Chapter III: General Rule (1)

When surprised by airplanes, either by day or by night, use
all natural shade provided by trees, embankments, houses,
etc., and remain motionless.

By Order of the General Commanding the Army.

CHIEF OF STAFF.
(Signed) FAUPEL, _Lieutenant-Colonel_.

So great, indeed, was the importance attached to camouflage by the German High Command that, during the last year of the war, there was attached to every German division a “security officer” whose duty it was to enforce the rigid observance of camouflage discipline. In many cases these security officers kept a watch on their respective division from observation-balloons. They were answerable only to Great Headquarters and were empowered, I understand, to recommend the removal of all officers up to and including generals of division for infraction of the rules for camouflage discipline as laid down by Ludendorff.

Camouflage, it should be kept in mind, is of two kinds—negative and positive. Negative camouflage consists in the concealment of troops, trenches, mine-shafts, battery positions, ammunition-dumps, hangars, or other objects, knowledge of whose location must be kept, if possible, from the enemy. Positive camouflage, on the contrary, consists in the imitation or suggestion of troops, trenches, batteries, etc., in certain locations, when, in reality, there is nothing of the sort there, in order to deceive and bewilder the enemy. It occasionally became necessary, for example, to convince the Germans that a large troop movement was in progress behind a certain sector of the front, whereas the real movement was taking place scores of miles away. If it was desired to suggest a movement by rail, smoke-pots with clouds of dense black smoke bellying from them were placed on flat cars and moved about from point to point on the military railways. German aviators, observing these columns of smoke at numerous points along the railways, naturally assumed that they came from locomotives hauling troop-laden trains and promptly reported that large bodies of troops were apparently being moved by rail behind the American lines. Thereupon the German commander would rush up his reserves to resist the attack which he believed to be impending. Or, if it was desired to imitate a troop movement by road, the camouflage officer would requisition large numbers of Fords, which would be driven madly along the roads, dragging bundles of brush behind them. The great clouds of dust which thus suddenly appeared on the highways naturally suggested to the German observers that the _verdamte_ Yankees were rushing large bodies of troops to the front by bus or motor-truck. Fooling Fritz was an amusing game while it lasted.

This latter ruse, I might mention parenthetically, was not original with the Americans, for President Diaz, of Mexico, once related to me how, when he and his little band of patriots were being hotly pursued by the French forces sent to Mexico to keep Maximilian on his unstable throne, he ordered his vaqueros to cut bundles of mesquite and drag them behind them by their lariats. It was in the dry season, and the dense clouds of yellow dust thus stirred up convinced the French commander that the Mexican force was far stronger than it really was. He thereupon precipitately abandoned the pursuit and a few weeks later General Diaz, having gained the breathing-spell necessary to augment his forces, fought and won the decisive battle of Puebla.

It has frequently been said that the camera does not lie, but such assertions were made before the Camouflage Corps commenced its operations. Thereafter the negatives brought in by the German airmen began to prove so unreliable that the officers whose business it was to interpret them never knew whether they were telling the truth or not. For example, it frequently became necessary after heavy bombardments in which long stretches of entanglements had been destroyed, to convince the enemy that the wire had been repaired. This illusion was accomplished by the simple stratagem of driving stakes into the ground and festooning them with fish-nets, for, in a photograph taken from the sky, fish-nets thus arranged are indistinguishable from wire. If such ruses are to deceive the enemy, however, as much attention must be paid to detail in their execution as David Belasco pays to detail in the production of a play. On a certain British sector a not overintelligent subaltern was ordered by his battalion commander to take a working party and put out some 500 yards of this imitation wire, as there was reason to believe that the Huns, thinking the sector unprotected by entanglements, were preparing to make an attack. Now it is some job, even for a large and well-trained working party, to put out 500 yards of wire in much under a day. Heedless of such minor details, however, the lieutenant gayly slammed in his stakes and spread his fish-nets as fast as his men could work, “wiring” the 500 yards of front in little more than an hour. From high in the blue German airmen photographed the proceeding. When one set of photographs showed a sector destitute of wire and another set of pictures, taken an hour later, showed the same area with a complete system of wire entanglements, the suspicions of Von Hindenburg’s intelligence officers were naturally aroused, and the next morning at dawn the Germans launched their attack. In camouflage work one can’t afford to be slipshod.

The most elaborate camouflage works can be rendered utterly useless, however, by the carelessness of a single soldier, for there is little that escapes the eye of the airman’s camera, particularly when it was fitted, as during the latter days of the war, with a stereoscopic attachment. I remember that in one of the Champagne sectors the Germans had installed a battery of heavy guns which were so ingeniously concealed that the French were unable to locate them. It was believed that they were hidden somewhere in a fringe of woods along a stream, but though there was a considerable area of cultivated land beyond the woods, the aerophotographs of it showed nothing which would suggest a path such as would be made by artillerymen going to and from their guns. One day, however, a new batch of plates, upon being developed, showed a dim gray line, faint as the shadow of a hair, leading across this cultivated area to a small wood on the bank of the stream, where a battery might easily be concealed. Upon studying an enlargement of the picture the intelligence officers became convinced that the shadowy line on the negative really represented the trail left by a soldier crossing the field. Proceeding on the surmise that the soldier was an artilleryman going up to his gun-position, the French gunners registered on that particular patch of woods the following morning, whereupon the fire from the concealed battery abruptly ceased. German prisoners captured a few days later explained how the secret of the battery’s position had been kept so long. The German security officer had issued orders that the artillerymen must under no considerations walk across the fields in order to reach their guns, but that they must instead follow a much-used highroad until they reached a bridge over the stream, drop from the bridge into the water, and wade up the stream until opposite their position. But one night an artilleryman, in a hurry to reach his battery and confident that the tracks left by a single man could do no harm, took a chance and a short cut across the forbidden field. I have told you what happened to his battery as a result of his carelessness. Knowing something of German discipline, I can imagine what happened to him.

But it was not often that the Germans were caught napping, and so ingenious were some of their ruses and stratagems, that it required an intelligence officer with the imagination of a Sherlock Holmes to keep up with them. During the operations on the Flanders front a British aviator brought in some photographs of a certain area behind the German lines. The intelligence officer whose duty it was to scrutinize them detected a suspicious something which he was convinced was a cleverly camouflaged German battery, but though it was in the midst of open country there was no suggestion of a path leading to it. After studying the photographs for several hours he suddenly exclaimed:

“I have it! They get up to the guns on the covers of biscuit-boxes.”

“What do you mean?” his chief asked curiously.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” explained the youngster. “The Boche knows jolly well that if he walked across that open ground his tracks would show up in our air photos. So when he wants to get up to his battery he gets a couple of wooden biscuit-box covers and ties strings to them. He stands on one cover and throws the other ahead of him, then stands on that and drags up the first cover by means of the string and repeats the operation. Deuced clever of the beggars, I call it.”

And, as subsequent events proved, the intelligence officer was right in his deduction. That was precisely what the Germans had done.

By far the most important work of the Camouflage Corps was the construction of “flat-tops” and “false contours.” A flat-top, I should perhaps explain, is a screen for concealing a gun from enemy observation. It consists of a fish-net, usually 37 feet square, into the mesh of which are woven and knotted narrow strips of burlap of colors to blend with the vegetation of the region where the flat-top is to be used. The interwoven burlap becomes gradually thinner as the edges of the net are approached, so that no sharply defined shadow may be cast. Every piece of artillery, large and small, in the A. E. F. had its own flat-top, which accompanied the gun everywhere, being stretched above it, like a canopy, when the piece was in action, at other times being rolled up and carried on the limber. A somewhat similar device was also provided for the concealment of machine-guns. It resembled one of those huge umbrellas used in summer on delivery-wagons, and, like an umbrella, it could be quickly raised or lowered. It was the intention of the Camouflage Corps, had the war continued, to provide one for every machine-gun.

A false contour can best be described as the prolongation, by means of burlap spread over a sort of wire trellis, of a ridge, promontory, or hill. It being desired to place a battery at the foot of a hill and at the same time conceal it from enemy observation—which included photographs taken from enemy airplanes—the Camouflage Corps would first of all erect a light wooden framework, something like that of a grape or rose arbor, but conforming to the general contour of the hill. Over this framework was stretched wire netting, which supported, in turn, a finer mesh of chicken-wire, into which were woven strips of burlap dyed so as to exactly match the color of the hill itself. The space beneath this burlap screen provided perfect concealment for anything up to a battery or a battalion, while so closely was nature imitated in the shaping and coloring of the false contour that photographs taken by enemy flyers would show only an innocent hillside, with not enough vegetation to provide cover for a sniper. The burlap used in the construction of these false contours was frequently “slashed,” after the fashion of foliage-drops in theatres, and was dyed in a great variety of shades, all of which were standardized and could be ordered by number. There were burlaps slashed and dyed to imitate ploughed fields, grain-fields, roads, lawns, quarries, water, rocks, and spring, summer, autumn, and winter foliage; in short, every phase of nature as found in the zone of operations.

These suits are made of burlap and painted to match the vegetation and were frequently used by American snipers and raiding-parties.]

As the enemy had this road under direct observation, traffic along it was concealed by means of burlap screens.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._

An overhead road screen made of burlap strips and chicken wire.

_Photograph by Signal Corps, U. S. A._]

The first time I visited the big warehouse of the Camouflage School at Fort St. Menge, I thought for a moment that I was back in the old Eden Musée which used to stand in West 23d Street, for stacked against the walls were scores of lifelike silhouettes of soldiers charging with fixed bayonets, while the shelves were lined with soldiers’ heads beautifully executed in papier-maché. The silhouettes, which were of painted canvas mounted on light wooden frames, were used in the so-called “Chinese attacks”—an idea which we borrowed from the British. When it was necessary to ascertain how quickly the enemy could switch on his artillery-fire in a certain sector, or the location of his batteries or machine-guns, a hundred or more of these silhouettes would be carried out into No Man’s Land under cover of darkness and laid down in front of our wire in such a manner that they could be pulled upright by means of cords running back to our trenches. Just at daybreak, at that hour when objects are still indistinct and when the nerves of the men in the trenches are at the greatest tension, a signal would be given, the cords pulled, and a long line of what appeared to the startled Germans to be charging Yankees would suddenly appear in the mist overhanging No Man’s Land. Instantly the German trenches would crackle and blaze with musketry, the concealed batteries and machine-gun nests would betray their positions by going into action, and by the time the Huns discovered the hoax that had been played upon them, our observers had obtained the information which they required. Sometimes, in order to further chagrin the Boche, the silhouettes would be left standing.

The papier-maché heads to which I have already referred were used for the purpose of locating German snipers. When a sniper became particularly annoying and defied all attempts to locate him, the camouflage officer attached to the division would be summoned. Under his direction a papier-maché effigy of a soldier’s head, steel helmet and all, made so as to move up and down in wooden guides, would be set up in that part of the trench which the sniper had been annoying. At intervals the head would be slowly raised and lowered, so that from the outside of the trench it looked precisely like a soldier peering cautiously over the parapet. Sooner or later the hidden marksman would send a bullet through the careless Yankee’s brain. The neat hole drilled through the papier-maché showed the exact direction from which the bullet came, and by inserting in the hole a tiny telescope, no larger than a pencil, and looking through it by means of a periscope, the loophole from which the sniper was firing could be located. In one case a sniper was found to be firing through a hole bored in the heel of an old boot, apparently thrown carelessly onto the glacis.

Though I have described at some length the use of silhouettes and papier-maché heads because they are picturesque and interesting phases of modern war, it should be borne in mind that they were designed to meet exceptional conditions, that they were used infrequently, and that they were in no sense typical of the enormously important work of the Camouflage Service.

* * * * *

In the foregoing pages I have sketched the multitudinous activities of the Engineers only in the barest outline. To attempt to compress the story of their achievements into the limits of a single chapter would be absurd, so I have dwelt only on the most picturesque and unusual phases of their work—the high spots, as it were. There is much that I have left unsaid, not because it is not worth saying, but because I have no space in which to set it down. The stories which I have had, perforce, to leave untold would in themselves fill a volume. Among their other accomplishments the Engineers designed a portable steel bridge, made up in sections so that it could be transported on trucks, and so designed that it could be bolted together, which could sustain a load of thirty tons over a span of ninety feet. These bridges were used all along the fighting front, as our forces advanced, to replace the bridges destroyed by the retreating Germans. They had under construction, when the war ended, a raft designed for the transportation of the heaviest pieces of mobile artillery in existence—by means of which, had necessity required it, we could have ferried our giant howitzers across the Rhine. The portable floating foot-bridges—passarelles—which our troops used in crossing the Meuse and the adjacent canals under fire were invented by an officer of Engineers. The Engineers threw one of them across the Canal de l’Est, near Dun-sur-Meuse, under a shell and machine-gun fire so heavy that it was twenty-six hours before the infantry could cross it. The Engineers have invented a very ingenious and remarkable device whereby search-lights can be operated from a distance, thus making it possible for an officer to control a battery of scattered search-lights just as the man in a signal-tower controls, by means of levers, the switches in a railway yard. The corps has perfected a blasting machine for demolition work which destroyed ruins faster than the Huns could make them. Military operations are absolutely dependent upon maps and plenty of them. The Engineers met the demand by erecting and operating in France a larger map-producing plant than was possessed by France herself or any of the Allies. In order to provide a more rapid means of obtaining topographical information, Major James W. Bagley, of the Engineers, invented an aerial cartograph or mapping camera, which takes three pictures at a time from an airplane, mapping a strip of territory three and a half miles wide at 5,000 feet elevation, the series of pictures thus taken forming a mosaic map of the country over which the airplane has flown which is as accurate and far more detailed than a map drawn from surveys. This invention opens up an entirely new field for the use of airplanes and a possible revolution in former methods of mapping. The Engineers likewise produced portable machine, blacksmith, and lithographic shops, the capacity of the portable lithographic truck-sets furnished the 29th Engineers—the Surveying and Printing Regiment—being greater than that of the permanent map-reproduction plant of the Geological Survey in Washington. Mobile sterilizers, water-tanks, job-presses, photographic laboratories, derricks, pile-drivers, road-sprinklers, and oilers were all asked for by the A. E. F., whereupon the Engineers designed them and shipped them to France.

I fully realize that what I have written in the preceding pages contains no mention of the supply work performed by the corps in the United States, which was so enormous that 27 per cent of all the tonnage shipped to France up to the signing of the Armistice was from or for the Engineers. Furthermore, I have touched only here and there upon the activities of the corps oversea, where in addition to the enormous amount of engineering work which had to be done with the armies, including fighting, the construction of fortifications, and the building of roads, railways, and bridges, it executed an incredible amount of general construction, such as docks and warehouses, railroad yards and railroad bridges, camps and hospitals, balloon sheds and airplane hangars, not to mention the installation of water, heating, lighting, and sanitary systems. And, bear in mind, the oversea activities of the Engineers were not confined to France, but extended to England, Italy, Russia, and Siberia.

* * * * *

“_Essayons!_” The more I have seen of the work of the Engineers, the more appropriate seems their motto.

“_Essayons!_” There is apparently nothing that these men with the castles on their collars will not essay. And everything they essay they accomplish.

III

THE GAS-MAKERS

Were you to grow up with a boy who eventually became widely talked about, watching him pass from knickerbockers to trousers and from youthful shyness to burly aggressiveness, the chances are that you would follow his career with an almost proprietary interest, and that when you came upon his picture in _The World’s Work_ or _The Police Gazette_, according to whether he had become famous or notorious, you would display it to your friends, explaining proudly: “Why, I’ve known him ever since he was a youngster. I always felt sure that he would attract attention some day.”

Such, in a manner of speaking, has been my acquaintance with poison-gas, or toxic-gas, as the chemists call it. I was in the Ypres salient, on the British front, when the first gas attack in the history of warfare was launched against the Africans and Canadians on April 22, 1915, and that night, in the hospitals, I saw the earliest victims of gas warfare, gasping on their cots like fish thrown on the bank to die. On several occasions during the months which followed I again encountered the malign creature—on the Yser, in the Champagne, in Alsace, and on the Isonzo—and on each succeeding occasion it was more threatening and was causing greater concern. So that when, after the United States had been at war a year or more, I visited the great arsenal at Edgewood, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and was shown the vast plants devoted to the production of chlorine, chlorpicrin, phosgene, mustard, and other deadly gases, and caught the familiar nauseous odor, I felt as though I were renewing an old and undesirable acquaintance.

I doubt if the Germans started the war with the intention of utilizing poison-gas, for they did not introduce it until nine months after the beginning of hostilities, and even then they apparently failed to realize the terrible potency of their new weapon, for they waited twenty-four hours before following it up with a bayonet attack, evidently fearful that the gas had not dissipated. As a matter of fact, the gas dissipated within thirty-five or forty minutes after its release, though in that time it annihilated 80 per cent of the French, Canadians, and Senegalese opposing it. Had the Germans taken instant and vigorous advantage of the confusion and dismay created by their unexpected use of chlorine, they could unquestionably have broken the Allied front, pushed through to the Channel ports, and changed the entire course of the war. (I might mention, parenthetically, that the British had been warned by a deserter, a week before, that the Germans were making preparations for a gas attack, but they did not believe him.) But the men in the spiked helmets failed to take advantage of the Allies’ temporary panic; the latter had time to improvise a means of defense, and the opportunity of the Germans to win the war by the use of gas was gone. So effectively, indeed, did the Allies turn the new weapon to their own uses that, before the close of 1916, the Germans were putting out feelers for the purpose of bringing about a cessation of this form of warfare. Then the United States entered the war, whereupon all the resources of American laboratories and chemical manufactories were directed toward the production of gas in quantities of which the Germans had never dreamed.

But, even had the Allies been aware of Germany’s intention to make use of toxic-gases for military purposes, they would still have been at an enormous disadvantage, because, as a direct result of her policy of giving government assistance to certain industries, Germany had several huge gas-plants, connected with her dye manufactories, in operation when the war began. Now phosgene, which is comparatively easy to produce, is used extensively in the manufacture of dyes, which explains why the Germans had a virtual monopoly of it when they decided to utilize it for the promotion of dying instead of dyeing. The German Government, it should be remembered, had for years subsidized the entire chemical industry of the empire, so that when the war began it had at its disposal scores of establishments devoted to the production of dyestuffs and pharmaceutical preparations, in the production of which certain toxic-gases are an important factor, which were converted, literally overnight, to military purposes. Though there is no data regarding the German gas production available, it was probably in the neighborhood of 30 tons a day. It may have reached 50 tons, but certainly not more. Though the English, realizing how desperate was the situation, utilized every facility they could command, their total daily output of toxic-gases never went above 30 tons. The best the French could do was much below this. Yet at Edgewood, during the months of September and October, 1918, when the plant had been in operation only a few months, the output averaged 140 tons a day and would have gone much higher had the war continued. In other words, _Edgewood Arsenal alone produced nearly twice as much gas per day as Germany, France, and England together_.

Now I wish to lay special emphasis on the fact that when the United States decided to manufacture gas, and to manufacture it in hitherto undreamed-of quantities, we were embarking on strange and uncharted seas. We manufactured almost everything else under the sun, but of the production of these toxic-gases we knew little save in theory, because virtually their only commercial value was in the making of certain dyes and chemicals, for which we had depended almost wholly on Germany. It was a new game which we had to learn—and to learn quickly. We found ourselves in the position of a baseball-player who is unexpectedly called upon to bowl in a game of cricket on which the championship depends. But when word went out from Washington that chemists were needed to beat the Germans at their own game, the masters of the retort and the test-tube left their classrooms and closed their laboratories and from every corner of the republic came flocking to the colors. I am using no mere figure of speech when I assert that the mammoth gas industry which was built up from nothing in less than a twelvemonth, knowledge of which was without question largely contributory to breaking down the German morale, was the work of American college professors. Some one, an Englishman, if I remember rightly, once referred to Germany as “the land of damned professors.” When their batteries and battalions were sent reeling back by American-made gas, the Germans must have felt like applying the same term to the United States.

Notwithstanding the remarkable standard of efficiency which it ultimately attained, the Chemical Warfare Service, or the Gas Service, as it was originally called, passed through a checkered and stormy formative period. By the close of 1917, when we had already been at war for nine months, there was hardly a branch of the American Army which did not have a finger in the affairs of gas warfare. The manufacture of masks was under the direction of the Medical Corps. Gas and shell production was in the hands of the Ordnance Department. Alarm devices were produced by the Signal Corps. The gas and flame troops formed the 30th Regiment of Engineers. Field-training was directed by the Sanitary Corps. Research work, an extremely important phase, was carried out by the Bureau of Mines, a branch of the Department of the Interior. And, to complete the decentralization, arrangements were being made to form a chemical service section of the National Army for the purpose of conducting gas operations overseas.

There is nothing to be gained by describing the long series of misunderstandings, controversies, and recriminations which constituted the history of gas warfare during the early months of 1918. It is not pleasant reading. It is enough to say that the demoralization resulting from this divided authority, taken in conjunction with the introduction by the Germans of mustard and other new gases, and the difficulty which the English were experiencing in obtaining a sufficient supply of chlorine, brought about a situation which caused grave alarm to all who were familiar with the situation in Europe. The two chief obstacles in the way of a complete reorganization of the service were the Ordnance Department, the chief of which was unwilling to permit all of the gas activities of Ordnance to be controlled by an external authority, and the Bureau of Mines, which refused to permit its chemists and its organization to be absorbed by the War Department. Though at that time it was impossible to modify the attitude of the Bureau of Mines in regard to its control of research, the Chief of Ordnance did his best to improve conditions within his own department by placing Colonel William H. Walker, assistant director of the Gas Service and former professor of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in complete control of gas production, including the operation of the great plant at Edgewood, the branch factories throughout the country, and the experimental field at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The manner in which this college professor brought order out of chaos at Edgewood and its related plants, directed the activities of 7,000 soldiers and 8,000 civilian workmen, settled labor troubles, obtained material, completed and put into operation the largest toxic-gas plant in existence, and, by his insistence on manufacturing at Edgewood all types of gases, including a large proportion of the basic chlorine, made the government independent of manufacturers and contractors, was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the war.

In May, 1918, Major-General William L. Sibert, Corps of Engineers, who had commanded the First Division in France, was appointed by the President as director of the Gas Service for the express purpose of reorganizing that service and placing it on a footing commensurate with the importance it was now realized to have. General Sibert promptly took the position that, if he was to assume this responsibility, there could be no further divided control; all gas production and all research work must be in his hands. Ensued then lengthy discussions between the War Department and the Department of the Interior, enlivened by newspaper articles and speeches in Congress, as to whether the research chemists of the Bureau of Mines should pass under military control, but General Sibert’s attitude remained unshaken and, on July 13, 1918, all branches of the work connected with gas warfare were placed under his control as chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, henceforward a complete and separate branch of the army.

When the United States entered the war, none of the toxic-gases used by the warring nations, with the exception of chlorine, had been prepared in this country except on a very small scale and as laboratory experiments. The War Department was faced, therefore, with the immediate problem, not only of developing methods for the manufacture of these gases on a large scale, but also of putting these methods into execution. Gases, the preparation of which even in very small quantities was prohibited in many laboratories on account of their highly dangerous character and which, for the same reason, the Railroad Administration refused to transport except by special trains, were now to be produced by the thousands of tons. But how? There was no suitable machinery for the purpose to be had in the United States; everything must be designed and built to order. And where were the thousands of workmen who would be required to come from? Why should a man exchange the safety of a shipyard, where he was getting undreamed-of wages, for the perils of making poison-gas? It was indeed a stupendous problem which the government was facing. Yet there was no time to mull the question over, as a judge mulls over a point of law, for every day brought word of an increasing use of gas by the Germans.

It was the original intention to interest existing chemical firms in the manufacture of the required gases, with the hope of obtaining from them the entire supply required. As the project developed, however, difficulties arose which prevented the carrying out of this programme. The director-general of railroads ruled, as I have just said, that the gases could only be transported by special train movement, and this would entail great difficulty, delay, and expense. More serious objections were encountered, however, in the efforts to enlist the co-operation of the chemical manufacturers. The methods for the production of toxic-gases on a large scale were quite unknown, the manufacturers explained, and to discover and develop satisfactory processes would necessarily require extended investigations. The companies also realized that there would be great danger to the lives of those employed in the work, that fatalities were almost certain to result, and they were unwilling to run the risk of the interminable lawsuits which are usually incidental to the settlement of such cases. Moreover, only a limited number of firms had the personnel and the experience necessary to undertake the difficult problems involved, and these firms were already crowded with war work and were unwilling to assume additional responsibility, particularly of such a character. And, finally, it was recognized that the manufacture of toxic-gases would be limited to the duration of the war, and that the processes involved, as well as the plants necessary for carrying out these processes, would have little value after the war was over.

Meanwhile the Ordnance Department had approved of a plan to utilize a portion of a tract comprising 35,000 acres, near Aberdeen, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay, which had just been acquired by the government for a proving-ground, for erecting a suitable plant for filling shell with poison-gas—though at that time it had not been determined where the gas itself was to come from. As soon as it became evident that the necessary quantities of gas could not be obtained from private firms, the War Department decided to erect and operate its own gas-plants on a peninsula of the Aberdeen Reservation, known as Gunpowder Neck. This peninsula, consisting of about 3,500 acres, which was admirably suited for the purpose by reason of its remoteness from centres of population, its security, and its facilities for rail and water transportation, was named Edgewood Arsenal.

Only those who saw the low-lying, swamp-lined shores of Gunpowder Neck during the winter and spring of 1917-1918 can fully picture the obstacles with which our gas-makers were confronted. Have you ever seen a Virginia road after the spring rains? Yes? Imagine, then, this Virginian clay mixed with Mexican adobe and diluted with New Orleans molasses and you will have a slight idea of the nature of the soil over which enormous quantities of material had to be hauled and on which was erected the greatest manufactory of poison-gas in the world. It may be recalled, moreover, that the winter of 1917-1918 was the severest in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. For weeks on end the shores of the Chesapeake resembled the shores of Greenland, but, in spite of cold and mud and rain, in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties in obtaining building materials and in securing transportation for those materials on the congested railways, in spite of strikes and labor troubles of every kind, the work forged steadily ahead, officers and men working themselves as a negro teamster works his mules. Scores of miles of roads were built and metalled, a network of railways was laid down, and over them snorted panting locomotives hauling endless caravans of freight-cars. The building sites were illuminated by hundreds of arc-lights, the working force was divided into shifts, and the reservation resounded both night and day to the creak of derricks, the clatter of riveters, and the rasp of saws. A total of 558 buildings were constructed on the grounds of the arsenal, including, in addition to the huge structures of steel and concrete which comprised the filling and the various chemical plants, 36 cantonments with quarters for 8,400 men, 3 field-hospitals, a base hospital with more than 400 beds, bunk-houses for civilian workmen, officers’ barracks, Y. M. C. A. and Knights of Columbus huts, and one of the most completely equipped laboratories in the country. Edgewood is, in reality, a collection of great manufacturing plants, with all that implies in housing, sanitation, heating, storage, hospitalization, and other agencies. And the work was done by men every one of whom, from the commanding officer down, was in civil life when the war began. Not a single officer or man of the Regular Army had any responsibility for the construction or operation of Edgewood Arsenal from the day that the ex-professor of chemistry, Colonel Walker, assumed command, until its operations were terminated by the Armistice.

Any one who has had practical experience in manufacturing well knows that it is usually a long step from laboratory experimentation to factory production, a step which it often takes months and sometimes years to make and which is frequently beset with all manner of difficulties and problems. But there was no such time at the disposal of the Edgewood gas-makers. In all their experiments they were never permitted to slack up on production. The need was too vital. Our armies in France were clamoring for gas, gas, gas. There were no existing models for much of the machinery needed, but the corps of brilliant young men with whom Colonel Walker had surrounded himself invented as they went along. Yet, as a result of the experiments at Edgewood, numerous new and more economical processes were discovered. The slow and dangerous water-cooling method of producing phosgene, as followed in Europe, was supplanted by an entirely new system and a plant was perfected which could turn out forty tons of this gas every twenty-four hours. When the Edgewood plant was put into operation the government was paying one dollar and fifty cents a pound for phosgene, but when the Armistice was signed we were manufacturing it at the theretofore unheard-of price of ten cents per pound and would have brought it to an even lower figure had the production been continued. The systems devised for filling, painting, and marking the shell were marvels of mechanical ingenuity. These discoveries were not intended for commerce. They were the result of patriotic effort on the part of the workmen to see the nation excel in the particular thing in which it was then engaged—war. They were the outgrowth of impatience over slow and dangerous methods, or a desire to do the work in hand a little better or a little more quickly than it had been done before—a quality inherent in the American character.

It is a remarkable commentary on the efficiency of the Edgewood organization that notwithstanding the fact that the manufacture of poison-gases in quantity was a new industry in the United States, that the machinery was improvised or designed from the ground up, that the workmen were without previous experience—many of the drafted men, mind you, were fresh from offices, stores, and farms—and that they were engaged in a peculiarly hazardous occupation, only four fatalities were directly traceable to poisoning by gas. This should not be construed as minimizing the peril attached to the work, however, for, though every possible precaution was observed in the construction and operation of the plants, there were 925 casualties between June and December, 1918, of which 674 were due to mustard-gas. During the month of August, when the gases were most volatile as a result of the excessive heat (during that month the mercury stood at 106 degrees for three days in succession), and when the weather caused the soldiers to somewhat relax their precautions, the hospitals were on several days filled at the rate of 3½ per cent of the entire force of the mustard-gas plant, though this rate of casualties was not maintained, of course, throughout the entire month. I might add that several of the divisions which took part in the St. Mihiel offensive sustained a considerably smaller percentage of losses, which shows that the dangers of the war were not entirely monopolized by the men who served in France.

Long before the chemical plants were completed it became evident that civilian labor could not be utilized in their operation. Not only was such labor difficult to obtain, but the wages were abnormally high, the work was, as a whole, extremely inefficient, and it was virtually impossible to maintain the discipline and secrecy imperative to the success of the undertaking. Moreover, it was found that such civilian labor as was available could not be depended upon to work in the chemical plants because of the danger attending the manufacture of such highly poisonous materials. It was decided, therefore, to utilize enlisted men. As the project progressed, increasing numbers of soldiers from the National Army were detailed to the arsenal, the force reaching a strength of 7,400 at one time. The soldiers, no matter how much they disliked the work, could not quit like the civilian laborers; they had no option but to obey orders, and so, morning after morning, they rose at the summons of the bugles in the dim light of early dawn, hurried through their breakfasts at the long tables in the mess-halls, and marched to their respective tasks, whether making chlorine, chlorpicrin, phosgene, or mustard gas, filling or painting shell, working in the great refrigerating-plants through which the shell were passed to be chilled before filling, loading trains and boats, building roads, digging ditches, or firing boilers—all for thirty dollars a month. To the men who wore the blue-and-yellow hat-cords of the Chemical Warfare Service, the men who performed their dangerous work without advertisement and without public recognition, is due the gratitude of the nation.

The chief activities of the great arsenal on the Chesapeake consisted, as I believe I have already mentioned, of the manufacture of four types of toxic-gas—chlorine, chlorpicrin, phosgene, and mustard—and the filling of shell with these gases. Now I have not the slightest intention of entering upon a technical account of the complicated processes by which these gases were produced. Though no doubt interesting to chemists, it would make dry reading for others. It will suffice for the purposes of this book to sketch in briefest outline, and in simple words, the chief characteristics of the principal toxic-gases and the methods followed in their manufacture.

Chlorine, which is the first gas the Germans used and which is an important constituent of nearly all the other toxic-gases, is derived from ordinary table-salt. It is prepared by passing a current of electricity through a solution of salt, by which process chlorine is liberated and caustic soda formed. At ordinary temperatures chlorine is a greenish-yellow gas of strong, suffocating odor, but by means of cold and pressure it can be readily condensed to a liquid and is usually shipped in that form, stored in strong cylinders. The apparatus in which the salt is decomposed by the electric current is known as a cell. The salt, upon arrival at the arsenal, was taken to the brine building and dumped into large concrete tanks kept partially filled with water, the resulting brine being drawn off, purified, and pumped to the cell-house as needed. The interior of this building was filled with cells, nearly 4,000 in all, through which was passed a direct current of approximately 260 volts. The chlorine thus extracted from the brine was liquefied by compressing it through the agency of a falling column of sulphuric acid and then cooling the compressed gas by refrigeration. Though chlorine has long been manufactured in the United States for chemical purposes, a constant supply of it was so essential for the preparation of the other gases that Colonel Walker insisted that it should be produced at Edgewood, thus making the government independent of private manufacturers.

Chlorpicrin, while not so poisonous as some of the other gases, is, nevertheless, an active poison and has, in addition, pronounced lachrymal (tear-producing) and nauseating qualities. Though chlorpicrin is fatal when taken in large quantities, it is almost impossible to inhale much of it because of its terribly nauseating effect. The inhalation of four cubic inches of it causes violent vomiting. Chlorpicrin is produced by the action of picric acid upon chlorine in the form of bleaching-powder. The bleaching-powder, after being diluted with water to the consistency of thick cream, is mixed with a solution of calcium picrate in large stills holding 5,000 or more gallons. A jet of live steam is introduced at the bottom of the still and the reaction begins at once, the resulting chlorpicrin passing out of the still into condensers. This mixture of chlorpicrin and water is then run into tanks. As chlorpicrin does not dissolve in water, it gradually settles to the bottom and is drawn off and loaded directly into the shell.

Phosgene, the next member of the poison-gas family, is the deadliest of the lung-gases, killing almost as quickly as cyanogen. It is produced by the combination of two other gases, chlorine and carbon monoxide. The reaction is effected in iron boxes, lined with lead and filled with charcoal, into which a stream of chlorine and carbon monoxide, mixed in proper proportion, is introduced. The colorless gas which results is phosgene. It is condensed to a liquid by passing it through a condenser surrounded by brine kept cold by refrigeration and is then either stored in strong steel containers or run directly into the thirty-pound cylinders known as Livens’ drums. These drums are fired from a sort of mortar, called a projector, and are extremely effective for producing heavy concentrations of gas up to a range of 1,500 yards.

The compound commonly referred to in chemical warfare as “mustard-gas” is known to chemists as dichlorethylsulphide. Its nature is as formidable as its name. It has a distinctive smell, like garlic rather than mustard. It has no immediate effect on the eyes, beyond a slight irritation, but after several hours the eyes begin to swell and inflame and practically blister, causing the most intense pain; the nose discharges freely, and severe coughing and even vomiting ensue. Direct contact with the spray causes blistering of the skin so severe that it is virtually burned. Even when protected by masks and specially made clothing, it is impossible for troops to remain for more than eight hours in an area which has been bombarded with mustard-gas. Dichlorethylsulphide, to use its correct name, is produced by blowing ethylene-gas into liquid sulphur monochloride in large iron reaction vessels. Contrary to the popular impression, this gas contains no mustard. The details of devices and methods for introducing the ethylene and sulphur monochloride into the vessels, the removal of the product, the necessary agitation and cooling of the mass, and the like, were frequently changed during the development of the process and had not reached a final form even when the Armistice was signed. Nevertheless, when the war ended, Edgewood was producing 30 tons of mustard-gas a day and a rapid increase up to 100 tons daily was practically assured.

Though the Germans began their use of gas by releasing it from cylinders, depending upon the wind to carry it over the enemy’s lines, these “cloud attacks,” as they were called, did not prove satisfactory and were eventually discontinued, for great difficulty was experienced in getting the heavy cylinders up to the front and installing them in the trenches, and favorable winds could not be depended upon. It seems likely, indeed, that the Germans failed to recognize the significance of the meteorological records and charts of northern France, which show that 75 per cent of the prevailing winds are from a southerly or southeasterly direction, thus leaving the Germans only 25 per cent of the time in which they could use their gas without danger of its being blown back over their own lines. It was in order to overcome these meteorological conditions that the Germans evolved the idea of loading the gas into shell, usually in the form of liquid, which turned into gas when it came into contact with the air upon the explosion of the shell, and firing these shell from guns or mortars, thus enabling them to place the gas wherever they desired without reference to the weather. During the last two years of the war, barring a few isolated instances, gas was used in no other way.

The filling of shell was, therefore, one of the most important of Edgewood’s many activities. Let me explain to you, as simply and briefly as possible, how the shell were filled with phosgene.

The empty shell, after inspection, were loaded on trucks together with the required number of loaded boosters. (A booster, it should be explained, is the cap or stopper containing a charge of high explosive, usually TNT or dynamite, which is screwed on the nose of the shell after it has been filled with gas, much as a metal top is screwed onto a bottle. Just before firing, a fuse is inserted in the booster, igniting the explosive, which in turn shatters the shell, thus releasing the gas.) The trucks with the empty shell were then run by electric locomotives to the filling buildings. Here the shell were transferred to a conveyer, a sort of moving platform, which slowly moved through a room kept cold by refrigeration. About thirty minutes was required for this operation, during which time the shell were cooled to a temperature of about zero. This chilling of the shell was made necessary because phosgene has a low boiling-point. It was imperative, therefore, that the temperature of the shell be kept considerably below the boiling-point of phosgene in order that the latter should remain in liquid form while the filling was taking place. The chilled shell were then transferred to trucks and hauled by motor through the filling-tunnel to the filling-machines. Here the phosgene, kept in liquid state by refrigeration, was run into the shell by automatic machines. The truck then carried the filled shell forward a few feet, at which point the boosters were screwed into the noses of the shell by hand. The final closing of the shell was then effected by motors operated by compressed air. The filled shell were next conveyed to the shell-dump, where they were classified and stored for twenty-four hours, nose down on skids, in order to test them for leaks. The following day the shell were again placed on conveyers which carried them through a painting-machine, where air-brushes gave them a coat of elephant gray and striped them with the distinctive bands of color which denoted the type of gas they contained. The methods followed in filling shell with chlorpicrin were similar to those for phosgene except that refrigeration was unnecessary. The peculiar properties of mustard-gas, however, required an entirely different filling system. Edgewood Arsenal also had separate plants for filling the stannic-chloride hand-grenades used for “mopping up” trenches; for filling both shell and grenades with white phosphorus for use in forming smoke-screens to conceal the movements of advancing troops, and for loading the incendiary drop-bombs used by the Air Service.

The various plants which I have just described by no means comprised the whole of Edgewood’s activities, however, for, in order to obtain a sufficient supply of bromine, certain compounds of which are excellent tear-producing materials, a series of brine-wells was sunk at Midland, Michigan; a plant for the production of another lachrymator, brombenzyl cyanide, was erected at Kingsport, Tennessee; and an establishment for the manufacture of diphenychlorarsine—an arsenical material used in gas warfare because it produces violent sneezing, thus causing the troops to remove their gas-masks and thereby exposing them to the effects of the toxic-gases used in combination with the arsenicals—was started at Croyland, Pennsylvania.

As a matter of fact, the great mother-plant on Chesapeake Bay had branches and ramifications of which the public had scarcely an inkling, so carefully were the details of our gas production guarded. I have already pointed out that it was the original intention to secure the entire supply of toxic materials from existing chemical plants, and that it was only after this plan was found to be unfeasible that the decision to build government plants was reached. This decision did not signify, however, that no such material would be obtained from existing firms. On the contrary, it was decided to utilize such firms whenever it was possible to secure their co-operation. But as the products desired had never been prepared on a commercial scale in this country, it was impossible to forecast with accuracy the cost of their manufacture. As a result, the co-operation of the existing chemical concerns could be secured only on the condition that the government would finance the work. These plants, therefore, though they continued to be operated by their owners, became in fact government plants, being financed by the government, representatives of the War Department being stationed at each establishment to supervise their administration and look after the government’s interests. At first they were under the direction of the trench warfare section of the Ordnance Department, but, under a later order, they were made a part of Edgewood Arsenal and placed under the administration of its commanding officer. The list of these outside plants, with their official designation and the product manufactured in each, is as follows:

Edgewood Arsenal, Niagara Falls Plant: Manufacture of phosgene.

Edgewood Arsenal, Midland (Mich.) Plant: Sinking of brine-wells
for the purpose of securing adequate supplies of bromine.

Edgewood Arsenal, Buffalo Plant: Manufacture of mustard-gas.

Edgewood Arsenal, Bound Brook (N. J.) Plant: Manufacture of
phosgene.