Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  ‘As under a green sea’

  The red poppy, which we wear to commemorate the loss of life in the First World War, offers us consolation because it is a symbol of survival: a flower that grew from the soil of battlefields, which had been fertilized with the blood of the slain. But one of the weapons of that war destroys even this sentimental construction. The poison gas that both sides employed offensively for the first time in 1915 had horrific power to choke the lungs, and to bleach the grass and flowers white. The gas was chlorine.

  By the outbreak of the war, it had been anticipated for some fifty years that new chemical weapons, built on the scientific advances of the nineteenth century, would be developed for use in war. However, so strong was this possibility, and so strong too the sense that this was something uniquely abhorrent, that a pre-emptive ban had long been in place to regulate the use of such lethal agents on the battlefield.

  Tear gas remained legal because it did not kill. The challenge for military engineers was to find a means of delivering it to enemy lines on a large scale and ensuring it would disperse in such a way as to cause maximum disruption while presenting minimal danger to one’s own forces. The German chemist given this job was Fritz Haber–the same Haber who would later endeavour to extract gold from seawater for his country and who was already celebrated as one of the innovators of a process for converting nitrogen from the air into ammonia. When, later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work, the choice was highly controversial because he had by then been listed by the Allied Powers as a war criminal.

  Haber’s brainwave was to keep it simple. Chlorine was a step backwards from tear gas in chemical sophistication, but a considerable leap forward in practicality. Rather than try to encapsulate it in shells that could be fired behind enemy lines, Haber proposed simply to release the gas from ground-based cylinders and allow the wind to do the rest. The chlorine, twice as heavy as air, would roll along the ground in a choking blanket before which the enemy would have no option but to retreat. At Ypres in northern Belgium, Haber personally oversaw the installation of more than 5,000 cylinders along a seven-kilometre stretch of the Western front. Chlorine became the first weapon of gas warfare on the afternoon of 22 April 1915, when a light north-easterly wind blew favourably for the German army. The surprise attack seemed to engulf the Allied soldiers, mainly French and Algerians. Swallowed up by the corrosive cloud, they could no longer tell whether to retreat from the gas or push through it in the hope of finding clear air beyond. By the end of the day, hundreds of men lay dead, and thousands were incapacitated, many remaining permanently disabled.

  Did chlorine break The Hague conventions banning ‘asphyxiating and deleterious’ substances? Haber’s argument that chlorine was non-lethal, like tear gas, and so a legitimate weapon of war, seems disingenuous in the light of his infamous later boast that he had devised ‘a higher form of killing’. The death toll on that April afternoon in Ypres pronounced its own verdict.

  Certainly the attack was felt to be more than enough to sanction response in kind by the Allies. Both sides employed gas periodically throughout the rest of the war, although it was never so devastating as when used by the Germans at Ypres and a few weeks later on the Eastern front west of Warsaw. Both sides also displayed an alarming readiness to deploy ever more unpleasant gases, escalating the chemical war with agents such as phosgene (carbonyl chloride), which smells faintly of fresh hay, mustard gas and other chlorinated compounds of sulphur and arsenic. But it is chlorine that still seems the most brutal weapon because of its elemental simplicity. The gas rips through the blood vessels that line the lungs and the victim eventually drowns in fluid produced as the body attempts to repair the damage.

  Haber’s patriotic efforts cast a long shadow, not least over his own family. His wife, Clara, committed suicide on the night of 1 May 1915 using her husband’s service revolver. Biographers argue over the extent to which the death was her protest against Haber’s chemical war, but it is worth noting that she was a qualified chemist herself, having trained in the subject in order to catch Fritz’s attention, and had observed the effects of chlorine in Haber’s animal experiments and field trials. Haber was apparently unfazed; he departed the following morning to supervise the installation of gas cylinders on the Eastern front.

  Haber’s son by his second marriage, Lutz (a contraction of Ludwig-Fritz), was haunted by his father’s history and tried to lay the ghost in a book called The Poisonous Cloud, which remains one of the standard works on chemical warfare. Haber was forced to leave his beloved Germany with his family when his Berlin research institute was shut down by the Nazis in 1933. (Although his chemical talents would undoubtedly have been put to use, and indeed he offered his services, Haber’s partly Jewish ancestry made him unacceptable.) He considered settling in Palestine, then looked to find a home in Cambridge; in the end there was time for neither, and he died just a few months after his journey into exile.

  Lutz Haber and his sister Eva Charlotte stayed in England. A number of years ago, I visited them in an incongruously genteel cottage in Bath, the city to which they had retired. Lutz was then nearly eighty and a little frail, but Eva Charlotte was the kind of woman who seems to save her sharp focus for old age. They remembered their father dimly–the odd game of bowls, helping him up the stairs, that sort of thing. Eva recalled how Einstein, a family friend, explained relativity to her by analogy with moving trains, and told me how she and Lutz one day climbed up a ladder and into Haber’s institute, tripping over an assistant’s apparatus and breaking it, sending their father into a rage. Why did Lutz write his magnum opus? ‘I felt I should contribute my bit,’ he confided. In his ‘personal introduction’ to the book, he elaborates with a critical sketch of his father as ‘the embodiment of the romantic, quasi-heroic aspect of German chemistry in which national pride commingled with the advancement of pure science and the utilitarian progress of technology’. He judges his father’s patriotism ‘unusual even in an age when jingoism, into which it so frequently spills over, was condoned’. As for chlorine, Lutz told me, it was simply ‘the most readily available substance. The chemical industry was very capable of producing chlorine quickly and in quantity.’

  Wilfred Owen uses a chlorine gas attack as the tableau against which to expose ‘The old Lie’ of patriotism in the most famous poem of the First World War:

  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…

  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.

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Owen limns the effects of the gas with a pathologist’s accuracy. John Singer Sargent’s famous painting Gassed, completed after the war in 1919, confronts us with none of this frenzied horror. His vast canvas shows a walking column of eleven men, all but the man who is guiding them blindfolded and holding on to the shoulder or knapsack straps of the man in front. A similar column is led off by white-coated men in the distance. Around the walking wounded other injured men lie on the ground, one drinking from a water bottle, another clutching a hand to his banda
ged eyes. The bleak, flat landscape is punctuated only by the pitched canvas of the nursing stations. Over it all, a low rancid sun forces its light through a greenish sky.

  There is clearly something wrong with this picture. It may not be a picnic, but the scene is curiously static, almost reposeful. The soldiers are not suffering. There are no visible injuries, no scarred or burnt skin, no blood; uniforms are neatly in place. There is no sign of the choking that Owen describes. The picture was painted following a visit that the artist made to France in the summer of 1918. The gas at this late stage of the war is more likely to have been mustard gas, although the sickly greenish mist hints at chlorine. The artist has clearly responded to the official brief he was given to emphasize soldierly comradeship, but he cannot have painted what he saw if he saw the aftermath of a gas attack. His giant mise en scène parades its identikit blond Aryan heroes–the sons of the society women whose portraits he had grown rich by, perhaps–like an heroic film in Cinemascope.

  In the light, airy calm of the reading room at the top of the Imperial War Museum, I read letters home from Ypres and find the same scene painted in very different colours. Sergeant Elmer Cotton of the Fifth Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers described how

  The flat country all around was covered to a height of from 5 to 7 feet with a greenish white vaporous cloud of Chlorine gas…further on we passed a dressing station–propped up against a wall were a dozen men–all gassed–their colour was black, green and blue, tongues hanging out and eyes staring. One or two were dead and the others beyond human aid, some were coughing up green froth from their lungs.

  I read other letters that speak of the confusion produced by the novel weapon (‘a great stream of Sulpher’, according to Infantryman James Randall; carbon monoxide according to an erroneous first report of the Ypres attack in The Times); of the Allies’ unpreparedness (the British have ‘bicarb of soda or something as an antidote’, wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Vivian Fergusson); and of the effects from a Canadian nurse named Alison Mullineaux, who tended two men ‘both lungs burnt out in each of them’, the doctor himself having to leave the ward in order to vomit from the gas he breathed off the patients.

  Chlorine’s pungent nature was noted from the outset. The Swede Carl Scheele was the first to isolate the gas in 1774, noting its green colour, choking power and bleaching effect on litmus paper and plants. He made the discovery in pursuit of one of the great chemical projects of the day: to confirm whether or not all acids contained oxygen. Well-known acids such as sulphuric and nitric were known to contain oxygen. Hydrochloric acid, then known as muriatic acid (after muria, the Latin for brine), was a mystery. Antoine Lavoisier even called it oxymuriatic acid, believing its acidity had to be linked to oxygen. Scheele succeeded in obtaining chlorine during the course of his own experiments with this acid. However, this did not prove the absence of oxygen. It was not until 1810 that this was done by Humphry Davy, who confirmed that the gas Scheele had isolated was indeed an element, by combining muriatic acid with his own newly discovered metal, potassium, and obtaining from the reaction only potassium chloride and hydrogen gas–no oxygen.

  Chlorine’s propensity to combine with other elements to form hazardous new compounds, such as mustard gas, was also noted early on. One of these substances was the highly explosive liquid nitrogen trichloride. When Pierre-Louis Dulong first made this compound in 1811, it cost him an eye and three fingers. André-Marie Ampère warned Davy about the dangers, but Davy repeated the experiment anyway, and received cuts to his eye from flying glass.

  The critic John Ruskin was sufficiently struck by the contrast between placid nitrogen gas and its explosive chloride to cite them figuratively in his 1860 essay Unto This Last, making an argument in favour of ‘accidentals’ and against man’s complete control of his materials:

  We made learned experiments upon pure nitrogen, and have convinced ourselves that it is a very manageable gas: but behold! the thing which we have practically to deal with is its chloride; and this, the moment we touch it on our established principles, sends us and our apparatus through the ceiling.

  The dangerous compounds of chlorine that are more familiar today are those that have become notorious pollutants of the environment. Some of these have their origin in the research done by Haber and his colleagues. The ceaseless search for ‘higher forms of killing’ had consequences for species other than man. DDT was one by-product of this research, its efficacy as a pesticide identified during the course of laboratory tests on insects of potential warfare agents. DDT is a chlorinated hydro-carbon, a class of compounds in which chlorine atoms are substituted for hydrogen atoms on a carbon backbone. The herbicide known as Agent Orange used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War is another. The group of refrigerant gases known as CFCs–chlorofluorocarbons–are others.

  Chlorine is a Janus-faced element. It is abundant in nature–not least in the salt of the oceans–and is essential for life, playing an important role in regulating body functions. Like sulphur and phosphorus, it is usually safe enough in natural combinations. But when it slips its leash it can do great harm. This is what happened in the case of CFCs, the famously inert compounds originally adopted as a safe alternative to existing aerosol propellants and refrigerant gases. High in the stratosphere, sunlight strips out their chlorine atoms, setting up a chemical cycle that allows them to rampage through the ozone layer, breaking it up molecule by molecule.

  Released in controlled doses, however, chlorine has the power for good. Our awareness of the stinging smell of chlorine gas comes not from the battlefield, but from public swimming pools where it is used as a disinfectant, from the bleach under the kitchen sink, and from the medicine cabinet and preparations such as TCP and the chloroquine tablets we take on exotic holidays. It is said that chlorinated drinking water brought to troops in the First World War saved more lives than were lost to the gas as a weapon.

  As early as 1785, Claude-Louis Berthollet, a follower of Lavoisier and an inspector of dyeworks, published an account of his experiments with the new element. Adding to Scheele’s observation that the gas had a bleaching effect, he showed that it was possible to make a safe and practical bleaching agent by mixing potash–potassium carbonate originally obtained from wood ash–with chlorine water. Berthollet’s discovery was well timed. Bleaching cloth had traditionally been a laborious business, involving repeated washing and then prolonged exposure to sunlight, a procedure that took some months even in favourable weather. The common sight of fields laid out with sheets of linen inspired some memorable images, especially in Dutch art, such as the painting attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael of the bleaching fields outside Haarlem. (The cultural memory of white rectangles papering the landscape was later perhaps an inspiration to the abstract painter Piet Mondrian.) The Industrial Revolution led to an increase in textile production and a demand for a faster bleaching technique. Berthollet advertised his discovery to British scientists, and in 1786 the leading industrialists of the day, James Watt and Matthew Boulton, travelled to Paris to see Berthollet demonstrate his instant bleaching process. Watt discussed his steam engine with admiring French academicians and brought home information about Berthollet’s process, which he then applied in his father-in-law’s textile factory.

  Like Odysseus’ sulphur, chlorine was also soon recommended in the fight against infection and disease. The gas was awkward to administer, however, and always unpleasant, and for a long time was not a popular treatment. It was the devastating epidemic of influenza immediately after the First World War that helped to make chlorine acceptable–a double irony since the gas so recently used for killing men was not actually effective against the flu virus. When Calvin Coolidge, the most inert of American presidents, underwent chlorine-inhalation therapy for a cold over three days in 1924, the Washington Post headlined: ‘chlorine gas, war annihilator, aids president’s cold. Coolidge Much Relieved After 50 Minutes in Airtight Chamber.’ Over-the-counter chlorine remedies began to proliferate. One ointment, Chlor
ine Respirine, applied to the nostrils ‘liberated pure chlorine gas’. The product advertising burbled: ‘Its discovery is, in fact, one of the greatest triumphs of science.’ In 1925, the president’s health presumably restored, the Post joyously drew the bigger picture: ‘Chlorine to save more lives a year than its war toll.’

  I am indebted for some of these insights into chlorine’s properties to an unusual book that is in effect a biography of the element, but is more notable as the permanent record of an intriguing pedagogical experiment. Two lecturers in the history of science at University College London asked their undergraduate students each to explore a different aspect of chlorine’s life ‘in science, medicine, technology and war’. The project was completed over several years, with students inheriting work from their predecessors, adding to it and improving it little by little until a unique chemical commonplace book had been built up. The copy I borrowed from the library had never been opened. Was it just fancy that I sensed a whiff of chlorine rising from its fresh bleached pages?*

  ‘Humanitarian nonsense’

  In Stanley Kubrick’s blackest of black comedies, Dr. Strangelove, the paranoid American general Jack D. Ripper, holed up on Burpelson Air Force Base, under siege by his own men, finally reveals to the hapless RAF officer Lionel Mandrake why he has launched the nuclear attack on the Soviet Union that will lead by the end of the film to the destruction of human civilization. ‘Do you realize,’ he says, chewing mightily on his cigar, ‘that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?’ Ripper, it should be said, is driven by a pathological fear of contamination of his ‘precious bodily fluids’, something that first came to him ‘during the physical act of love’. As machine-gun fire rakes through his office, he explains that fluoridation began in 1946: ‘How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy? Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies under way to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.’