Part 3

In April, 1915, a relatively educated member of the Government got hold of a physiologist, whose name I suppress as he is a modest man. He found a rather curious state of affairs. On the _Emden_, a German cruiser captured in the Indian Ocean, a German sailor had been found in possession of a pad of lint with tapes to tie in front of his mouth. It did not even cover his nose, and, though it might or might not have been of some value against smoke, it was of none at all against gas. There was, however, a very prevalent belief at that time, and may be still, for all that I know, that German men of science were vastly superior to British. It is perfectly true that there are more of them, but I think that their average attainments in the last forty years have been, if anything, slightly below those of our own. So hypnotized, however, were some of the authorities in this country by this theory that it was being proposed to issue these articles to our troops. After pointing out their uselessness, the physiologist in question was rushed over to France in a destroyer, along with a chemist. He identified the gas used by the Germans as chlorine. On his return, he got a cylinder of that gas, let some into an air-tight chamber, and devised a rough respirator which would keep most of it out, trying various possible methods on himself. On his return to the War Office, rather short of breath from the chlorine he had breathed, he found to his horror that the appeal to the women of England for home-made respirators had been issued. Their design was apparently based on the captured German one, which had very probably been made on the _Emden_. As they were quite useless, he secured a promise that they would not be sent out to France. Things were not made easier by the opinion held in high military quarters that, offence being more important than defence, the great thing was to reply to the Germans by gassing them. As, however, this could not be done in less than five months, while respirators could easily be made in a week, it led to delay at a somewhat vital moment. Finally every important decision taken in England had to pass through the hands of Lord Kitchener, who naturally had not time to weigh the arguments at all fully. It is not my intention to attack Lord Kitchener: that the war could be carried on at all under such a system proves that he was a great man. But, if he had managed to delegate some of his powers, he would have proved himself a greater. As the result of all this delay, a great many of the first respirators had to be made in France.

Convalescent soldiers and the nuns in a convent on the Mont des Cats were conscripted to make respirators, which, if inelegant, were fairly efficient. Unfortunately, consignments of “Women of England” and other home-made respirators were continually appearing in France, and every now and then led to a battalion or so being wiped out. I am able to give these details, because at this time I, who before and after was an honest infantry bombing-officer, made my brief incursion into chemical warfare. I arrived at St. Omer from my comfortable trench as being a person accustomed to poisonous gases in civil life. In a large school there, converted into a hospital, there was a small glass-fronted room, like a miniature greenhouse, into which known volumes of chlorine were liberated. We had to compare the effects on ourselves of various quantities with and without respirators. It stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed. For this reason trained physiologists had to be employed. An ordinary soldier would probably restrain his tendency to gasp, cough and throw himself about if he were working a machine-gun in a battle, but could not do so in a laboratory experiment with nothing to take his mind off his own feelings. An experienced physiologist has more self-control. It was also necessary to see if one could run or work hard in the respirators, so we had a wheel of some kind to turn by hand in the gas chamber, not to mention doing fifty-yard sprints in respirators outside. As each of us got sufficiently affected by gas to render his lungs unduly irritable, another would take his place. None of us was much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so. This work, which was mainly done by civilians, was rewarded by the grant of the Military Cross to the brilliant young officer who used to open the door of the motor-car of the medical General who occasionally visited the experiments. The soldiers who took part in them could, however, for some time be distinguished by the peculiar green colour of their brass buttons due to the action of the gas.

Even when arrangements had been made for the manufacture of respirators in England, the supply suddenly dried up. It was found that the girls who made them were working as best they could with raw and bleeding fingers, and London was being scoured for rubber gloves. Someone had altered the formula of the mixture in which the respirators were dipped by substituting for carbonate of soda caustic soda, which has the property of dissolving the human skin. His name, needless to say, does not appear in the official history.

Such were some of the difficulties which we incurred in our anti-gas work, through the ignorance of highly-placed persons. As, however, our defensive (though not our offensive) measures were ultimately better than those of any other nation, things must have been still worse elsewhere. The success of our respirators was largely due to one man, Harrison, whose name is insufficiently known to his countrymen. He was an analytical chemist, and author of that admirable and too little read work _Secret Remedies_ (published by the British Medical Association). He enlisted as a private, but was a Lieutenant-Colonel when he died of influenza and overwork in 1918.

Naturally the ignorance of our private soldiers was of an even more abysmal character. In the early days they often removed the respirators from their faces and tied them around their chests, as it was there that they felt the effects of the gas. Again in 1917 80% of the mustard-gas cases vomited, while this symptom was rare in 1918. Apparently it took five months for the British Army to realize that gas-poisoning did not necessarily mean poisoning through the stomach.

If, then, in future wars we are to avoid gross mismanagement in high places, and panic and stupidity among the masses, it is essential that everyone should learn a little elementary science, that politicians and soldiers should not be proud of their ignorance of it, that ordinary men and women should not be ashamed or afraid of knowing something of the working of their own bodies. If we persist in the belief that we can be saved by patriotism or social reforms, or by military preparation of the type which would have sufficed in former struggles, we shall go down before some nation of more realistic views. We do not know what type of scientific knowledge will be needed: we can be certain that some type will be. The British are a tired people: they like to rest “in breathless quiet after all their ills,” and to pin their faith to the promises of leaders whose eyes are fixed on the past. It has all happened before.

“Ganz vergessener Völker Müdigkeiten Kann ich nicht abthun von meinen Lidern, Noch weghalten von der erschrockenen Seele Stummes Niederfallen ferner Sterne.”

(“I cannot lift from my eyelids the weariness of quite forgotten peoples, nor hold away from my terrified soul the dumb downfall of far stars.”)

The Roman and Spanish Empires appear to have perished largely from intellectual torpor. Are we to go the same way?

We have got to get over our distaste for scientific thought and scientific method. To take an example from the war, the physiologists at the experimental ground at Porton, in Hampshire, had considerable difficulty in working with a good many soldiers because the latter objected so strongly to experiments on animals, and did not conceal their contempt for people who performed them. And yet these soldiers would have had no hesitation in shelling the horses of hostile gun-teams, and the vast majority of them were in the habit of shooting animals for sport. I have never known a physiologist who went in for shooting animals: physiologists know too much of the processes which occur in a wounded beast or bird that creeps away to die. And, though I have seen a good many scientific experiments on animals, I have never seen one which, so far as concerns the pain given, I should object to having performed on myself. That this attitude is not unusual would appear from the following experiment described by the director of the Porton experimental ground, in which he wished to compare the effects of hydrocyanic (or prussic) acid gas on himself and a dog. They both entered a chamber containing 1 part in 2,000 of the gas.

“In order (he writes) that the experiment might be as fair as possible and that my respiration should be relatively as active as that of the dog, I remained standing, and took a few steps from time to time while I was in the chamber. In about thirty seconds the dog began to get unsteady, and in fifty-five seconds it dropped on the floor and commenced the characteristic distressing respiration which heralds death from cyanide poisoning. One minute thirty-five seconds after the commencement the animal’s body was carried out, respiration having ceased and the dog being apparently dead. I then left the chamber. As regards the result upon myself, the only real effect was a momentary giddiness when I turned my head quickly. This lasted about a year, and then vanished. For some time it was difficult to concentrate on anything for any length of time. It is hard to say to what extent this was due to the experiment.”

As the result of this work, hydrocyanic acid was given up for use in the field, as phosgene is effective at fifty times this dilution, and mustard gas at one thousand times.

One of the grounds given for objection to science is that science is responsible for such horrors as those of the late war. “You scientific men (we are told) never think of the possible application of your discoveries. You do not mind whether they are used to kill or to cure. Your method of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with molecules and atoms, renders you insensible to the difference between right and wrong. And so you devise the means of universal destruction, and sell them into the hands of unrighteous and bloody-minded men.”

I note that the people who make these remarks do not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or to read mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in their back-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, with its interesting and variegated fauna. But it is quite easy to show that the destructive and horrible nature of modern warfare is due, not to the weapons used, but largely to the other applications of science which constitute the material basis of our civilization. Let us imagine the Great War fought with all our means of transport and preventive medicine, but no weapons more complicated than swords, spears, and possibly a few bows. With fewer munitions the armies could have been mobilized even more rapidly, and more men put in the fighting line. The Germans would probably have tried, as they tried in 1914, to bring about a “Schlacht ohne Morgen,” a battle on reversed fronts modelled on Cannae. The fighting would probably have been about as severe as at Cannae, and men would have been fighting in close order, ten or twenty deep, along a hundred-mile front. No doubt it would have been over sooner, but the losses would probably have been just as great. The French and Germans would doubtless both have gone on fighting until at least half their armies had become casualties, and, with four years’ fighting compressed into as many weeks, it would have been impossible to tend more than a fraction of the wounded. The chief difference might have been that the Russians would have been victorious by mere weight of numbers, and the French defeated. In former wars slaughter was limited by the fact that large armies could not be fed, and developed epidemic diseases. They also moved very slowly. So it took twenty-three years (from 1792 to 1815) to wear down the resistance of the French nation. Moreover, the Great War was the first since the Second Punic War of the 3rd century B. C. between two great civilized nations, each fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity. Modern transport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used merely served to prolong it.

The objection to scientific weapons such as the gases of the late war, and such new devices as may be employed in the next, is essentially an objection to the unknown. Fighting with lances or guns, one can calculate, or thinks one can calculate, one’s chances. But with gas or rays or microbes one has an altogether different state of affairs. Poisonous gas had a great moral effect, just because it was new, and incomprehensible. As long as we permit ourselves to be afraid of the novel and unknown, there will be a very great temptation to use novel and unknown weapons against us. Now, terror of the unknown is thoroughly right and rational so long as we believe that the prince of this world is a malignant being. But it is not justifiable if we believe that the world is the expression of a power friendly to our aspirations, or if we are atheists and hold that it is neutral and indifferent to human ideals.

It will by now have become clear to you that I am writing somewhat parabolically. What I have said about mustard gas might be applied, _mutatis mutandis_, to most other applications of science to human life. They can all, I think, be abused, but none perhaps is always evil; and many, like mustard gas, when we have got over our first not very rational objection to them, turn out to be, on the whole, good. If it is right for me to fight my enemy with a sword, it is right for me to fight him with mustard gas: if the one is wrong, so is the other. But I have no sympathy whatever for Mr. Facing-both-ways when he says that, though he is prepared on occasion to fight, he will not use these nasty new-fangled weapons. Of course I am not suggesting that we should violate or prepare to violate the Washington Agreement on this subject. I do, however, believe that we ought to denounce it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Such are the facts about chemical warfare. They will not be believed because a belief in them would do violence to the sentiments of most people. They will not be promulgated, as there is no money to be made out of them. (Chemical manufacturers make both high explosive and mustard gas, and the former more easily.) The views which I have expressed do not coexist in the mind of any party leader or newspaper proprietor, and must therefore be those of a crank. But until some stronger argument can be waged against them than that they are unusual and unpleasant, there remains the possibility that they are true.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.