CHAPTER VII
The rising importance of the gas shell—The variety of gases practicable with the shell—The deadly Green Cross Shell—Risks of transporting “duds” for chemical analysis—Reduced Allied casualties—German blunders in shelling tactics—Importance of universal discipline.
The rising importance of the gas shell—The variety of gases practicable with the shell—The deadly Green Cross Shell—Risks of transporting “duds” for chemical analysis—Reduced Allied casualties—German blunders in shelling tactics—Importance of universal discipline.
The rising importance of the gas shell—The variety of gases practicable with the shell—The deadly Green Cross Shell—Risks of transporting “duds” for chemical analysis—Reduced Allied casualties—German blunders in shelling tactics—Importance of universal discipline.
Oneof the most interesting things about the development of gas warfare has been the way in which the gas shell, from being the least important method of poisoning the air, has become the chief gas weapon in the German armoury.
The reasons for this extraordinary development, though various, are not far to seek. They lie chiefly in the fact that unlike the gas cloud we have not even yet approached the limit of the number or size of the gas projectiles that can be used. Nor, which is even more important, is there any limit to the variety of the poisons that can be used in gas shell.
The fact of the matter is that the gas shellis not really a gas shell at all. It is nearly always a “liquid” shell and sometimes even a “solid” shell. The term “gas shell” is used because the liquid or solid contents are atomised by the explosion of the bursting charge or are distributed round in the form of such tiny particles or droplets, as the case may be, that they act almost as a gas. In the latter case they form what might be described as a mist or smoke, but with this difference from ordinary smoke—that the gas mist or smoke is generally, though not always, invisible.
Just imagine what would happen supposing a shell were filled with water. Burst such a shell with a sufficiently big charge of high explosive and all the water would be distributed into the air in the form of such finely divided spray that it would form a mist. This mist would either vapourise into the atmosphere completely or hang about like a cloud, according as the air was dry or moist. In any case, if the burster were big enough no water would be spread on the ground; nor would any big drops be formed.
This is just what happens with any of the poisonous materials filled into a shell. Indeedif the burster were big enough and carefully chosen it would be possible to form a “gas” with treacle. With a volatile material like gasoline on the other hand all that would be needed would be a burster just big enough to open the shell.
It can be seen therefore that the choice of materials for gas shell is practically unlimited and is governed only by their being poisonous enough and by the ease of production.
Another thing in which the gas shell has the advantage over the cylinder gas is in getting surprise, which is naturally much easier to effect with shell. By the way, if the reader wishes to be counted among those who knows, he will always speak or write the plural of shell without adding a final “s.” To talk of a number of shells is very civilian.
As I pointed out before, we were expecting something new to happen in the gas-shell line during the whole of 1916, and had an idea that the new arrival would be something of a cyanide nature—possibly prussic acid itself. When it did come, however, it proved to be a liquid filling closely related chemically to phosgene and to the K-Stoff,which I have previously described. These new gas shell were the first of the present series of German gas shell, which are all distinctly marked with coloured crosses and named accordingly. These particular shell were the Green Cross Shell, a green cross being painted on the base of the cartridge or on the side of the shell or sometimes on both. They made their appearance on the Somme Front about a fortnight after the battle had started—that is, about the middle of July, 1916—though a few of them had been used against the French on the Verdun Front sometime in June.
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 handson 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 expertattention. 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 describedas “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 menpoisoned 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 willrealise 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—withgreat 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.
Shell of these three sizes were used thenon nearly all occasions and in very large quantities. One thing that made large numbers possible was the simplicity of the shell compared with the old pattern. There was no separate lead container and the “gas” was filled straight into the body of the shell, as the new material was unacted on by iron or steel. The head of the shell was screwed in and kept in position and perfectly gas-tight by means of a special cement.
As very little explosive was needed to open them up and spread the contents round the noise made by the burst of the Green Cross Shell was little more than a pop—at any rate when compared with the high-explosive shell or the old tear shell. The result was that at first men were apt to regard them as duds and to delay the putting on of respirators until it was too late.
These gas shell are supposed to make a peculiar wobbling noise in the passage through the air because of the liquid inside them, and in this way to be recognisable beforehand. Personally I cannot tell any difference in the noise compared with H. E. or shrapnel of the same calibre, though I have heard thousands of both kinds; but Idare say some people can, as the belief is fairly widespread.
Of course Fritz’s liberality with his gas shell caused us a lot of casualties, but not nearly so many as we might have had if he had known how to use them. The fact was he had not at that time got hold of the proper technic—developed later on by the French—of concentrating his gas shell on special targets. By now, of course, he has; but at that time he still clung to the idea of being able to poison big areas with his shell gas by putting down a series of barrages over the country to be attacked. Either he had not enough shell or he chose his areas too big, for he did not produce effective concentrations anywhere but locally. If he had, our losses might have been tremendous. As it was it became rather a hit-or-miss proposition, and I have seen hundreds and hundreds of these shell drop into absolutely unpopulated areas of the devastated Somme battlefield.
In one case a battery of field guns came in for its share of one such promiscuous bombardment while I was there. The number of shell coming over was so great thatit was like a magnified machine-gun shoot, but only a very few got on to the battery and the casualties were only two—both caused by a direct hit on one of the guns by a gas shell. If the boche had been able to concentrate his shell on and round the battery instead of giving it just the same amount as the unoccupied surrounding country the effect might have been very different.
One possible reason for the promiscuous and sometimes very casual shooting may have been the fact that the boche at that time had practically no air observation. Our flying fellows had temporarily chased his planes out of the skies and had shot down all his observation balloons. This made it impossible for him to pick his targets, and he either had to bombard the countryside or shoot “by the map,” neither method being particularly conducive to good results with gas shell.
On the other hand, one or two places that he knew were pretty certain to be occupied by our troops were given their full dose. One such place was Caterpillar Wood—a big narrow spinney running off from the Fricourt Valley and so named because ofits shape and the fact that on the ordnance maps, on which the woods are colored green, it looks just like a green caterpillar crawling over to the shelter of Mametz Wood. This place was continually shelled with large numbers of the Green Cross Shell, and as it stood in the side of a valley the gas persisted longer there than elsewhere and built up a tidy concentration which caused a lot of trouble.
The gunners were among our chief sufferers from these gas shell, as their guns were so frequently placed in sunken roads and folds in the ground for protection against explosive shell and aërial observation, and these were just the kind of places that held the gas longest. In the open much less damage was done. I remember one night the first-line transport of a battalion of the Black Watch ran into a patch of country into which the boche was raining 77-millimetre Green Cross Shell, and came out with only three casualties, two of which were from a direct hit on one of the wagons, the driver being killed instantly.
It seems particularly bad luck to be killed by a direct hit from a gas shell, for the bitsof shell that fly about don’t do much damage in the ordinary way and don’t travel great distances. Indeed it is remarkable, even in the biggest gas-shell bombardments, how very few men are hurt by the fragments.
The first week or two after the advent of the Green Cross the toll of gas-shell casualties was considerable if not alarming, but steps were immediately taken to get the situation in hand. It is in a case like this, where a surprise had been brought off, that Discipline, with a very big “D,” counts for so much. Fortunately the gas discipline of the British Army was pretty good, and it was not difficult to get new instructions carried out and orders obeyed. Once they got going their effect was most apparent and the gas-shell casualties dropped from week to week until they approached a minimum.
Among the important steps that were taken were a revision of the methods of spreading the alarm, and the protection and clearing out of dugouts into which the gas had penetrated.
Mention has already been made of the slight noise caused by the explosion of the gas shell, and instructions were accordinglyissued that all shell that sounded like duds were to be regarded as gas shell, and the respirators adjusted accordingly. This got over one of the elements of surprise.
A great many men, especially those in battery positions, had been gassed in their dugouts before warning of the gas bombardment had been spread. Numbers of these men were actually gassed in their sleep and were awakened too late by the choking fumes themselves. What was done was to post a gas sentry at every battery in just the same way that it was done in the trenches. Special local-alarm signals were arranged so that the sentry could wake every one in the neighbourhood without having the alarm spread beyond the limit of the gassed area. These alarms generally took the form of bells or of gongs made from big shell cases; but later on policemen’s large rattles were found to be the most effective “weapon” for the purpose, and numbers of these were distributed up and down the line and in the battery positions. It was feared at first that the noise of the rattles would be mistaken for machine-gun fire and no attention be paid to it, but this did not materialiseand the rattles have done good service.
The only thing about them is that they are made of wood—and nicely pickled, easily burning wood at that. In the trenches kindling chips of any kind are eagerly sought after to make a miniature fire to warm tea or cook an egg. When men will go the length of shaving the handles of their entrenching tools to obtain dry wood it could hardly be expected that policemen’s rattles would always be respected. I am afraid a number of them disappeared. With the artillery things are not so bad as fuel is easier to obtain and the rattles are therefore less liable to get lost.