matter of scale. And the reason why we cannot utilize subatomic phenomena is just the same. We cannot make apparatus small enough to disintegrate or fuse atomic nuclei, any more than we can make it large enough to reach to the moon. We can only bombard them with particles of which perhaps one in a million hit, which is like firing keys at a safe-door from a machine-gun a mile away in an attempt to open it. We do occasionally open it, but the process is very uneconomical. It may be asked why we cannot bring our machine-gun nearer, or improve our aim. To do this we should require to construct apparatus on the same infinitesimal scale as the structure of the chemical atom. Now we can arrange atoms into various patterns. For example, we can arrange carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in patterns which constitute the molecules of sugar, glycerine, or alcohol at will. This is called chemical synthesis. We have been doing it by rule-of-thumb methods for thousands of years, and are just beginning to learn a little about it. But even chemical molecules are much too large for our purposes. We can no more ask a chemist to build our apparatus than expect a theatrical scene-painter or a landscape-gardener to do us a miniature. We know very little about the structure of the atom and almost nothing about how to modify it. And the prospect of constructing such an apparatus seems to me to be so remote that, when some successor of mine is lecturing to a party spending a holiday on the moon, it will still be an unsolved (though not, I think, an ultimately insoluble) problem.

To see how chemical weapons are likely to be used in future we must study their employment in the late war. Lachrymatory gas was only once used under ideal conditions――by the Germans in the Argonne in 1915. They captured a fairly extensive French trench system and about 2,400 prisoners, almost all unwounded, but temporarily blind. When they gave the number of prisoners, the French authorities not unnaturally protested that this number was practically equal to the total of their casualties. And this was quite true. The French were unprotected. They were deluged with shells giving off a vapour which temporarily blinded them. They could not even run away. The Germans walked across, removed their rifles, and formed them up in columns which marched back, each led by a German in goggles. In order to make future wars humane it would only be necessary to introduce the two following rules:――

1. No goggles or other eye protection shall be worn;

2. No shells shall be used containing any other substances save ethyl iodo-acetate (or other lachrymatory compound) and a small bursting charge.

Certainly it is unlikely that such rules will ever be adopted, but I do contend that to forbid the use of such substances is a piece of sentimentalism as cruel as it is ridiculous.

Gases of the first group were used in clouds discharged from cylinders, sometimes on a front of several miles. They probably caused at least 20,000 casualties among unprotected or inadequately protected British troops. At least a quarter of these died, and that very painfully, in many cases after a struggle for breath lasting several days. On the other hand, of those who did not die almost all recovered completely, and the symptoms of the few who became permanent invalids were mainly nervous. Apart, however, from the extreme terror and agitation produced by the gassing of uneducated people, I regard the type of wound produced by the average shells as, on the whole, more distressing than the pneumonia caused by chlorine or phosgene. Besides being wounded, I have been buried alive, and on several occasions in peacetime I have been asphyxiated to the point of unconsciousness. The pain and discomfort arising from the other experiences were utterly negligible compared with those produced by a good septic shell-wound.

The first German cloud-gas attack was in April, 1915, the last in August, 1916, though the British continued them until the end of that year. They gradually became more and more ineffective as the efficiency of the respirators used on both sides increased. The first few German attacks were very well conducted, so far as the liberation of the gas was concerned, as they were arranged by Haber, an extremely competent chemist, who afterwards supervised their production of explosives. On the other hand, the German respirators were bad to begin with; and later on were not so good as the British. This was, apparently, because the most competent physiologist in Germany with any knowledge of breathing was a Jew. This fact was quite well known in German physiological circles, but apparently his race prevented the military authorities from employing him. The result was that they were unable to follow up their gas-attacks at all closely, but had to wait till the cloud had passed off, by which time resistance was again possible. That was how the Germans paid for anti-Semitism. It is very probable that it lost them the war, as never again, not even in March, 1918, had they as complete a gap in the Franco-British Western front as during the first gas-attack in April, 1915. It was, indeed, fortunate for the Germans that the Russians were still more anti-Semitic than themselves. Hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews volunteered for service in 1914. They were mostly refused, and in no case granted commissions. They then proceeded to turn their combative instincts into other channels, to the no small advantage of the Germans. If one goes to what is, perhaps, the opposite extreme from Russia, one finds the army of the world’s most democratic nation, Australia, commanded by a Jew, Monash, and notes with interest that the Germans regarded the Australian troops as, on the whole, the most formidable, man for man, of all their opponents.

The other reason why the cloud-gas attacks were indecisive was that the Germans had relatively few reserves to put into the gap they made. Their reserves in April, 1915, were in Poland. If they had trusted their scientific men they could certainly have captured Calais and Boulogne, and probably have annihilated the British Army.

In addition to clouds released from cylinders in the trenches, gas-cylinders were fired from trench-mortars, some hundreds at a time, into the enemy’s lines, producing a sudden and dense cloud of gas before the men had time to put on their respirators. But these bombardments, though they caused many casualties, were never decisive, as the cloud-attacks would have been, but for causes which we have discussed.

Mustard gas is a very different thing. It was never used to force a decision by breaking the enemy’s lines, but to cause him casualties and deny him the use of ground. For, after a given area has been well sprayed with dichlorethyl sulphide from bursting shells for some time, it is death to occupy it without a mask, and the vapour may blister the skin, while anyone touching the ground will be certain of a very serious blister. Someone placed a drop of the liquid on the chair of the director of the British chemical warfare department. He ate his meals off the mantelpiece for a month. The most interesting thing, however, about mustard gas is that, though it caused 150,000 casualties in the British Army alone, less than 4,000 of these (or 1 in 40) died, while only about 700 (or 1 in every 200) became permanently unfit. Yet the Washington Conference has solemnly agreed that the signatory powers are not to use this substance against one another, though, of course, they will use such humane weapons as bayonets, shells, and incendiary bombs.

It is worth while attempting to analyse the reasons for this rather curious decision. First, perhaps, we must put the complete and shameful ignorance of most of the politicians and many of the soldiers who took part in the Conference. Their ideas of gas warfare were apparently drawn from the descriptions of the great German cloud-gas attacks of 1915, which killed at least 1 in 4 of their casualties, and were written up on a large scale for recruiting and political purposes. But it is the business of politicians and soldiers, conceivably even of journalists, to know the truth about such matters before coming to decisions, or even impelling others to come to decisions about them.

To this ignorance, however, there was joined one of the most hideous forms of sentimentalism which has ever supported evil upon earth――the attachment of the professional soldier to cruel and obsolete killing machines. I would remind you of the conduct of the Chevalier Bayard, whom his contemporary soldiers described as _sans peur et sans reproche_. To captured knights, and even bowmen, he was the soul of courtesy, but musketeers or other users of gunpowder who fell into his hands were invariably put to death. It is worth remembering that, until the invention of gunpowder, fighting had for many centuries been remarkably safe for everyone who could afford a good suit of armour, while the abominable arquebus and its descendants have saved the remnants of Christendom from the Turks, Mongols, and other paynims who had by Bayard’s time successfully overwhelmed one half of its original extent.

I remember an excellent example of Bayardism in the war. A Turkish airman had developed considerable flair for shooting down our observation balloons. A British officer sent up one of these latter with a large cargo of gun-cotton, and blew up the Turk in question. For this deed he was severely reprimanded by the local officer commanding R.A.F. for unsportsmanlike conduct. This gentleman, doubtless, felt little objection to bombing, for example, Turkish transport columns, consisting mainly of non-combatants and animals, incapable of retaliating. (One may remark that between wounds and thirst perhaps 30,000 Turkish transport animals perished during our final victory in Palestine.) But he objected to airmen being killed except by other airmen. I, fighting in the mud beneath them, and exposed to the bombs of both sides (I was severely wounded by one of our own), felt differently. An attempt by the professional soldiers to stereotype the art of war into the channels which correspond to the ideas of 1914 might lead to a future rather different from that which I shall venture to predict, a future in which the military organizations of the world were overthrown by the exponents of some other mode of thinking, employing all the resources of science, and fighting “dirty.” The opponents of the present world-order may, therefore, welcome Bayardism in their governments.