A lantern picture, entitled “War in the Air,” by C. G. Grey (editor of “Aeroplane”), issued by the National War Savings Committee, Salisbury Square, London, E. C. 4 (page 7).
“Slide 32—The navy’s land machines went over to Belgium and it is to the credit of the R. N. A. S. that the first hostile missiles which fell on German soil were bombs dropped by R. N. A. S. pilots on Cologne and Dusseldorf....
“Slide 35—It is interesting to note that these early raids by the R. N. A. S. were the first example of bomb-dropping attacks from the air in any way, and the only pity is that we had not at the beginning of the war enough aeroplanes.”
“Priority in poison gas.”
The Glasgow “Evening News” (January 26, 1918) frankly admitted that:
It appears that mustard gas, generally believed to have been invented by the Germans, was discovered by the late Professor Guthrie at the Royal College, Mauritius.
The London “Times,” on August 2, 1914, reproduced from the French government organ, “Le Temps,” a paragraph reporting that M. Turpin has offered to the French Ministry of War a shell filled with a chemical compound discovered by him, and called Turpinite. Numbers of these shells seem to have been used by the French artillery, and they were essentially such gas shells as the Germans are now using. Numerous correspondents, claiming to be eye-witnesses,reported their terrible effects in the British press during October and November, 1914. We learned that the gas liberated from the explosion of one of these shells was enough to asphyxiate an entire platoon of Germans. After death they were observed to be standing erect and shoulder to shoulder in their trenches, and, after killing them with this marvelous celerity, the gas would roll on and stifle entire flocks of sheep feeding in fields in their rear. The British press writers saw nothing to blame in the use against Germans of Turpinite; on the contrary, they openly exulted in its terrible effects. Subsequently, much to their regret, Turpinite was given up, because it was so dangerous to the munition workers who had to pour it into the shell cases. Some weeks later the Germans began to use with more success the same expedient.
The London “Illustrated News” (May 13, 1915) published a “thrilling” picture of 5 German officers asphyxiated by British lyddite. The descriptive lines below the picture say:
“One of the correspondents at the front tells a thrilling story of the havoc wrought by lyddite shells used by our artillery in Flanders. The fumes of the lyddite are very poisonous, so much so that some of our troops wore masks for the nose and mouth. After one battle, in which the German trenches had been shelled with lyddite, an officer found a card party of five officers stone dead. Looking at them in the bright moonlight, he was struck by their resemblance to waxwork figures. They were in perfectly natural poses, but the bright yellow of their skins showed the manner of their death—asphyxiation by lyddite.”
The first inventor of poison gas was Lord Dundonald during the Crimean war (see “The Panmure Papers,” published in 1908 by Hodder & Stoughton, and the “Candid Review,” August, 1915). It was at the time of the Crimean war rejected by the English as “too horrible.”