Part 2

Meanwhile, the Bayardists have nobbled a curious assortment of allies in their so far successful attempt to prevent the humanization of warfare. First are a number of out-and-out pacifists, who object to all war, and apparently hope to make it more difficult by restricting the means of fighting allowed. Some, of course, genuinely believe that gaseous weapons are more cruel than solid ones. Those who know the facts seem to me to be the victims of loose-thinking. With them are associated a group of sentimentalists who appear to me definitely to be the Scribes and Pharisees of our age. These people, who are to be found in all political parties and most religious and irreligious sects, are generally willing (after a decent interval) to accept any application of science which appears to them profitable, or any social institution (such as war) which is hallowed by use and wont. They salve their consciences for such behaviour by attacking, in the name of their god or their ideals, every novelty, whether in thought or in action, which presents any loophole. In particular they are distinguished by a ferocious opposition to, and contempt for, any attempt at the solution of human problems by honest and simple intellectual effort. Mustard gas kills one man for every forty it puts out of action; shells kill one for every three; but their god who compromised with high explosives has not yet found time to adapt himself to chemical warfare.

More respectable in every way are the candid reactionaries, like Lord Cecil, who believe in their hearts that in abandoning traditional religion of the medieval type for scientific thought, man has definitely chosen the wrong path, and who fight with their eyes open against its application. These people have a case, and are prepared to argue it. They would honestly desire to give up the gunpowder of Lazare Carnot for the sword of Bayard. But one cannot congratulate them on their associates.

And behind these follow like sheep the predestined victims of the next war, the peoples of the civilized nations who will undergo the extremity of suffering rather than think for themselves.

How profound and unreasoning the objection of the military mind to chemical warfare is can best be judged by one simple fact. About three years ago the British regular army gave up the instruction of every soldier in defence against hostile gas. For one thing, speed in adjusting respirators being of more importance than elegance, it did not form the basis of a satisfactory drill, like those curious relics of eighteenth century musketry which still occupy so much of the time of our recruits. But the truth no doubt was that the officers did not like that sort of thing. The chemical and physiological ideas which underlie gas warfare require a certain effort to understand, and they do not arise in the study of a sport, as is the case with those underlying shooting and motor transport. One of the first acts of the late Government was to reinstate some modicum of anti-gas instruction in the normal training of the Army. But it may be hoped that this pernicious and demoralizing teaching will once more be dropped with the return to power of one of the gentlemen’s parties.

Personally, I must confess that I would go very much further than the Government, and seriously consider the provision of gas-masks for the population of London and other large towns, and the instruction of school-children in their use. If this is not done, there is at least the possibility of a disaster of the very first magnitude at an early stage in the next war. It is also one of the very few military measures which could hardly be regarded as provocative by the most ardent of foreign militarists or British pacifists. At the present moment, however, this need does not arise, as the French, who alone could bomb London, have very slight facilities for making mustard gas.

It is interesting to compare the attitude of our militarists to defence against gas with their attitude before the war to a possible German invasion. The fear of the latter, although the naval experts always stated that it was impossible on any serious scale, had been so impressed on the military mind by the propaganda of the National Service League and its like before the war that, from 1914 to 1918 hundreds of thousands of troops were quite unnecessarily kept in England. There however, this very fundamental difference between a defence against invasion and a defence against gas. The one would increase the importance of the professional soldier: the other would not. One does not need to be a very profound psychologist to see in this fact one reason why the military authorities dropped anti-gas training, and why I, being a biochemist and therefore a person of the type who would become important if gas war returned, am advocating its extension. As to which of us is justified, I would suggest that it is more likely to-day that poisonous gas will be used against British soldiers or civilians in future wars than it was in 1912 that Britain would be invaded by the Germans.

We have seen that a case can be made out for gas as a weapon on humanitarian grounds, based on the very small proportion of killed to casualties from gas in the war, and especially during its last year. Against this may be urged the probability that future research will produce other gases or smokes which, as weapons, will be as cruel as, or more cruel than, the chlorine and phosgene used in 1915 and 1916. The answer to this is quite simple. First, as regards gases or vapours. Only a limited number of chemical substances are appreciably volatile, and of their vapours only a small proportion are poisonous. Now every chemical substance has a definite molecular weight. Those with a small molecular weight, _i.e._, whose molecules are relatively light, are on the whole the most volatile, _i.e._, go most easily into vapour. Now the large majority of the possible volatile chemical substances of small molecular weight, and therefore relatively simple chemical composition, are already known. Mustard gas, for example, was discovered and its properties described in 1886. There are probably substances of high molecular weight whose dense vapours are even more poisonous than mustard gas. But the charcoal of our respirators has the property of adsorbing heavy molecules of vapour quite independently of their chemical composition. It is, therefore, somewhat unlikely, though not, of course, impossible, that any very poisonous vapour will ever be found which will go through a mask impermeable to mustard gas or chlorine. It is, to my mind, far more probable that skin irritants may be discovered which are even more unpleasant than mustard gas.

The question of smokes is more serious. It was the hope of the producers of irritant smokes that they would penetrate the gas-masks in sufficient amounts to cause sneezing and force their victims to remove their masks, thus exposing themselves to greater concentrations of smoke and to poisonous vapours liberated along with the smoke. This was the German view when they introduced the “Blue Cross” shell in July, 1917. Fortunately, by that time our defence against gas and smoke was extremely good, and we had foreseen the smoke menace and introduced, between April and June, 1917, a filter which effectively stopped it in the concentrations then met in the field. It is not, however, at all unlikely that concentrations of smoke will be produced in the future which will penetrate our present masks. If our anti-gas measures are sufficiently neglected the consequences may, of course, be very serious.

It would seem likely that the chemical weapons of the future will not be so very unlike those of the past. The main efforts of the soldier who uses them will be devoted, first, to blistering his enemy, secondly, to tiring him out by forcing him to wear a respirator continuously, which, of course, enormously hampers him for doing anything else.

In the Great War mustard gas and sensory irritant smokes were not used as the principal weapons of attack or defence, because the smokes would not incapacitate everyone in a given area, though they would make them keep their respirators on. Mustard gas, on the other hand, could make any area absolutely untenable by the defenders, but the vapour persisted for so many days that it could not be occupied by the attackers either. It was mainly used to produce casualties a few days or weeks before an attack on the units which would be defending, and to protect the flank of an offensive against counter-attack. Thus in April, 1918, Armentières, the original Northern limit of the German attack in Flanders, was so heavily shelled with “mustard” that the gutters in the streets were reported to be running with it. The Germans themselves received orders forbidding them to enter its ruins for a fortnight.

Nevertheless, mustard gas is so adequate a weapon that the attempt will almost certainly be made to use it not merely for making ground untenable for both sides, but for gaining it from the enemy. For this purpose the following methods suggest themselves. First, attempts might be made to protect troops completely from the effect of gas on their skins by encasing them in airtight overalls and gloves. These were used with a certain amount of success by machine-gunners in the Great War, but would hardly be practicable for attackers, who would, except perhaps in winter, die of heat-stroke if encased in such apparatus.

Air-tight tanks with adequate arrangements for filtering the incoming air are probably more hopeful, as mustard gas will not poison motors as it does men. (The motors would, of course, have their own air-supply, as it would hardly be practicable to filter air in the quantities needed by them.) To support the tanks and to tackle specially protected machine-gunners use will probably be made of immune infantry. One attack of gas-poisoning, whether by the lungs or skin, produces no immunity to a second attack――in fact, it generally increases the sensitivity of the victim. If a vapour is discovered against which immunity can be conferred, it will be the most effective weapon in history as long as its secret is kept. On the other hand, some people are naturally immune. The American Army authorities made a systematic examination of the susceptibility of large numbers of recruits. They found that there was a very resistant class, comprising 20% of the white men tried, but no less than 80% of the negroes. This as intelligible, as the symptoms of mustard gas, blistering, and sun-burn are very similar, and negroes are pretty well immune to sun-burn. It looks therefore as if, after a slight preliminary test, it should be possible to obtain coloured troops who would all be resistant to mustard gas blistering in concentrations harmful toward most white men. Enough resistant whites are available to officer them.

One sees, then, the possibility of warfare on somewhat the following lines:――

Heavy concentrations of artillery would keep an area say thirty miles in length and ten in depth continuously sprayed with mustard gas. After allowing, say, two days for the development of blisters, the gassing of the positions within two or three miles of the front line is discontinued, but a long-range bombardment, especially of roads, goes on. Suddenly, behind the usual barrage of high explosive shells appears a line of tanks supported by negroes in gas-masks. They meet with but little opposition in the area still reeking of gas, and occupy the hostile lines to a depth of two or three miles. A counter-attack, even if successful, involves concentration in an area under gas-bombardment and enormous casualties from blistering. The only satisfactory counter-attack would be from the air. In this way the side possessing a big superiority of mustard gas should be in a position to advance two or three miles a day.

This kind of tactics was impossible during the Great War for a very simple reason. There was not enough mustard gas. The Germans used a quite surprisingly complicated process for its manufacture. When we decided to follow their example, one of our chemists (a Cambridge man, I am glad to say) hit on a vastly cheaper and speedier method of manufacture. Unfortunately, our first supplies only arrived in the field in September, 1918. There is reason to think that the knowledge that we were at last about to develop gas and smoke warfare on a large scale had a good deal to do with the acceptance by the Germans of the armistice conditions.

The reason why we did not use mustard gas earlier is also simple and rather instructive.

In 1915 a British chemist proposed to a General who was concerned with such questions that the British should use dichlorethyl sulphide. “Does it kill?” asked the General. “No,” he was told, “but it will disable enormous numbers of the enemy temporarily.” “That is no good to us,” said the man of blood; “we want something that will kill.” It is interesting to find how completely the ideas of this worthy soldier as to the object of war coincided with those of the average intelligent child of five years old. I may remind you that Clausewitz held the view that the object of war was to impose one’s will upon the enemy. This idea would, however, appear to have been too abstract, too complicated, or too humanitarian for the British military mind. At any rate, it had its fill of killing. It was not, therefore, until the Germans had demonstrated upon the persons of some tens of thousands of British soldiers (we had 14,000 casualties, though with only 400 deaths, during the first three weeks of the mustard gas war) that there was something to be said for a weapon that was not primarily designed to kill, that we began to use it.

It seems, then, that mustard gas would enable an army to gain ground with far less killed on either side than the methods used in the late war, and would tend to establish a war of movement leading to a fairly rapid decision, as in the campaigns of the past. It would not much upset the present balance of power, Germany’s chemical industry being counterpoised by French negro troops. Indians may be expected to be nearly as immune as negroes.

And clearly, the more war is complicated, the more unimportant become semi-civilized powers, such as Turkey and Russia, even as allies. The Turks were seldom capable of organizing a combined attack by any number greater than a battalion, or a shoot by anything larger than a battery. Yet small groups of them fought very well, and their individual guns made very good shooting. But gas-warfare demands organization, both of attack and defence――attack, because one tries to keep up a certain concentration of vapour over a whole large area rather than to knock out given groups of men; defence, because respirators and discipline in wearing them must be perfect. I need not say that in the Great War our military leaders strongly deprecated the use of gas against the Turks, on the ground, I believe, that the latter were “gentlemen.” They showed their gentlemanly character by such acts as the killing of 45% of the prisoners taken at Kut-el-Amara, not to mention some millions of Greeks and Armenians who had the misfortune to be Christians. But they never used gas: so perhaps they may have preserved their quality of gentlemen in the eyes of our Bayardists.

I claim, then, that the use of mustard gas in war on the largest possible scale would render it less expensive of life and property, shorter, and more dependent on brains rather than numbers. We are often told the exact opposite, that it will make it more barbarous and indecisive, and lead to the wiping out of the population of whole cities. Let us consider for a moment this latter allegation. Can aeroplanes do more against a hostile town with gas than with high explosive and incendiary bombs? We were threatened with gas bombs during the war, and certain London pharmacists made very large sums by the sale of alleged anti-gas masks. It could be, and was, urged at the time that as the carrying of these curious objects seemed to calm the civilian population in a moment of national emergency, they served a useful purpose. The same argument has been brought forward on behalf of amulets and other pious frauds sold in the name of religion. In the case of the above gas-masks, they inspired such faith (for they had a better finish than the official pattern and looked like one’s idea of what a gas-mask ought to be) that some thousands were sent out by fond relatives to soldiers at the front, a number of whom in consequence perished miserably.

Was there anything in the gas-bomb scare? In the first place, many otherwise well-informed people have very erroneous views as to the poisonousness of gases. Gases are dangerous in the laboratory or factory if they kill without giving warning by odour and irritation; but gases of this kind, such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen arsenide, have to be present, in order to kill, in concentrations which cannot practically be produced in the open. The insidiousness of hydrogen arsenide has, however, so alarmed chemists that a tradition persists of a man having been killed by a single bubble of it, while they are so afraid of smelling carbon monoxide that it is generally stated to be inodorous. Besides errors due to this cause, there were errors of arithmetic. In one calculation which was made to show how easily London could be poisoned a decimal point went astray in one place! As the calculation was concerned with volumes of gas, the result came out as 10 metres cubed or 1,000 cubic metres, in place of one. For this reason it appeared that ten aeroplanes could do the damage which would actually have required ten thousand. However, most of the prophets of disaster from gas-bombs made no calculation at all. Let us try to make a rough one. On the nights of March 11th to March 14th, 1918, just before the great offensive of March 21st, the Germans fired 150,000 mustard gas shells into the villages and valleys of the Cambrai salient, an area of about twenty square miles, the same as that of central London. This caused 4,500 casualties, of whom only fifty died (all of them because they took off their respirators too soon). The area was not evacuated. In central London, if the population had had gas-masks, the casualties would have been perhaps ten times greater. But we have to compare this hypothetical air-raid, not with any raid that actually occurred, but with a bombardment of 150,000 high-explosive shells or their equivalent in bombs. This would hardly have left a house in central London untouched, and the dead would have been numbered not in hundreds, but in tens of thousands. Such an attack would have required the visits on repeated nights of something like 1,000 aeroplanes. Such a number is not yet a practical possibility. We are, perhaps, inclined to underestimate the potentialities of town-bombing with high explosive and incendiary bombs. In London, for example, there were never too many big fires started at any given time for the fire-brigades to deal with. An attack by ten or twenty times as many aeroplanes as ever bombed London simultaneously might well ring round a given area fairly completely with wrecked streets or burning houses, in which case most of the buildings and a good proportion of the inhabitants would perish. In one or two air-raids on other towns it seems probable that the Germans were not far from outstripping the capacities of the fire-brigades and producing very large conflagrations.

The reasons why explosives are more likely to be effective than poison on a town are as follows. Houses are far more vulnerable to explosives than earthworks, and do far more damage to their occupants in collapsing, besides being inflammable. And, on the other hand, they contain far more refuges which are nearly gas-proof. A shut room on a first or second floor would be nearly proof against gas released in the neighbourhood if it had not got a lighted fire to drag contaminated air from outside into it. Moreover, civilians could, and would, rapidly evacuate an area which has been heavily soaked with mustard gas, whereas soldiers have to stay on at the risk of their lives.

Gas-bombs would certainly be far less effective than high-explosives on a town whose inhabitants were provided with respirators, probably even if they were unprovided. But, so long as London is undefended in this respect, it constitutes a standing temptation to any power desirous of making this kind of experiment. Judging from experience, there is no doubt that a gas or smoke attack from the air would occasion a first-class panic. The introduction of each new chemical weapon produced great terror, as did even such a militarily unimportant (though cruel) weapon as the _Flammenwerfer_ (flame-projector). This was certainly due to ignorance. The French Colonial troops who were caught in the first cloud-gas attack were far more frightened than the Canadians, and appear to have had far more casualties, although they mostly ran away: which the Canadians did not. For the Canadians made some attempts to improvise respirators, and almost any damp fabric will reduce the concentration of chlorine passing through it to half or less. They also breathed less because they did not run. As a matter of fact, a most efficient respirator against chlorine (though whether against mustard gas I do not know) can be made by knocking the bottom off a bottle, filling it with loose earth, placing its neck in the mouth, and breathing through it. Very great alarm was caused by the first mustard gas bombardments in France, as no one had ever seen anything resembling the blisters it caused. But very soon familiarity bred contempt, or even liking, for aeroplanes dropped sheaves of pamphlets explaining how any soldier tired of the war could become a casualty without danger either of death or detection by allowing earth contaminated with mustard gas to touch the skin or the clothing. A good many wound-stripes were earned by this simple and up-to-date method, though, as we had the superiority in the air and the German soldiers were both more tired and more confiding than our own, the German casualties from this cause were probably still greater. But let us tell our civilian population before and not after they are attacked with blistering gases that the blisters produced are considerably less dangerous than measles. It was predicted during the war that the survivors of lung-irritant gases would get consumption, while those burned by mustard gas would develop cancer. This has not happened, but it is the sort of rumour that easily starts.

For, after all, our greatest weapon in chemical warfare is not gas, but education, and education of all classes. By education I mean a process which puts people in general in touch with the thought of the abler minds of their own and past times, whether in literature or art, in science, mathematics, or music. An educated man knows enough of science, for example, to be able to distinguish a gas from a smoke, or a Grindell-Matthews from a Marconi, even if he is not thoroughly versed in the kinetic theory of gases or the laws governing radiation through the ether. Educated men are rather rare. It will be worth while giving some examples of how our uneducated politicians and soldiers failed to adjust themselves to the scientific thought of their contemporaries.