the First Gas Attack 6
French 'Turcos' fleeing during the first gas attack
- from the book
- Vive la France
- by E. Alexander Powell (American Journalist) 1916
It was against the British, remember, that the Germans first used their poison-gas. The first engagement of importance in which gas played a part was the second battle of Ypres, lasting from April 22 until May 13, which will probably take rank in history as one of the greatest battles of all time. In it the Germans, owing to the surprise and confusion created by their introduction of poison-gas, came within a hair's breadth of breaking through the Allied line, and would certainly have done so had it not been for the gallantry and self-sacrifice of the Canadian Division, which, at the cost of appalling losses, won imperishable fame. The German bombardment of Ypres began on April 20 and in forty-eight hours, so terrible was the rain of heavy projectiles which poured down upon it, the quaint old city, with its exquisite Cloth Hall, was but a heap of blackened, smoking ruins. That portion of the Allied line to the north of the city was held, along a front of some four miles, by a French division composed of Colonials, Algerians, and Senegalese, stiffened by several line regiments.
Late in the afternoon of the 22nd, peering above their trenches, they saw, rolling toward them across the Flemish plain, an impalpable cloud of yellowish-green, which, fanned by a brisk wind, moved forward at the speed of a trotting horse. It came on with the remorselessness of Fate. It blotted out what was happening behind it as the smoke screen from a destroyer masks the manoeuvres of a Dreadnought. The spring vegetation shrivelled up before it as papers shrivel when thrown into a fire. It blasted everything it touched as with a hand of death. No one knew what it was or whence it came. Nearer it surged and nearer. It was within a hundred metres of the French position . . . fifty … thirty . . . ten . . . and then the silent horror was upon them. Men began to cough and hack and strangle. Their eyes smarted and burned with the pungent, acrid fumes. Soldiers staggered and fell before it in twos and fours and dozens as miners succumb to fire-damp. Men, strained and twisted into grotesque, horrid attitudes, were sobbing their lives out on the floors of the trenches. The fire of rifles and machine guns weakened, died down, ceased. The whole line swayed, wavered, trembled on the verge of panic. Just then a giant Algerian shouted, "The Boches have turned loose evil spirits upon us! We can fight men, but we cannot fight afrits! Run, brothers! Run for your lives ! That was all that was needed to precipitate the disaster.
The superstitious Africans, men from the West Coast where voodooism still holds sway, men of the desert steeped in the traditions and mysteries of Islam, broke and ran. The French white troops, carried off their feet by the sudden rush, were swept along in the mad debacle. And as they ran the yellow cloud pursued them remorselessly, like a great hand reaching out for their throats.
An eye-witness of the rout that followed told me that he never expects to see its like this side of the gates of hell. The fields were dotted with blue-clad figures wearing kepis, and brown-clad ones wearing turbans and tarbooshes, who stumbled and fell and rose again and staggered along a few paces and fell to rise no more. The highways leading from the trenches were choked with maddened, fear-crazed white and black and brown men who had thrown away their rifles, their cartridge pouches, their knapsacks, in some cases even their coats and shirts. Some were calling on Christ and some on Allah and some on their strange pagan gods. Their eyes were starting from their sockets, on their foreheads stood glistening beads of sweat, they slavered at the mouth like dogs, their cheeks and breasts were flecked with foam. " We're not afraid of the Boches ! " screamed a giant sergeant of Zouaves on whose breast were the ribbons of a dozen wars. "We can fight them until hell turns cold. But this we cannot fight. Le Ron Dieu does not expect us to stay and die like rats in a sewer."
Guns and gun-caissons passed at a gallop, Turcos and tirailleurs clinging to them, the fear-crazed gunners flogging their reeking horses frantically. The ditches bordering the roads were filled with overturned waggons and abandoned equipment. Giant negroes, naked to the waist, tore by shrieking that the spirits had been loosed upon them and slashing with their bayonets at all who got in their path. Mounted officers, frantic with anger and mortification, using their swords and pistols indiscriminately, vainly tried to check the human stream. And through the four-mile breach which the poison-gas had made the Germans were pouring in their thousands. The roar of their artillery sounded like unceasing thunder. The scarlet rays of the setting sun lighted up such a scene as Flanders had never before beheld in all its bloody history. Then darkness came and the sky was streaked across with the fiery trails of rockets and the sudden splotches of bursting shrapnel. The tumult was beyond all imagination-the crackle of musketry, the rattle of machine guns, the crash of high explosive, the thunder of falling walls, the clank of harness and the rumble of wheels, the screams of the wounded and the groans of the dying, the harsh commands of the officers, the murmur of many voices, and the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of countless hurrying feet.
And through the breach still poured the helmeted legions like water bursting through a broken dam. Into that breach were thrown the Canadians. The story of how, overwhelmed by superior numbers of both men and guns, choked by poison-fumes, reeling from exhaustion, sometimes without food, for it was impossible to get it to them, under such a rain of shells as the world had never before seen.
Canadian soldiers being gassed
A German drawing of a gas attack at Steenstraete
Early British gas masks
Cover of a war-time magazine - 'the Illustrated War News'
Early French protective suits and masks : drawing and photo
