An Air That Kills: A Familiar History of Poison Gas
A paper given at the Death
By Technology
conference, Birkbeck College, 30 May 2003
War provides a grisly, parodic
counterpoint to the growth of civilisation and the growth of
technology. Wars both punctuate technological time, and
accelerate it. Many advances in technology are produced under the
threat of war, or as a result of the increased impetus permitted
by high rates of investment and coordination of production in
times of war.
The idea of using poisonous or noisome gases, vapours and smokes
to defeat or incapacitate one's enemy is recorded from classical
times. For centuries, the favoured substances were pitch and
sulphur, or brimstone. Thucydides recorded that the Spartans used
arsenic smoke during the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century
BC. Leonardo made plans for smoke weapons formed of sulphur and
arsenic dust. The first stink bombs or stench bombs were indeed
weapons employed for military purposes. One Fioravanti of Bonomia
made stench bombs from an oil brewed from a mixture of
turpentine, sulphur, asafoetida, human faeces and blood. (Wachtel
21).
This lineage seems appropriate, for there is something archaic in
the very nature of poison gas. Bad or lethal air has usually been
thought of as emanating from nature, rather than as the result of
human device. The word 'influenza' preserves the belief in the
malign influence of the stars, transmitted in the form of
mephitic fluid or vapour. The fascinators or bewitchers of the
medieval and early modern imagination were believed to have the
power to blast and wither crops and cattle with their breath,
often working in conjunction with the power of the evil eye. The
basilisk, which could both immobilise its victims with its eye
and destroy them with its mephitic breath, is the mythical
embodiment of this belief. Hell, or the underworld is regarded in
many cultural traditions as a stinking or smoky place.
If there is something archaic about poison gas, it is also true
that it is a preeminently modern weapon, because of its
association with technological development and industrial
production. Siegfried Sassoon was one of those who experienced
the First World War as the passing away of a Romantic ideal of
bravery amid the processes of mechanised death, writing of how,
by the winter of 1916-1917, 'the war had become undisguisedly
mechanical and inhuman' (Sassoon 1930, 147). He may have had in
mind the massification of men and the use of aircraft and tanks,
though perhaps gas played a considerable part in this
mechanisation too. Cultures who have developed techniques for
smelting and other industrial processes requiring combustion are
all familiar with the noxious or toxic byproducts of these
processes. Mining and cave exploration brought acquaintance with
the two ways in which air can be lethal, explosion and
asphyxiation. The lesson of the First World War was that only
countries with advanced chemical industries are able to deploy
gas in a systematic way in combat. There is a particularly long
and close association between the dyeing industry and the
production of gas. Partly because of the use they made, well into
the seventeenth century, of human products, like earwax and
urine, dyeworks were renowned as extremely smelly places and
during the medieval period were often, like tanneries, banished
to the outskirts of towns. The principal use for chlorine, the
gas that was first used during the First World War, was as a
bleaching agent. Ironically, bleaching powder would turn out to
be the most effective neutraliser of mustard gas. In 1934, F.N.
Pickett, who had been involved in clearing the large dumps of
German chemical weapons left over after the First`World War, and
who thought that gas was certain to be employed in any future
war, warned that Our dye industries, and therefore our
poison gas manufacturing facilities, are not among the great
industries of the world (18). German poison gas production
during the First World War was driven by a conglomerate of 8
chemical combines in Ruhr, known as Interessen Gemeinschaft, or
IG, who had a world monopoly on production of dyes (Harris and
Paxman 8). IG Farben would be associated with Zyklon B, the most
notorious of the gases employed during the Second World War.
Because of its notorious fickleness and the difficulty of
deploying it reliably in battlefield situations, or even, as the
disastrous outcome of the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002
demonstrated, in enclosed circumstances, the use of gas requires
great technical skill and precision. Until recently, the
production of chemical weapons such as gas required considerable
industrial effort and coordination, with advanced techniques of
mass production, storage and distribution, reinforced by
well-established scientific infrastructure. It is for this reason
that, despite its archaic nature, and its recent associations
with small groups or countries attempting to equalise a military
disadvantage, gas has tended to be used by countries enjoying
industrial superiority over their adversaries.
Although the outcomes of war are determined by such
cultural-technological differences, war is also by its nature
traditionally supposed to create a kind of mirroring or mutual
acknowledgement in the adversary relationship. Gas has a unique
reputation for being perfidious, for setting aside the relations
of mutual respect and recognition which are supposed to hold even
in the most savage and unbridled conflict. An Austrian chemist
Veit Wulff von Senfftenberg wrote in 1573 about an early example
of the stink bomb: It is a terrible thing. Christians
should not use it against Christians, but it may be used against
the Turks and other unbelievers to harm them (quoted, Poison
Gas 8). When a French General Peleesieu used a cloud of
smoke generated by green wood to suffocate a tribe of Kabyis in
1845 in Ouled Ria, he was recalled for what was regarded as an
offence against codes of military honour. Lord Dundonald
recommended the use of gas against the French in 1811 and again
during the Siege of Sebastopol in 1845. A committee of enquiry
rejected the idea as dishonourable. Gas appears to have been used
against Afghan rebels in the 1920s and certainly was used by
Mussolini during his invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The use of gas
shells was condemned by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.
It appears that the French had employed gas grenades during 1915,
though to little effect. This example of first use may have
emboldened the Germans to the politically risky act of
retaliation in kind, though their first two experiments in firing
gas-filled shells, against the British and Russians, had such
insignificant results that neither adversary even realised that
gas had been used against them. But then, on 22 April 1915,
German troops massed around Langemark in Belgium opened cylinders
of chlorine gas which had been carefully placed in their
trenches. Wind and weather were kind, and the gas formed a thick
greenish cloud which drifted slowly towards the Allied lines. The
result was catastrophic for the British and Canadian troops,
around 5000 of whom were killed and many more incapacitated by
the choking gas within minutes. Doctors had no idea how to treat
casualties: one death was diagnosed as due to air
hunger (Harris and Paxman 3). Chlorine attacks the inner
lining of the lungs, causing the victims of most serious
poisoning eventually to drown in their own exuded fluids. It is
the effects of chlorine which leads Wilfred Owen to the
apprehension of 'the old lie' in 'Dulce et Decorum Est':
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - an ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Obscene as cancer (Owen, 79)
Even though the Germans
vehemently denied the first use of gas in the First World War,
and insisted that their actions had not been in breach of the
Hague Convention of 1907, which only prohibited the use of
gas-filled projectiles, which they had not on this occasion used,
their attack was condemned as an unfair and treacherous assault
upon an unprepared opponent, though it is hard to see why this
really differs from the introduction of new forms of artillery or
high explosive, or new methods of delivering weapons, such as
balloons or aircraft.
To begin with, the Allied troops seemed utterly defenceless
against this new weapon. With no other form of protection
available, soldiers were advised to breathe through socks soaked
in their urine, or even to bury their mouths and noses in earth
and use that as a protective filter. However, within weeks, the
British and French had begun to develop protection against gas.
If the dominant German chemical industry gave them a conspicuous
lead in the production of gas, the long experience of mining in
industrial Britain gave them invaluable experience in protecting
against dangerous gases. (It is the conjunction of explosion and
asphyxiation, the two effects of poison gas which enables Owen to
make a striking connection between mining and soldiering in the
poem 'Miners', in which the sinister hiss of the coals on his
fire make him think that
the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writing for air (Owen, 87)
Within months, the British and
French not only had respirators to protect against gas, but had
stocks of gas of their own ready to employ. Thereafter, gas was
used extensively on both sides. Defence and attack leapfrogged
over each other (Haber 275). The first respirators, simple
breathing pads secured by tape, were rendered useless by the
German introduction, at Ypres on 19 Dec 1915, of the much more
deadly gas phosgene. This gas, which had been discovered by
Humphrey Davy in 1812, was a mixture of chlorine and carbon
monoxide, which was even more noxious than chlorine and dispersed
less easily. This led in turn to improved respirators, in the
form of gas helmets and hoods. The balance shifted again with the
German introduction of mustard gas in mid 1917. Mustard gas, or
dichlorodiethyl sulphide is, like many of the chemical compounds
of this period, somewhat misnamed, for it is a liquid at normal
temperatures and is dispersed in the form of an aerosol. It is a
vesicant or blistering gas, which acts not just on the lungs, but
on any exposed areas of skin, causing intense blistering,
especially around the eyes. Sargent's painting Gassed, showing blinded men being led in a line away
from the battlefield shows victims of mustard gas. The deployment
of mustard gas led to improved vigilance and what was called 'gas
discipline'. By the end of the war, the shortage of supplies and
the development of new arsenical compounds, such as the American
gas Lewisite, in which arsenic was mixed with mustard gas in
order to poison the wounds caused by the blistering, had shifted
the advantage to the Allies, who were seriously planning the
first gas attacks by aircraft on civilians in cities.
The experience of the First World War, and the expectation of gas
attack from the air in the early years of the Second World War
meant that Britain gave serious thought to its first use. Sir
John Dill, Chief of Imperial General Staff, proposed using
mustard gas on an invading German army, 15 June 1940. His idea
was vetoed, on the grounds that it would provoke retaliation and
mean a loss of moral authority, especially among Americans.
(Harris and Paxman 100-101). A member of Dill's own staff, one
Major General Henderson, wrote that '[s]uch a departure from our
principles and traditions would have the most deplorable effects
not only on our own people but even on the fighting services.
Some of us would begin to wonder whether it really mattered which
side won (quoted, Harris and Paxman 111). As
hostilities intensified, Churchill, who had been involved in
planning gas attacks in the First World War, seemed to abandon
whatever restraint he had about first use, writing in a minute to
his Chiefs of Staff of 6 July 1944:
It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there. (Quoted, Harris and Paxman 108).
So poison gas is at once modern
and archaic, at once an instrument of war, and a betrayal of it.
What we call modern warfare is an example of that intensified
swirling together of the new and the old which is actually the
leading characteristic of what we have perhaps for too long been
too content to call modernity. It may be that the
particular kind of apostasy represented by poison gas has to do
with the way it embodies the fundamental ambivalence in our
relations to air, which all of us, at every moment, are at once
breathing in and expelling. Air is both life-giving and noxious.
The goodness and the badness of air are intimate opposites, which
meet and invert in the intoxications of tobacco, opium and other
inhaled drugs. It had become apparent from the early seventeenth
century that the dangerous gas produced by the burning of coal
and charcoal, and the fermentation of wine, known as carbonic
acid gas, or fixed air - a substance that, as we will see, in
fact led to the invention of the word gas - was produced within
the body, as what one late eighteenth-century medical writer
called the 'fecal matter of the vascular system' (Bache 45). The
same writer reported that the dangers of fixed air could be
demonstrated by the fact that '[I]f in the morning a
lighted candle is placed under the cloaths of a bed in which a
person has lain all night, so great is the accumulation of this
gas, that the flame is immediately extinguished (Bache 46).
During the 1930s, an anti-war organisation called World Peaceways
placed an advertisement in various magazines, showing a fiendish
looking boffin, at work upon an annihilating supergas. The
caption threatened that, in the next war, Planes will zoom
over cities and towns, children will fall down strangling from
one breath of air that a second ago had seemed pure and
sweet (quoted, Kendall 74). Poison gas is air betrayed, not
the enemy of life, but life turning on itself.
I have called this talk a 'familiar history' as a reminder of the
fact that the technologies of war enter into the fantasies and
lived realities of populations, especially perhaps in modern
warfare, in which communications and military technology are so
closely combined. Poison gas, or the idea of it, is both
unthinkable and insidiously familiar. In the interwar years in
particular, the idea of gas took on a kind of political and
phantasmal reality which has not yet diffused, and serves as a
point of reference for more contemporary concerns and debates.
One might equally think of the history of gas as an 'imaginary
history', since it is the history of the idea or dream of gas as
much as its reality. Just as the old and the new are not easily
to be distinguished, so too the idea and the reality of gas form
together an unstable yet indissoluble compound. The accounts of
Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds and the fear of gas attack
and attack by chemical weapons during the first and second Gulf
Wars have reactivated many of these fears.
L.F. Haber's detailed and almost pathologically sober account of
the use of gas in the First World War includes a few discussions
of the representation of gas by artists and writers. He is
bewildered by the fact that so many should have come to see gas
as the ultimate weapon and the ultimate atrocity during and
especially after the war, since his view is that gas was a
peripheral and, in the end, rather a feeble weapon, the effects
of which were hugely enlarged by rumour, fantasy and imagination.
And yet the psychological component of gas was widely recognised
and formed part of the reality of its effect. Gas is a mass
weapon in two senses. First of all, it seems to be aimed at mass
destruction; but it is also a weapon that is implicated in the
epidemic processes of mass media and communications. It is not
just the fact, but also the idea of gas, which tends towards a
condition of saturation.
One of the virtues of the arsenic-based compounds which began to
be introduced in the later years of the First World War was that
they included distinct psychotropic effects, inducing depression
and panic in addition to the demoralising fear naturally provoked
by the idea of gas. F.N. Pickett wrote that
The writer has probably been through more gas clouds than any other individual living, and is not ashamed to confess that he has and always has had a dread of poison gas, even though he might know that the gas was not in a dangerous concentration.
This dread is entirely psychological, and a recognition of this dread which almost amounts to hysteria is the first step in defeating gas. (Pickett 12).
This advice comes from a book that is meant to be reassuring, but seems unlikely to have been. Gas seems to have gathered a reputation for having the power not just to injure the body, but to destroy the moral fabric of the person: indeed, its reputation is part of this power. One anti-war pamphlet from the 1930s claimed that The mental distress caused by [gas] poisoning is often sufficiently serious to drive the sufferer actually temporarily insane (Poison Gas 22). It goes on to evoke
those tragic human wrecks whose nervous systems have been completely disorganised and who fill the nervous hospitals. These shadows of what they were are startled, frightened creatures sleepless and apprehensive unable to concentrate often completely losing their memory for a while at times suicidal, at times unable to walk or move or in any way help themselves (Poison Gas 28)
During the 1960s, the
psychotropic possibilities of gas were investigated from the
other end, with military experiments on hallucinogens like LSD. A
report of 16 August 1963 in the Wall Street Journal
quoted one US government scientist as saying 'Ideally wed
like something we could spray out of a small atomizer that would
cause the enemy to come to our lines with his hands behind his
back, whistling the Star-Spangled Banner. I dont think
well achieve that effect. But we may come close
(quoted Harris and Paxman 189)
Bruno Latour has suggested that the great founding error in the
formation of what he calls the 'Modern Constitution', is the idea
that modernity creates an absolute gap between natural existence
and human artifice. In fact, modernity, with its host of
techniques of technical transformation, does not make the natural
world over into the cultural, but rather gives rise to an
ever-expanding middle ground of what Latour, borrowing the term
from Michel Serres, calls 'quasi-objects'. The principal example
which Latour offers for this is in fact gaseous, for it is the
vacuum procured by means of Boyle's air-pump. A vacuum is a
natural fact, and yet also entirely an artefact of the
laboratory. A gas is similarly ambivalent. Many of the gases
produced during the First World War and beyond are in fact to
some degree naturally occurring and all of them are natural, even
as they are clearly human fabrications. As a kind of
'second nature', as artefacts that are nevertheless never
entirely controllable, they are quasi-objects par excellence.
What is gas? The word was coined by Joannes Baptista Van Helmont
(1579-1644). The word did not catch on until the nineteenth
century - Boyle and his followers, for example, preferring the
traditional word 'air'. Part of the threat and the beauty of the
'wild spirit' that Van Helmont saw being 'belched' out of coal
when it was burned (Helmont 106) lay in its ambivalence, as a
nothing that was a something. It was a substance that existed
within all other substances, but in an infinitely rarefied form,
the word gas being formed from the Greek chaos, meaning
void. And gas is never pure, never just one thing. Indeed, few of
the weapons described as gases in the history of this particular
form of warfare in fact exist as gases at normal temperatures:
chlorine and phosgene are the exceptions. Other so-called gases
are dispersed in the form of smokes, liquids, powders and
aerosols. It is for this reason that the area of technical
speciality devoted to this form of warfare quickly became known,
as it is still known today, as 'chemical warfare'. And yet, terms
like 'gas' and 'gassing' survive, for example in accounts of
Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds. What all these forms of
offensive military operation have in common is the fact that they
are airborne, carried in, or transmitted in the air.
As such, they belong to a no-man's land. Gas is not so much a
weapon, as a form of communication. Weapons are designed to
establish in the most unambivalent of terms the difference
between subjects and objects. A subject who employs a weapon
against another subject makes that subject simply and utterly the
object of his attack. The spear is the stereotypical form of the
weapon in this. At one end, there is a handle or grip; at the
other, the business end, is the sharpened tip. Ships, shells and
bombs continue to approximate to this shape. At one end, in other
words, there is the sphere of the subject, at the other, the
place of the object, the object you become by being in this
place. In fact, this is not quite right, since the concentration
of the point at the sharp end is meant to indicate not the
location of the aggressor, but his potential omnipresence, along
with the reduction to space, to the X which marks the spot, of
the enemy. You defend yourself under such conditions, either by
repelling the spear, or by avoiding it, which is to say, by
giving yourself the invulnerability of your adversary. Much of
the mythology of gas derives from the improbable piece of
meteorological good fortune that allowed the cloud of chlorine
released by the Germans on April 22 1915 to proceed gently
downhill and in an easterly direction towards the British troops.
Thereafter, the efforts of First World War combatants were
directed towards making gas behave as a projectile, not with much
success.
A fist, spear, shell or missile cleave through the air,
overcoming its resistance, just as gravity is temporarily set
aside. The parabola is the perfect form of the compromise between
nature and culture. Freud would famously derive the principle of
transcendence from the male capacity to generate transcending
arcs of urine, as compared with the inchoate immanence of the
female, forced by the absence of a focussing or sighting organ,
to gush where she squatted. He might have appreciated the
ballistic finesse of the joke about the drunk who is preparing to
relieve himself by a wall when he is restrained by a policeman
who tells him 'You can't do that here'. 'I'm not going to do it
here', replies the drunk. 'I'm going to do it Right, Over,
THERE!'
Gas, by contrast, does not have a sharp end, cutting edge or, as
we say, 'front line'. Gas does not penetrate, but rather diffuses
or infiltrates. The nature of all gases is to expand, uniformly,
in all directions. The big problem for engineers of gas attacks
was how to balance the need for the gas to diffuse over a wide
area, like a slow bomb, while also keeping it sufficiently
concentrated for its toxicity not to decline. How does one do
battle - in either sense, as attacker or defender - with a
cloud rather than a spear? Peter Bamm, a German doctor who
published novels and reminiscences under the pseudonym of Kurt
Emmerich, wrote that it was impossible to be brave against gas
(Bamm 320, quoted Haber, 237). With gas warfare, the trigonometry
which had governed military theory in an unbroken continuity
since the days of Roman siege-catapults, gave way to a fiendishly
complex multi-parameter calculus, in which the simple variants of
propulsive force, air resistance, gravity and distance were
complicated by the addition of wind-direction and speed,
air-pressure, humidity and temperature, all of which affected the
rate of expansion of gases. Neither the meteorology nor the
mathematics of the combatants was adequate to the task.
It became apparent both to the Germans and the Allies that if the
use of gas-clouds were to continue, the advantage would be sure
in the end to lie with the Allies, for the ludicrously simple
reason that the prevailing winds in Northern France do not blow
from east to west, but from west to east. This is not to mention
the dangers of blowback, which meant that no army could be sure
that a sudden change in the direction of the wind would not turn
their weapon back on them. Even if the wind behaved properly,
there was the problem for the forces following up the gas attack
of themselves having to advance through a gas cloud, or take
possession of terrain that had been contaminated. Gas was not
only dependent on the weather, it was itself a kind of climate.
Bruno Latour distinguishes between an intermediary and a
mediator. An intermediary is an object that connects two subjects
by moving between them. It simply 'transports, transfers,
transmits energy' (Latour 77). A mediator is a third thing, which
forms an environment within which the two subjects it connects.
It is 'an original event which creates what it translates as well
as the entities between which it plays the mediating role'.
(Latour 78). It is an atmosphere and not an object. As the
metaphor I have just used would imply, gas is this kind of
mediator. Rather than a missive or a missile, it is what Michel
Serres calls a 'milieu'.
Gas became the archetypal weapon of the First World War because
it instituted the ghastly economics of exchange between the
combatants. Though gas was in no way decisive in the war, it
seems clear that it would have been, had the Germans been able to
limp on into 1919, at which point the British, assisted by the
newly-arrived Americans who had poured a great deal of resources
into the development of gas weapons, would have had clear gas
superiority for the first time. The Germans had already had to
replace the rubber of their respirators with treated leather, and
would not have been able to maintain supplied with these
materials. The design of their respirators - all in one snout
respirators attached to the face rather than the British design
of hood respirators attached by a tube to a separate box
containing the filter mechanism, meant that they would not have
been able easily to be adapted to cope with the arsenical
compounds, especially Lewisite, which the British and Americans
had been developing Even more banal and most telling of all
was the shortage of fabrics, which meant that the Germans would
not have been able to replace uniforms and boots contaminated by
burning droplets of mustard gas, which had replaced chlorine and
phosgene as the most successful form of chemical warfare during
1916 and 1917. The British considered and rejected the idea of a
gas attack on a German city, partly because of the threat of
reprisal, partly, no doubt, in order to maintain the propaganda
advantage given to them by the Germans' seeming first use of gas
in 1915.
A curious effect of gas was that, although it turned out to be a
fairly simple matter to protect against it, the very measures
which should have provided the solidest reassurance in fact
intensified the fear. Although most the troops at the front did
not experience gas bombardment on a regular basis, the necessity
of regular drilling in order to ensure adequate gas discipline
kept the dread of gas alive. Mass technological warfare requires
the maintaining of a difficult affective mixture: there are the
traditional daring and conviction required for exposure to shot
and shell and the patient, meticulous attention to detail of the
operative keeping his machinery in good order. Gas required a
terrifyingly continuous attention to one's safety, as focussed
upon the state of one's equipment, which may in the end have been
psychologically draining. The need for inspection is only one
form of the way in which gas turns the combatant or other
potential victim in on itself, making death or injury one's own
responsibility. The respirator on which one's life depends also
isolates and disorientates, making communication and the aiming
of weapons difficult, as well as cutting one off from what is
often the most important of the senses, that of hearing. Saddam
Hussein was far from the first to learn the lesson that the very
means of defending against gas can become a form of assault. As
the destructive limitations of gas became apparent, it started to
be used as an instrument of attrition. The fact that gas did not
kill as many men as high explosive could be a positive advantage,
Twenty percent of men killed leaves eighty per cent able to
fight. Twenty per cent injured will absorb the resources of
perhaps a further ten or twenty percent in evacuating and
treating them. On one occasion, a particularly intense British
gas bombardment of seven and a half hours duration caused a
German withdrawal, not because the gas succeeded in penetrating
the German respirators, but simply because the stress and fatigue
of wearing them became too much to bear. Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et
Decorum Est' evokes the shared predicament of the gassed man and
the masked man:
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning (Owen 79)
The striking thing about the
poem is the interchange it effects between the victim, drowning
in the green cloud of chlorine, and the strange, dreamy,
submarine sensation of the one inside the mask. It is safety that
seems suffocating.
This strange principle, that the strength of the weapon is
borrowed from the means employed to thwart it, came to the fore
after the First World War, when governments had to consider how
to instil gas discipline in the civilian populations they assumed
would be the target of gas attack in future
hostilities. Although it is the use of gas in the trenches
of the First World War which has been most mythologised, it was
during the 1930s, during the long build-up to war, that the
threat of gas became the focus of the most intense debate and
widely disseminated fears. The focus on the likely use of gas
against civilian populations and the means necessary to protect
them helped both to amplify and, so to speak, retune the fear and
horror of gas. It is this period which transmitted the gas
phantasm to the late twentieth century.
It is not possible to consider the effects of gas without
considering the place of the mask, on which so much depended. In
the run-up to the Second World War, when it was assumed
that gas would be dropped from aeroplanes on civilian
populations, the gas mask became the most familiar reminder that
there was no longer a clear and distinct 'front line' for
military conflict. Thirty million gas masks were distributed to
the population during the Munich Crisis of 1938. When war was
declared, gas masks were provided for almost everyone in urban
areas, along with detailed instructions for their use.
One cannot understand the peculiarly intimate nature of the
threat posed by gas unless one takes into account the extreme
familiarity of the technologies of gas, for cooking, heating and
still, at the outbreak of the Second World War, for lighting. Gas
was, and is, in almost everybody's home. Most remarkably, gas had
been introduced in the United States as a humane form of
execution. The Humane Death Bill, which abolished all
other forms of execution in the State of Nevada, was signed by
the governor on March 28 1921 (previously the condemned man had
been given a choice between hanging and shooting). The first use
of gas for execution in US was on February 8, 1924. The victim
was Gee Jon, a Chinaman convicted of killing a rival tong man.
The New York Times reported that the Chinaman
lapsed into unconsciousness after his first breath of the
vaporized acid (Gas Kills Convict Almost
Instantly, New York Times, Feb 9, 1924, p. 15,
quoted Vila and Morris, 78). It has been claimed that the
experience of the lethal effects of gas in the First World War
suggested the introduction of this method, along with the
popularity of gas asphyxiation as a method of home suicide.
Though one court in California has decreed this method of
execution to be cruel and unusual, five US states still authorise
its use: Arizona, California, Maryland, Missouri and Wyoming. It
has been used 31 times, 11 since 1976.
Germany had resumed the secret production of poison gas for
military purposes in the mid 1930s, drawing on the dominance in
industrial chemical technology which it had never lost even after
the sanctions of the Versailles Treaty. It was widely assumed in
Britain and the US that, though gas was certain to be used, no
new gases were likely to be discovered. In fact, Gerhard Schrader
has discovered the first of the new generation of what would come
to be known as nerve gases in 1936, when he found that a compound
he named 'tabun' caused generalised muscle contraction and spasm.
The discovery of sarin, a compound with similar effects, had
followed in 1938. (Sarin would be the gas used in the terrorist
attack on the Tokyo underground system on March 20 1995.) Hitler had himself
been gassed as a soldier in the First World War, and seems to
have had a certain reluctance about provoking retaliation through
gas attack (it seems that his advisors wrongly assumed that the
Allies must also be in possession of nerve gases).
The other major component in the
perception of lethal gas is of course its use by the Nazis for
the extermination of Jews and others in the concentration camps.
A bizarre but insistent logic seems to lie behind this use. The
use of gas as a means of extermination has a particular kind of
cruelty. The very reputation which the weapon had as annihilating
the humanity of the victim and sometimes also morally
contaminating the user was what seemed to make it appropriate to
exterminate peoples who were both regarded as subhuman and proved
to be so by the very fact that gas was used on them Gas has often
been used for the destruction of animal pests (the smoking out of
moles, badgers and foxes, for example) and the experience
of the First World War accelerated research into insecticides.
One wonders whether the ancient superstition of the fetor
judaicus, a particular odour supposed to be emitted by Jews,
does not play a part in this grotesque act of ethnic fumigation.
The cult of nudity and fresh air which characterised Nazism gave
the questions of space a specifically pneumatic dimension. German
Lebensraum would be guaranteed by clustering Jews
together to stew in each other's foul air in the ghetto. (Part of
the reason for this attribution may be the Christian disavowal of
the particular prominence of the sense of smell, and its
association with the divine, in the Hebrew tradition: in Hebrew,
the word for spirit, ruach, is suggestively close to the
word for aroma, rayach. The God of the Hebrews is often
approached through the odour of sacrifice and incense.) When the
revolver and the machine gun was replaced by Zyklon B as the
means of extermination, the logic seemed to be that the parasitic
rats should be subject to their own asphyxiating exhalations. The
particular power of gas to remove the humanity of one's opponents
survives into more recent uses. When Saddam Hussein's forces used
the nerve gas tabun at Basra on 17 March 1984, one Iraqi general
said defiantly If you gave me a pesticide to throw at those
worms of insects, to make them breathe and become exterminated,
Id use it (Harris and Paxman 241).
Michel Serres, who frequently reads the episteme or metaphysics
of particular eras in terms of their physics, or favoured states
of matter, has suggested that we may have entered a gaseous
epoch. 'The systems matter has changed
phase, at least since Bergson. Its more liquid
than solid, more airlike than liquid, more informational than
material. The global is fleeing towards the fragile, the
weightless, the living, the breathing (Serres and Latour
1995: 121).
Gas is an embodiment of the new, disembodied, no-man's-land
condition both of our technologies and of our wars. It was
assumed during the 1930s that civilian war would be a gas war,
since it is in the diffusive nature of gas to extend the whole
battlefield: there is now no very real distinction between
the fighting men and their women folk at home (Poison
Gas 9). If conflicts like the last two Gulf Wars
continue to conform to the traditional topology of wars, with
enemies ranged against each other in opposing territories, and
victory measured by the incursion of one party into the territory
held by the other, this may be a secondary or compensating effect
of the battle against inchoate furor, or war of all
against all, evoked by Michel Serres. The war against terrorism
is really a war against the new conditions of war, of which the
drifting, infiltrating, assassinating nature of gas, always both
homely and outlandish, the most intimate of adversaries, is an
allegory.
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| Steven Connor | School of English and Humanities | Birkbeck |