These smokes are extremely valuable where the purpose is to form a screen, whether it be to hide the advance of troops or to cut off the view of observers. These smokes are equally useful on land and on sea. So great is the decrease in efficiency of the rifle or machine gun, and of artillery even when firing at troops that cannot be seen, that smoke for screening purposes will be used on every future field of battle. When firing through a screen of smoke, a man has certainly less than one-quarter the chance to hit his target that he would have were the target in plain view. Since smoke clouds may or may not be poisonous and since smoke will be used in every battle, there is opened up an unlimited field for the exercise of ingenuity in making these smoke clouds poisonous or non-poisonous at will. It also opens up an unlimited field for the well-trained chemical warfare officer who can tell in any smoke cloud whether gas be present and whether, if present, it is in sufficient concentration to be dangerous.
At the risk of repetition, it is again stated that there is no gas that will kill or even permanently injure in any quantity that cannot be detected. For every gas, there is a certain minimum amount in each cubic foot of air that is necessary to cause any injury. In nearly all gases, this minimum amount is sufficient to be readily noticeable by a trained chemical warfare officer through the sense of smell.
It would be idle to attempt to enumerate the ways and means by which chemicals will be used in the future. In fact, one can hardly conceive of a situation where gas or smoke will not be employed, for these materials may be liquids or solids that either automatically, upon exposure to the air, turn into gas, or which are pulverized by high explosive, or driven off by heat. This varied character of the materials enables them to be used in every sort of artillery shell, bomb or other container carried to the field of battle.
Some of the gases are extremely powerful as irritants to the nose and throat in very minute quantities, while at the same time being highly poisonous in high concentrations. Diphenylchloroarsine, used extensively by the Germans in high explosive shell, is more poisonous than phosgene, the most deadly gas in general use in the past war. In addition, it has the quality of causing an intolerable burning sensation in the nose, throat, and lungs, in extremely minute quantities. This material can be kept out of masks only by filters, whereas true gases are taken out by charcoal and chemical granules.
There is still another quality which helps make chemical warfare the most powerful weapon of war. Gas is the only substance used in war which can be counted on to do its work as efficiently at night as in the daytime. Indeed, it is often more effective at night than in the daytime, because the man who goes to sleep without his mask on, who is careless, who loses his mask, or who becomes excited in the darkness of night, becomes a casualty, and the past war showed that these casualties were decidedly numerous even when the troops knew almost to the minute the time the gas would arrive.
Accordingly, chemical warfare is an agency that must not only be reckoned with by every civilized nation in the future, but is one which civilized nations should not hesitate to use. When properly safe-guarded with masks and other safety devices, it gives to the most scientific and most ingenious people a great advantage over the less scientific and less ingenious. Then why should the United States or any other highly civilized country consider giving up chemical warfare? To say that its use against savages is not a fair method of fighting, because the savages are not equipped with it, is arrant nonsense. No nation considers such things today. If they had, our American troops, when fighting the Moros in the Philippine Islands, would have had to wear the breechclout and use only swords and spears.
Notwithstanding the opposition of certain people who, through ignorance or for other reasons, have fought it, chemical warfare has come to stay, and just in proportion as the United States gives chemical warfare its proper place in its military establishment, just in that proportion will the United States be ready to meet any or all comers in the future, for the United States has incomparable resources in the shape of the crude materials—power, salt, sulfur and the like—that are necessary in the manufacture of gases.
If, then, there be developed industries for manufacturing these gases in time of war, and if the training of the army in chemical warfare be thorough and extensive, the United States will have more than an equal chance with any other nation or combination of nations in any future war.
It is just as sportsman-like to fight with chemical warfare materials as it is to fight with machine guns. The enemy will know more or less accurately our chemical warfare materials and our methods, and we will have the same information about the enemy. It is thus a matching of wits just as much as in the days when the Knights of the Round Table fought with swords or with spears on horseback. The American is a pure sportsman and asks odds of no man. He does ask, though, that he be given a square deal. He is unwilling to agree not to use a powerful weapon of war when he knows that an outlaw nation would use it against him if that outlaw nation could achieve success by so doing. How much better it is to say to the world that we are going to use chemical warfare to the greatest extent possible in any future struggle. In announcing that we would repeat as always that we are making these preparations only for defense, and who is there who dares question our right to do so?