One of the early, if not the earliest suggestion as to the use of poison gas in shell is found in an article on “Greek Fire,” by B. W. Richardson.[2] He says:
“I feel it a duty to state openly and boldly, that if science were to be allowed her full swing, if society would really allow that ‘all is fair in war,’ war might be banished at once from the earth as a game which neither subject nor king dare play at. Globes that could distribute liquid fire could distribute also lethal agents, within the breath of which no man, however puissant, could stand and live. From the summit of Primrose Hill, a few hundred engineers, properly prepared, could render Regent’s Park, in an incredibly short space of time, utterly uninhabitable; or could make an army of men, that should even fill that space, fall with their arms in their hands, prostrate and helpless as the host of Sennacherib.
“The question is, shall these things be? I do not see that humanity should revolt, for would it not be better to destroy a host in Regent’s Park by making the men fall as in a mystical sleep, than to let down on them another host to break their bones, tear their limbs asunder and gouge out their entrails with three-cornered pikes; leaving a vast majority undead, and writhing for hours in torments of the damned? I conceive, for one, that science would be blessed in spreading her wings on the blast, and breathing into the face of a desperate horde of men prolonged sleep—for it need not necessarily be a death—which they could not grapple with, and which would yield them up with their implements of murder to an enemy that in the immensity of its power could afford to be merciful as Heaven.
“The question is, shall these things be? I think they must be. By what compact can they be stopped? It were improbable that any congress of nations could agree on any code regulating means of destruction; but if it did, it were useless; for science becomes more powerful as she concentrates her forces in the hands of units, so that a nation could only act, by the absolute and individual assent of each of her representatives. Assume, then, that France shall lay war to England, and by superior force of men should place immense hosts, well armed, on English soil. Is it probable that the units would rest in peace and allow sheer brute force to win its way to empire? Or put English troops on French soil, and reverse the question?
“To conclude. War has, at this moment, reached, in its details, such an extravagance of horror and cruelty, that it can not be made worse by any art, and can only be made more merciful by being rendered more terribly energetic. Who that had to die from a blow would not rather place his head under Nasmyth’s hammer, than submit it to a drummer-boy armed with a ferrule?”
The Army and Navy Register of May 29, 1915, reports that
“among the recommendations forwarded to the Board of Ordnance and Fortifications there may be found many suggestions in favor of the asphyxiation process, mostly by the employment of gases contained in bombs to be thrown within the lines of the foe, with varying effects from peaceful slumber to instant death. One ingenious person suggested a bomb laden to its full capacity with snuff, which should be so evenly and thoroughly distributed that the enemy would be convulsed with sneezing, and in this period of paroxysm it would be possible to creep up on him and capture him in the throes of the convulsion.”
That the probable use of poisonous gas has often been in the minds of military men during recent times is evidenced by the fact that at the Hague Conference in 1899 several of the more prominent nations of Europe and Asia pledged themselves not to use projectiles whose only object was to give out suffocating or poisonous gases. Many of the Powers did not sign this declaration until later. Germany signed and ratified it on Sept. 4, 1900, but the United States never signed it. Further, this declaration was not to be binding in case of a war in which a non-signatory was or became a belligerent. Admiral Mahan, a United States delegate, stated his position in regard to the use of gas in shell (at that time an untried theory) as follows:
“The reproach of cruelty and perfidy addressed against these supposed shells was equally uttered previously against fire-arms and torpedoes, although both are now employed without scruple. It is illogical and not demonstrably humane to be tender about asphyxiating men with gas, when all are prepared to admit that it is allowable to blow the bottom out of an ironclad at midnight, throwing four or five hundred men into the sea to be choked by the water, with scarcely the remotest chance to escape.”
At the Hague Congress of 1907, article 23 of the rules adopted for war on land states: