CHAPTER III
Popular terror of gas—Necessity for drilling and early personal experience—Sure defence from gas possible—The first gas alarms—The prussic acid scare a myth—The phosgene scare a reality—The helmet made to combat it—Necessity for renovating the helmet.
Popular terror of gas—Necessity for drilling and early personal experience—Sure defence from gas possible—The first gas alarms—The prussic acid scare a myth—The phosgene scare a reality—The helmet made to combat it—Necessity for renovating the helmet.
Popular terror of gas—Necessity for drilling and early personal experience—Sure defence from gas possible—The first gas alarms—The prussic acid scare a myth—The phosgene scare a reality—The helmet made to combat it—Necessity for renovating the helmet.
Thefinal object in the training of men in defence against gas is that troops shall be able to protect themselves completely and as quickly as possible in all the multitudinous circumstances in which they may encounter the poisonous gas in the field. To attain this it is necessary to inspire confidence by letting them in as far as possible on the principles underlying the use of gas and the tactics which are adopted by the enemy; and, secondly, to bring their practical proficiency and discipline up to such a standard that they make the very best use of the apparatus that is given to them.
It must be remembered that one of the greatest difficulties in talking to people about gas is the mystery of it. Even educatedpeople hardly understand the word “gas” in connection with war and are apt to think of coal gas and dentists’ gas in consequence. The result is that the gas of the Germans was sometimes credited with all sorts of impossible qualities of movement and deadliness, and it can hardly be realised what alarm and distrust may exist in the raw recruit with regard to gas until he has been given some instruction. This is even as great a danger as the over-confidence of the veteran soldier, who may know just as little about it.
Mere drilling and assertion are not sufficient to inspire confidence and acquire proportion, and it was realised very early that personal experience was needed. To gain this arrangements were made for every man to see and smell gas in concentrations that would at any rate produce severe discomfort if dwelt in for any length of time, and for each soldier subsequently to be exposed to gas while wearing a gas helmet in such a concentration that negligence in obeying orders or in using the smoke helmet correctly would lead to real danger to life. By this means confidence could be inspired ineverybody, though there is always a certain danger due to recklessness among the more adventurous types.
Besides this it was necessary to give as many men as possible some idea of the common sense of the operations in which the army was being drilled. This could only be done by giving a clear idea of how the gas is used; how gas travels; where it accumulates; how it can be removed, and so on; and under what conditions a respirator or smoke helmet protects or ceases to protect its wearer. It was on these lines that instruction was built up; and to do it thoroughly it was found that a large number of instructors were required in order to train the officers and noncommissioned officers and to get them to treat their respirators with as great respect as their rifles and to learn to carry them through a gas-defence drill in just as smart a manner as the ordinary arms.
For this purpose special schools of instruction were started at each army headquarters, and as many regimental officers and noncommissioned officers as possible were given a four or five days’ course of gas training, so that they in their turn could goback to their regiments and spread the gospel, as the responsibility for getting things done must eventually fall upon them. Not only was it found impossible to provide specialist officers for each regiment or battalion, but it was recognised that such a procedure would have a bad effect on the gas-defence measures.
Gas defence was a matter which affected everybody and was in no way to be regarded as a specialist’s job; battalions were already full of specialists. Indeed the colonels were apt to complain that they had nobody but specialists to command. There were bombers, snipers, signalers, machine gunners and sanitary men; and at that time the trench-mortar personnel was also a part of the infantry battalion. With all these things the feeling was that if a job could be looked on as being a specialty it should be put on the specialist officer concerned, and nobody else worried about it much. Now if gas defence was to become Lieutenant Snook’s job, it meant that it was going to be nobody else’s job, and it was essential that the idea should grow up in the army that gas defencewas a purely military matter and affected everybody.
What was said then is just as true to-day—that the defensive appliance is a certain protection if it is used properly and in time. Defence against gas is thus on an entirely different footing from defence against shells and bullets, where protection cannot be assured; and, to quote instructions on the subject: “For destructive effects gas must depend on surprise, on poor discipline or on defective appliances. Consequently gas casualties are preventable if the soldier is trained continually to exercise vigilance and is well drilled in the use and care of his respirator.”
The basis of the whole thing, therefore, was that every officer should see that the men under his command were properly instructed in defensive measures against gas attacks, and that all orders on the subject were thoroughly understood. It was then up to the officers to see that their men could get their helmets on properly in the minimum time, and this involved considerable amount of drill practice. It was pointed out to the officers that since protection had beenprovided, those battalions which had been carefully instructed had come through practically unharmed, while those battalions in which instructions had been neglected suffered severely.
It was also up to the officers to explain to their men as much as they themselves had learned about gas clouds, and to impress on them, for example, that by moving to the rear they would move with the gas, and that if they got flurried they would breathe more deeply and would run much more risk of being gassed.
Besides these questions of instruction and drilling a lot of other arrangements had to be made, so that warning of German gas attacks should be spread in the quickest possible time. Arrangements were made to install alarms of various kinds in the trenches. Of course no reliance could be placed on any method of communication which involved the use of the lungs. A man cannot blow a bugle or a whistle while he has a helmet on, and if he waited to give a signal by such a method before protecting himself he would be almost certain to be gassed. What wasdone was to place bells and gongs made from shell cases up and down the trenches.
At first these were rather futile things, the bells generally being much too small—some of them merely cow bells. The shell cases were a bit better and are still used for local alarms; but the arrangements for giving warning were not really very good at that time. The best devices were a number of motor horns, which were obtained locally, but the supply was insufficient and there was no general issue. Later on the alarm arrangements were tremendously improved. In some cases signal lights were used, but so many different kinds of rockets were already employed for signalling to the rear that there was great difficulty in finding a light sufficiently distinctive. There was also the danger that it could be quickly copied by the boche, who would thus amuse himself by giving us all kinds of shocks from false alarms.
Quite as important as the provision of signals was the making of observations to see when the wind was in a dangerous quarter. This was done partly at the meteorological stations at headquarters and partly on thefront line itself. The latter was regarded at the time as the most important, and orders were given that each unit in the front line should rig up some kind of wind vane and learn to ascertain the strength of the wind, so that they should be immediately prepared for an attack whenever the wind was in a dangerous quarter.
Wind vanes in the trenches were of the simplest types and a great deal of ingenuity was displayed in fitting up weathercocks that would be capable of turning in really low wind—say, one with a speed of only two miles an hour. The bearings for the central rod were the greatest difficulty, but it was found that by boring out a rifle bullet a sharp pointed stick or a thick piece of wire could be got to revolve in the hollow bullet quite easily, what remained of the lead core acting as a kind of lubrication.
The greatest nuisance of these wind vanes at first was that they were made so generally obtrusive that they could be seen from the enemy’s lines, and they nearly always drew fire from snipers, and sometimes actually from the artillery. Presumably the enemy thought that where the wind vanes were installedcompany headquarters were probably situated. The position of the wind vanes consequently had to be chosen so that the direction and speed of the wind would be measured several feet above the ground without the apparatus being too obvious. One of the simplest types of vane adopted, and one which could hardly be seen from any distance, was a bit of a stick to the end of which was tied ten to twelve inches of thin thread with a tiny bit of cotton wool at the end. When the wind is blowing the direction taken by the thread shows the line of the wind fairly exactly, and the behaviour of the cotton wool in rising and falling indicates the strength of the wind. The latter, however, was supposed to be measured by reference to Beaufort’s scale, which depends on the movement in wind of natural objects. Beaufort’s scale, which was devised long ago by an English admiral of that name, is as follows:
Smoke moves straight up, speed of wind isnil; smoke slants, speed is two miles an hour; the wind is felt on the face, speed is five miles; paper, etc., move about, speed is ten miles; bushes are seen to sway, speed isfifteen miles; tree tops sway and wavelets are formed on water, speed is twenty miles; tree tops sway and whistle, speed is thirty miles.
All of these arrangements for training and equipment of the troops were hurried on as quickly as possible, but at the same time sight was not lost of the probability of the German’s using gases different from the chlorine which had originally formed their stand-by. It was felt that a good all-round protection should be capable of keeping out not only chlorine and similar gases but also others which were quite likely to come into use.
During the whole of this time we were getting a lot of information from the intelligence branch as to materials which the Germans were making for use against us in their next gas attacks. Some of this information was really farcical, but on the other hand some of it was very good and helped to confirm the conclusions to which our own scientists were coming as to the likelihood or unlikelihood of particular gases. In the former category may be classed one story which came to us containing a very circumstantialdescription of some experiments which were stated to have been carried out in Berlin. These trials were stated to have been made in what we considered a very proper place, namely, Hagenbeck’s menagerie, where, in the presence of a large number of military representatives, a new gas was tried out.
A noncommissioned officer appeared with a tank of the gas on his back, the spraying nozzle coming out under his arm. A camel and an elephant were brought out. The noncommissioned officer advanced toward them, and at twenty paces’ distance he pressed down the lever on the tank and out came some small black bubbles of gas, which floated down the wind toward the faded animals. The bubbles burst, giving off a yellow vapour, and the minute this vapour came in contact with the camel and the elephant the beasts dropped down dead!
This sounded very terrible, but even in the conditions we were at the time it was not taken too seriously, and of course nothing of this kind has ever made its appearance.
Another story which commenced to make its appearance at that time and which wehave heard a great deal about ever since was that the Germans were busy making prussic acid in enormous quantities for a huge offensive which was to finish the war. It was stated that the Kaiser had at last been persuaded to use this terrible weapon in order by its use to finish the war at once and prevent needless suffering.
When they first made their appearance stories with regard to prussic acid had to be taken a great deal more seriously than those like the “little black bubbles.” For one thing we were unprotected against prussic acid, and for another it was known of course to be an extremely deadly poison. Indeed before the war it was regarded as the most poisonous vapour known, so a great deal of weight was attached to these statements, and experiments were at once put on foot to find protection against prussic acid and to see exactly how poisonous it was compared with other gases.
As a matter of fact prussic acid has not been used by the Germans simply because it is not poisonous enough. It is not so poisonous, for example, as phosgene, and a lot of captured German documents showingthe relative toxicity of different vapours always put it on a rather low basis. It was this and not a desire to avoid utter barbarity which decided the Germans not to use it. The ordinary German soldiers, just like ourselves, still consider prussic acid as the most dangerous possible material, and whenever they have a story to tell of a new gas being invented or being got ready to use against us they will tell you in awestruck tones that it is prussic acid.
The most valuable piece of information which we got was a complete set of notes of some very secret lectures given to specially selected senior officers at a conference in Germany. We gathered that this conference was held behind closed doors and triple lines of sentries, and all that kind of thing, and I cannot of course indicate how the information came into our hands, but there it was. It described a lot of new gases which had been considered, and stated among other things that they intended to make a big gas attack against either the French or ourselves in Flanders in December, 1915, some time before Christmas when the wind was favourable. For this purpose they were goingto use a mixture of chlorine with another gas, phosgene—the amount of phosgene to be twenty per cent of the whole.
Now phosgene had been realised by our own chemists as a very likely gas to be used. I cannot say that it is more poisonous than chlorine, but it is infinitely more deadly because it is much more difficult to protect against and is more insidious in its nature. For one thing, though it is an asphyxiant like chlorine it is possible for a man to be only slightly gassed and think he is all right, and then, especially if he takes any exercise in between, to fall dead several hours later from heart failure.
The information was so complete that our arrangements to provide a helmet which would protect against phosgene were hastened as much as possible; and it was as well that they were, for the attack actually did come off just about the time and place mentioned, in the Ypres salient.
It was realised of course that any change in protection would have to include both prussic acid and phosgene; and this is not nearly so easy as it sounds. Phosgene is peculiarly chemically inert for such an activepoison, and it was some time before a reasonable protection was found which could be incorporated in a smoke helmet. The substance actually decided upon was a solution of sodium phenate—that is, carbolic acid dissolved in caustic soda, the mixture containing an excess of caustic. This solution is quite capable of dealing with reasonable concentrations of phosgene and would successfully protect against three parts of phosgene to ten thousand of the air, which in the circumstances was quite good enough. The French also altered their protection at the same time and used sodium sulphanilate as the basis of protection against phosgene. The objections against the sodium phenate were that it could not be absorbed into a flannel helmet owing to its destruction of the fabric, and on account of its being strongly caustic it would tend to burn the faces of the men it came in contact with. These difficulties were overcome by making the helmet of two layers of flannelette instead of one layer of flannel, and by mixing with the sodium phenate a large quantity of glycerin. This kept the fabric moist and prevented the caustic from exerting its corrosive action.
It was realised from the start that a smoke helmet containing free alkali would deteriorate considerably on exposure to air, and it was found advantageous to provide a breathing tube in the mask so that a man would breathe in through the helmet and out through an outlet valve; in this way the breath, which contains a lot of carbonic acid, would have no bad effect on the chemicals. The use of an outlet valve was also found to have the advantage of keeping the air purer inside the helmet and preventing the stuffy feeling which accompanied the older types of helmet.
This additional complication to the helmet was not looked upon favourably at first by the troops, but it was very quickly realised that only a little practice was required to make a man breathe quite normally in the way mentioned above, and that the advantages accruing from the alteration were very great indeed. We found that we could carry on for much longer stretches of time without being fagged out, and more exact trials by the scientists showed that a man’s temperature, pulse and rate of breathing did not increase nearly so rapidly if he used anoutlet valve as when breathing out and in through the same material. This is largely due to what is called “dead space,” which means the volume of air in between the lungs and the atmosphere and in which the air is largely composed of breath exhaled from the lungs. The smaller this space the easier it is to breathe.
This principle of using an outlet valve has been retained in all the British respirators which have been invented since and is regarded as one of the very highest importance.
Another thing which had to be taken care of was that the new helmets, which were called “tube” or “P” helmets, would gradually deteriorate on exposure to air, and would consequently have to be withdrawn from the troops in the line from time to time in order to redip them in chemicals and make them as effective as before. For this purpose large repair factories were started at the bases and were placed in charge of Englishwomen who were brought over for the purpose. These factories were organised with local labour, helped out by a little military personnel, and were capable of washingthe helmets returned from the line, redipping them in new solution, and sending them back in good condition again.
This was no small job, as the smoke helmets which were sent in were generally filthy dirty, sometimes soaked in mud and sodden with water, and requiring very careful handling to be brought back into good condition. All sorts of things got back with these helmets to the repair stations, and it was not an uncommon thing for the satchels containing the helmets to be found to hold anything from a live hand grenade to the photograph of some girl, which had been stored there for safe keeping. Both then and later we always had considerable difficulty in preventing Tommy from using his helmet satchel, and later on his box respirator satchel, for these illicit purposes. He seemed to consider that if he had to carry another haversack he had a perfect right to put in it whatever he liked—rations, knives and forks, ammunition, private knickknacks of all kinds. This of course had to be stopped, owing to the damage these things might do to the respirator and thedifficulty they might make in getting it out quickly.
During September and October, 1915, there were several scares as to the imminence of gas attacks by the Germans, and on one or two occasions it was definitely stated that the cylinders were actually in position in their trenches. This helped to hasten things up, and the factories in England and the repair stations in France kept themselves busy in producing the new type of helmet. A large number of them were actually issued to the troops by the time the Battle of Loos was started, and were consequently employed by our men when the first gas attacks were made, in September of that year.
It was these helmets which appeared in so many of the picture papers showing the charge of some British Territorial infantry through the gas cloud at the beginning of the battle, and there is no question about it that the men had a very fearsome appearance. With the hood over the head and the two big goggle eyes, and the outlet valve sticking out where the nose should be, it issmall wonder that the Germans described them as “devils,” and were so terrified as not to be able to put up much fight on the front where the particular charge was made.