Master Mind by Daniel Charles

Author:Daniel Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

From his post in the reserve trenches, well away from the front lines, Canadian Jim Keddie watched, mystified, as yellow-green smoke rose from the German side and drifted in his direction. It formed a wall about fifty feet high and four miles long, moving slowly with the wind, accompanied by the booming thunder of German artillery. At first Keddie thought the eerie cloud was coming directly toward him, but the wind shifted, carrying it further to the east, toward trenches occupied by Algerians who’d been brought to Europe to fight for their French colonial rulers. Keddie caught only a whiff of the gas. “We did not get the full effect of it, but what we did was enough for me,” he wrote. “It makes the eyes smart and run. I became violently sick, but this passed off fairly soon.”

The Algerians, on the other hand, had no chance. Those who tried to stay in place were quickly overcome, retching and gasping for breath as they died. The rest, if they could, fled in panic, stumbling and falling and tossing away their rifles. The cloud rolled on, moving about a hundred feet each minute. It swept all defense before it, ripping open a four-mile-wide hole in the Allied front.

After about fifteen minutes, the German troops emerged from their trenches and advanced cautiously. Where they previously feared to stand, they now walked with impunity. They clambered through abandoned trenches, barbed-wire and machine-gun emplacements, passing contorted, still-warm bodies along the way. For an hour, they walked unhindered. “Before us lay, still undestroyed, the beautiful old city of Ypres,” wrote one soldier. “You could recognize the famous Cloth Hall.”

Night, however, was already falling, and the deadly cloud that cleared their way had dissipated. The German soldiers began to dig themselves new trenches, preparing for the counterattack that was sure to come. On the Allied side, reserves were being called up to close the gaping hole in the French lines. Already, they’d thought of some rudimentary defensive equipment: cans of water, along with wads of cotton that soldiers were supposed to soak and hold to their faces. The cotton wads were objectively useless but psychologically comforting, and when the battle began anew the next day, Allied soldiers were never again so taken by surprise and routed by gas. In the end, German forces gained only about a mile of territory through their introduction of gas.

Years after this dramatic “day of Ypres,” Haber and other defenders of gas weaponry remained bitter about their inability to take full advantage of it. They felt that an opportunity had been squandered. If only they had been more patient, and waited for a day with good winds in the morning. If only the High Command had provided enough reserves to sustain the offensive, instead of sending them off to the eastern front. Then, German forces might have been able to break through Allied defenses and drive all the way to the Atlantic. The way Haber saw it, the military’s tradition-bound lack of faith in his innovation had undermined its potential.

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