Callinicus

by J. B. S. Haldane

It is worth while attempting to analyse the reasons for this rather curious decision. First, perhaps, we must put the complete and shameful ignorance of most of the politicians and many of the soldiers who took part in the Conference. Their ideas of gas warfare were apparently drawn from the descriptions of the great German cloud-gas attacks of 1915, which killed at least 1 in 4 of their casualties, and were written up on a large scale for recruiting and political purposes. But it is the business of politicians and soldiers, conceivably even of journalists, to know the truth about such matters before coming to decisions, or even impelling others to come to decisions about them.

To this ignorance, however, there was joined one of the most hideous forms of sentimentalism which has ever supported evil upon earth—the attachment of the professional soldier to cruel and obsolete killing machines. I would remind you of the conduct of the Chevalier Bayard, whom his contemporary soldiers described as sans peur et sans reproche. To captured knights, and even bowmen, he was the soul of courtesy, but musketeers or other users of gunpowder who fell into his hands were invariably put to death. It is worth remembering that, until the invention of gunpowder, fighting had for many centuries been remarkably safe for everyone who could afford a good suit of armour, while the abominable arquebus and its descendants have saved the remnants of Christendom from the Turks, Mongols, and other paynims who had by Bayard’s time successfully overwhelmed one half of its original extent.

I remember an excellent example of Bayardism in the war. A Turkish airman had developed considerable flair for shooting down our observation balloons. A British officer sent up one of these latter with a large cargo of gun-cotton, and blew up the Turk in question. For this deed he was severely reprimanded by the local officer commanding R.A.F. for unsportsmanlike conduct. This gentleman, doubtless, felt little objection to bombing, for example, Turkish transport columns, consisting mainly of non-combatants and animals, incapable of retaliating. (One may remark that between wounds and thirst perhaps 30,000 Turkish transport animals perished during our final victory in Palestine.) But he objected to airmen being killed except by other airmen. I, fighting in the mud beneath them, and exposed to the bombs of both sides (I was severely wounded by one of our own), felt differently. An attempt by the professional soldiers to stereotype the art of war into the channels which correspond to the ideas of 1914 might lead to a future rather different from that which I shall venture to predict, a future in which the military organizations of the world were overthrown by the exponents of some other mode of thinking, employing all the resources of science, and fighting “dirty.” The opponents of the present world-order may, therefore, welcome Bayardism in their governments.

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.