Gas and flame in modern warfare

by Samuel James Manson Auld

Curiously enough two kittens, which inhabited the dugout of the commanding officer of one of the battalions of the Scottish Borderers, who were in reserve, came through alive. The kittens were badly gassed and lay breathing rapidly, suffering from spasms and with profuse salivation. Possibly their fur helped to absorb some of the gas, for five hours later the little victims were almost themselves again, though they continued to cough occasionally and drank water continually. The water they took in preference to milk.

The effects of the poison on the soldiers who were gassed were pretty much the same as has been so frequently described in the press before. In the lighter cases it was mostly severe and painful coughing and bronchitis, with occasional retching and vomiting. The severe cases had the frothing at the mouth, the painful fight for breath and the blue face with staring eyes which are typical of severe gassing with chlorine and phosgene. I was told that there were not many delayed cases—that is, men being taken seriously ill hours after the attack, though apparently unscathed before.

The casualties were really remarkably small in the circumstances, and even despite the surprise tactics, were not as numerous as those of the December attack. Apart from the men who were caught without their respirators, most of the casualties were the result of some special circumstances. The helmets themselves when properly inspected and adjusted gave good protection. In connection with the laying aside of the respirators after the first cloud a sergeant told me that when the second wave came over he had seen two soldiers trying to get into the same helmet. The humorous side of this had apparently appealed to him even in the middle of the attack.

Of course with the trenches so close together a lot of men had difficulty in getting protection in time. Parties of men in advanced saps and listening posts had the greatest difficulty, and numbers of these men were killed. One pioneer of a tunnelling company came out of a mine gallery knowing nothing about what had been happening aboveground, and walked straight into the middle of the gas cloud.

A man in one of the companies of the Irish Rifles was wounded in the head by shrapnel through both his steel and gas helmets. In spite of the wound and the hole in his gas helmet he held the latter close round his mouth and nose and was not gassed at all—a clear case of presence of mind saving his life.

One thing which impressed every one with the need for thorough gas training at home, and which should be taken to heart by all men in training at the camps or likely to go there, was the way in which reinforcements and men who had recently joined up suffered. Their casualties were out of all proportion to their numbers and were due entirely to the fact that insufficient attention was given at that time to the gas-defence training of the recruits. Many of them had never put on a helmet before, and none of them had ever smelled gas.

In one particular instance a batch of twenty men had come straight over from England and were in the gas attack the day after their arrival in the trenches. The only training they had had was a lecture from their own regimental officers, and consequently they knew little or nothing about the use of their helmets. Every one of these men was gassed. It is true that they had scrambled into their helmets somehow, and none of them died; but the fact remains that absence of training at home cost the fighting line twenty men in one company. In this company they were the only men gassed. Largely as a consequence of this, gas-defence training was taken up very seriously in the early training of recruits, and big gas schools were established at all the camps both in England and at the bases in France, so as to catch the young soldier early.

The boche made another gas attack on the Irish Division on the same Front two days later. Once again he let off two waves—this time with an interval of only a quarter of an hour. But despite his idea of “mixing them up” he could not bring off that particular surprise again.

The second attack was one of the most interesting on record, for it was here, near Hulluch, that the gas blew back on the Germans and killed many more of them than our total gas casualties. The thing happened in this way: The first gas wave was loosed off at three-fifty A. M., opposite the celebrated Chalk Pit Wood. Fifteen minutes later a heavy cloud was discharged on the Hulluch front. But the wind was too light and variable. The cloud came over our line and then the gentle wind first dropped altogether and then gradually veered round. The gas hung on No Man’s Land and over both sets of trenches for a short time, and then with increasing pace drifted back right over the German position, just where Fritz had been seen massing for an attack on the Hulluch sector. We did not see the confusion which reigned, but almost simultaneously with the arrival of his own gas our barrage came down and the German attack dispersed.

All that day our observers reported the carrying out of German casualties from the trenches on stretchers and a constant stream of ambulances coming up and then returning along the roads to the rear. We surmised that the boche had swallowed some of his own poison, but it was not until several months later, from some documents captured during the Battle of the Somme, that we were able to appreciate his disaster to the full.