It was not long before blind or unexploded shell—“duds,” we call them—were collected and sent back for examination. This is one of the disadvantages of using gas shell—your opponent can always keep track of what you are doing. Sooner or later a fuse will not function or a bursting charge will not explode and your watchful enemy carefully collects the shell, and has for examination a considerable amount of the poison material. I say “carefully collects,” for it is no child’s play dealing with shell which may go off in your hands on the slightest provocation. However, it has to be done, and as it is the gas officer’s pidgin he manfully shoulders his task and the shell and has it brought in. Very frequently the fuse fails to act because a powder pellet holding up the striking needle has not burned away; but I remember one case where the gas officer of one of the armies took back a big dud gas shell. It meant transporting the weighty souvenir in a not particularly well sprung car over very bumpy roads, and he was quite relieved to arrive at his destination—the field laboratory. Here it was reverently taken to bits by the experts. Imagine the gas officer’s horror to find he had been bumping along for several hours in the company of a shell the powder pellet of which had burned away and whose only safety device was the weakest of weak creep springs on which the striker rested. A hard knock or a drop of six inches would almost certainly have exploded it.
The laboratory officers, who are experts at the game, may have to go up to the Front themselves to solve important duds which are regarded as dangerous and require expert attention. In one instance the officer concerned—in civil life a very celebrated professor at one of the London colleges—went up to the salient and explored about a mile and a half of trenches and finally located his prey—a fine dud 4.2-inch howitzer gas shell—out in the open.
Though the place was pretty unhealthy he “climbed the bags” and made a careful examination of the shell where it lay, finally bringing it back in with him. I forget whether he drew its sting on the spot, but in any case it was a pretty good effort, especially for a man no longer in his first youth.
Chemical analysis of the blind Green Cross Shell showed the contents to be a colourless liquid known to chemists by the extensive name of “trichlormethylcholoroformate.” Its effects are just as ferocious as the name implies, and experience showed it to be very poisonous. Indeed it is as poisonous as phosgene itself. The Green Cross Shell gas—“diphosgene,” to give it its short name—has many effects and symptoms that make it a dangerous weapon. When dilute it has a peculiar though not particularly nauseating smell, a smell variously described as “earthy,” “mouldy rhubarb”—whatever that smells like—and damp hay. Unlike the shell gases we had encountered before, it has very little effect on the eyes and causes practically no lachrymation. And this was a trap, because we had been used to lachrymators, so that many men despite the obvious smell were not particularly quick in protecting themselves because of the new symptoms.
Of course this applies only to such low concentrations as would take a long time to gas a man. In the higher concentrations the Green Cross very quickly asphyxiates—just as phosgene and chlorine do—and there is no question of whether it is deadly or not. The old Army quip about there being only two kinds of people in gas warfare, namely “The Quick and the Dead,” certainly applies if you get a Green Cross Shell bursting close to you. But even for gas shell bursting some distance away immediate and complete protection is necessary because of the delayed or after effects of the gas, which are exactly similar to those of phosgene. Every care that is taken with regard to men poisoned with phosgene has to be taken for men poisoned with Green Cross gas.
Those suffering from the effects of the gas are not allowed to exert themselves at all or to take heavy meals. They are kept under close observation for at least two days, and are treated, in fact, as casualties even though they are not apparently ill. Before the need for this was understood an officer I knew was slightly gassed with shell gas but thought nothing of it. Later on he felt a bit queer, and the regimental medical officer advised him to go down to the dressing station. He walked the length of the communication trench and then mounted a “push bicycle” for a mile’s ride to the aid post. The exertion was too much, however, and he reached the aid post only to fall dead.
The danger of not treating gassed men as casualties and resting them for a couple of days, after which they would probably be fit for work again, is shown by a case where forty men were lost to the line for a considerable time, though fortunately none of them died. These men were part of a working party engaged in the construction of dugouts. They were caught in a surprise bombardment, but were apparently not much affected. After completing their night’s work they marched back to billets and turned in as usual. The next morning several of them were so ill—nearly to the point of collapse—and the remainder were so visibly affected that the medical officer ordered the whole party to be sent down to the casualty clearing station, where they were evacuated to the base.
In still another case I remember a sergeant and twenty men of a wiring party engaged in the consolidation of a recently captured position were similarly caught by a sudden and intense Green Cross bombardment. A number of the men were gassed and felt pretty seedy, but continued their work and then withdrew. The sergeant felt no ill effects until an hour after turning in, when he woke with a bad cough and internal pain and died two hours afterward. One private went to bed without complaining at all and was found dead next morning. Another died soon after getting up. A third reached headquarters complaining of shell shock and died three hours later. I mention these cases so that my reader will realise why such great care is now taken with men who have been exposed to poison gas, and how by looking after them in this way it has been possible to reduce the number of delayed cases of death or serious illness to a minimum.
Talking of delayed effects of gas shell reminds me that at least two documents were captured during the Somme—one of them I got myself—which were obviously notes of lectures given to officers at a German gas school or staff course. In both of these sets of notes there were references to the Lusitania, showing that the German Higher Command was trying to explain that dastardly act to its own troops by making out that the Lusitania was sunk because it was carrying phosgene shell for the Allies. This lie can easily be nailed to the board, as not a single drop of phosgene—or any other poison gas or liquid, for that matter—was shipped from America before this year, 1918. Both of the paragraphs I refer to contained a double lie, for they each asserted that the French started the use of gas shell. One of them ran as follows: “The French first started the use of gas shell—with great hopes, but with little success! The most striking result was that experienced by the passengers of the Lusitania, whose rescued mostly died later.”
But to return to the Green Cross Shell. These were used during the Somme Battle in enormous numbers, far surpassing anything we had had before in the extent of the bombardment. There were a great many new features about these shell quite apart from the altered nature of the gas. First of all there was the size. Until then we had had gas shell of only two sizes—150-millimetre howitzer shell and the 105-millimetre howitzer shell. The former contained from five to eight pints of liquid according to the construction of the shell, and the latter about three pints. To these longer shell were now added shell from the ordinary field gun, or 77-millimetre gun—quite a small affair compared with the others and containing only two-thirds of a pint of liquid poison. But then, though so small, it could be fired more rapidly and accurately and could bring off an initial surprise in a way that the bigger guns could not do.