by Theo Emery
Fries was simultaneously close to the war and far from it. Occasionally, he came within a few miles of the front lines, but most of the time, danger was distant, too far even to worry about bombing runs by German planes. He was detached from the action, living in a bubble of comfort. It was a paradox that he occasionally remarked upon but that seemed to trouble him little as he motored between meals served with champagne, attended an operetta in Paris, and reveled in the mild fall weather. Still, he was aware of the travails of the soldiers on the front. Every time the Allies began a new offensive, it seemed, the weather foiled them. “They certainly have the devil’s luck this season,” Fries wrote.
That luck turned still worse in October. After the unrelenting rains of August, the skies had cleared, and the mud began to dry. The Third Battle of Ypres began as the British tried to take the strategic high ground of Passchendaele, just north of Ypres. The British Royal Artillery resumed shelling, an endless cannonade of flashing concussions as the British and Australians fought their way forward. Hopes began to rise among the British generals that perhaps the time had finally arrived when the Germans’ resolve would fail.
Then the rain began again. For the soldiers in the trenches, the Battle of Passchendaele would be the nadir of a war already soaked in horror. The mud turned the front into a vast, gelatinous cemetery, where bodies of men rotted where they fell, filling the air with the rank stench of decomposing corpses. Artillery turned night into day, the darkness filled with the endless roar of howitzers. Liquid metal thermite cascaded down on the trenches, an infernal rain that burned soldiers alive with a heat so intense that the ribs and walls of the trenches glowed. The quagmire underfoot swallowed artillery along with horses and men, who screamed in terror as they thrashed and struggled before they disappeared beneath the surface. A miasma of mustard and phosgene and chloropicrin and other gases poisoned the air above. That sliver of about one hundred yards created more than five hundred thousand casualties, turning the name “Passchendaele” into a shorthand for the madness of the war.
The British weren’t alone in their losses. Gas also exacted a terrible setback for the Russians that would upend the war and, eventually, all of the West. In September, the demoralized Russian army had faced German general Georg Bruchmüller’s troops in Riga, Latvia. Russian general Lavr Kornilov’s thirteen battalions had pushed the Germans back twenty miles through sheer force of numbers, until a German counteroffensive regained the lost territory. On September 1, Bruchmüller unleashed a staggering artillery barrage. For five hours, hundreds of thousands of shells cascaded onto the Russians. About a quarter were incendiaries; the rest were gas intended to saturate the battlefield.
With the Russian army in chaos, Bruchmüller delivered the coup de grâce: the Germans’ answer to the creeping barrage that the British had used at Arras. They called it the Feuerwalze, or “fire waltz.” The Feuerwalze was more carefully targeted and faster moving, cleaving through the Russian line and giving the Germans an opening to thrust through the Russian defenses. The fire waltz did its work, and the German infantry crossed the Dvina River and swept the Russian positions, capturing some nine thousand soldiers and sending the rest scrambling in retreat. The Germans walked into Riga, the Russian forces shattered.
It was the last battle of the war for the Russian army. Deserting soldiers straggled home with tales of the front’s horrors. As antiwar fever stoked revolutionary fervor in October, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd. Within weeks, revolution swept the moderate socialist prime minister Aleksandr Kerensky from office. The Bolsheviks and left socialists seized power, and the Quadruple Entente’s ally would withdraw from the war. Another member of the alliance, the Italians, suffered a calamitous defeat in October, when a massive gas attack launched at Caporetto introduced the German version of the Livens projector.
The grim tally of defeats reached Fries like a foul wind. His discomforts were limited to a restive stomach and a painful blister on his toe from a long hike across the countryside, and while soldiers shivered in the trenches, Fries bundled himself in his bearskin coat, “warm as a bug in a rug.” Still, the sour news dampened his sunny outlook and dimmed his hopes for a swift return home. As he continued to build up his service, he anxiously awaited news of the gas troops he requested. Fries had a pet name for what he learned from the British: “the gas game.” Like chess, checkers, or the evening games of bridge that he played with the other officers in the echoing mansion, gas demanded an exercise of wits and strategy with its own logic and rules, feints, and maneuvers to outflank an opponent. He, too, wanted to join the game.
“Things don’t look quite so good for the allied cause as they did a couple of months ago, but it is always darkest just before the dawn,” he wrote home. And he couldn’t imagine that the night could get any darker.
PART II
FLASH POINT
Chapter Seven
“A Hotter Fire”
There’s a place somewhere near Georgetown
Where the mustard blossoms grow
It was built to help the kaiser
Make a quick trip down below.
All ye chemists with your perfumes
To delight the boche’s smell
Gather round and sing this anthem
It’s the “kaiser’s march to Hell.”
—Stunt-night lyrics from American University Experiment Station
The Tuesday after Labor Day was breezy and warm in Washington, a cloudless sky over the crowds assembled along Pennsylvania Avenue. President Wilson waited at the foot of the Peace Monument, jaunty and casual in white trousers, a blue blazer, and a straw boater hat, a flagpole cradled in the crook of his elbow. The president of the chamber of commerce looked starched and uncomfortable in a top hat and tails beside him, while the head of the board of trade puffed on a cigar to his left.
The September 4 parade honoring the city’s first draftees was a demonstration of unity and homegrown patriotism, a celebration to drown out the naysayers and the soap-box agitators still speaking out against the war. Dissent had become the mark of traitors and slackers, and prosecutions of the war’s critics had begun. The Espionage Act enacted in June made it a crime to pass information that interfered with the war or supported the country’s enemies. Days before the parade, police arrested thirty Germans in South Dakota for petitioning against the war and the draft. In a Labor Day letter to American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, Wilson warned that labor unions needed to be a bulwark against the “forces of antagonism.” Gompers himself was suspect; Bureau of Investigation agents were tailing him, studying his movements and meetings for signs of subversive activities.
On the day of the parade, a promised pacifist demonstration never materialized, and the only arrests were a few lonely suffragists outside the White House. As the Marine Band struck up, a platoon of mounted police started down Pennsylvania Avenue. Brigadier General Joseph Kuhn, the president of the War College, led the procession, with the marshal of the First Division behind him. The president followed the Marine Band, marching with quick, measured steps, shoulders back, flag unfurled behind him in the breeze. As the parade passed, the crowds cheered for the president and the senators behind him. Then the roar fell away, and the mood grew sober. The draftees themselves came next, nine hundred dressed in civilian clothes, awkwardly trying to step in time to the martial music. The men in front carried an enormous banner that read SELECTED BY THE NATION TO ASSIST IN UPHOLDING THE WORLD’S DEMOCRACY. Some viewers wept as they watched the newly minted soldiers go by.
Then the draftees were gone and the somber mood with them. Soon the crowd was whistling and cheering for Civil War veterans in the faded uniforms of their respective sides, marching together in unity. Plodding mules pulled machine-gun caissons. Light field artillery pieces rolled by, and as infantry marched past, rifles held aloft, the sun glinted off their bayonets.
The parade along Pennsylvania Avenue was a spectacle of traditional warfare, a s
hiny martial display of familiar fifes and drums, cannons, and artillery caissons. The twenty-eight thousand soldiers who passed the reviewing stand outside the White House didn’t carry gas masks, which would soon be one of their most vital pieces of standard-issue equipment. The day before the parade, General Pershing had issued the order forming Fries’s gas service, but the War Department waited almost three weeks to publicize what had been a secret since August: that the U.S. Army would establish a chemical regiment, the Thirtieth Engineers (Gas and Flame), to answer German gas with its own.
When the War Department finally revealed its plans, the news arrived with a bang. On September 21, the lurid headline in the Washington Herald read “U.S. Prepared for Barbarity.” America would “meet Germany at her own game of frightfulness,” the article warned. “Besides poison gas and liquid fire, both of which, it was announced yesterday, would be employed by the American army, expert chemists are reported to be engaged in experiments with a new substance which will carry the campaign a step further and be the American backfire against German methods.”
Newspapers across the country invoked images of sorcerous tactics conjured from a Mephistophelian cauldron. “Uncle Sam to ‘Fight Devil with Fire,’” the South Bend News-Times proclaimed. They were brash words, hinting darkly at untested capabilities and strategies, and salted with inflated and misleading claims. “Liquid fire” would be part of the American arsenal, the articles reported, even though Fries had called flamethrowers all but obsolete. It was reported that the army had vast stockpiles of chemicals and a secret weapon at the ready—utter fabrications.
The announcement served two purposes. The first was propaganda, to send a signal rife with bluff and bluster that the United States, like its allies, intended to play the gas game, too. The second reason was that the army was laying the foundation for a sea change in warfare. For two years, the American public had read about Germany’s violations of the rules of war, a flaunting of conscience and convention that laid bare the moral failings of “the Huns.” Now the army needed to convince the country that it was justified in engaging in the same tactics. That wasn’t all. Not only was the United States prepared to use gas, but the army suggested a desire to push chemical warfare in new directions. Aerial bombing of cities packed with civilians was one of them. “War will be carried against Germany with poison, flame and dynamite—dynamite from thousands of airplanes which will answer the Germans in their own language of ‘women and children first.’” The influx of American pilots and planes would allow the Allies to shift targets from the trenches to German cities hundreds of miles behind the lines. “Berlin is the main objective. Other thriving German manufacturing towns and cities will be visited,” the Herald promised.
The announcement that the United States would embrace gas warfare was not welcomed everywhere. “This news brings no thrill of satisfaction to the hearts of the American people,” the Free Trader-Journal of Ottawa, Illinois, editorialized.
We do not want to use any means of warfare so inhumane as the gas which chokes men to death in agony and the flame which shrivels their flesh beyond all healing. All forms of warfare are cruel; but in comparison with these blasting weapons, ball and shell are merciful. If lead or steel kills, it kills quickly, often without pain. If it only wounds, the hurt men have a fair chance for recovery. Gas and fire mean lingering torture.
If the scientists in Washington agreed with such doubts, they were drowned out amid the din of construction that rang across the American University campus. The rush to complete the laboratories reached a fever pitch in September. From the attic to the basement of McKinley Hall, work was under way to transform the half-finished classrooms into research spaces for the chemists. Concrete floors had been poured in August. Workmen streamed up the curving front steps and into the high lobby under the rotunda. Carpenters hauled tables and chemical hoods up the marble steps to the labs throughout the building. Plumbers fitted pipes, installed sinks, and laid gas lines. Electricians were still unspooling wire and running it up the walls to power the building.
In a September 1 update, research chief George Burrell had written that the laboratories in McKinley Hall would be ready in eight weeks, then crossed it out and penciled in a much-shorter timeline: it would be ready in just two.
The work couldn’t be finished quickly enough. Seventy-five chemists and other Bureau of Mines employees were scattered between the Pittsburgh Experiment Station, Johns Hopkins, Yale, the Interior Department building, and other labs up and down the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Telegrams, telephones, and trains hitched the frantic investigations together. The chemists wasted precious time on travel and mailing samples to remote labs. The spring deployment to Europe was creeping closer. With Amos Fries installed as chief of the AEF Gas Service in France, cablegrams related to gas warfare flashed with increasing frequency across the Atlantic. There were battlefield updates, queries about manufacturing timelines, and requirements for officer training. Insistent requests for laboratory equipment proliferated, along with admonitions to focus investigations on mustard gas.
Every day brought new puzzles and problems. At the behest of the British, George Burrell was leading the research into cheaply produced helium for airships. After the debacle with the first gas masks, Arno Fieldner had redoubled efforts in Pittsburgh to improve their design, while the Army Medical Division had taken over the task of manufacturing them. Other divisions worked on experiments with smoke screens, explosives, and a ventilation system for scrubbing carbon dioxide from air in submarines. Another focused on large-scale manufacture of gases. In New Haven, Yandell Henderson was studying the toxicity of gas on animals in a hastily remodeled athletic clubhouse and a laboratory built beneath the bleachers of a ball field. The demand for animal test subjects was so heavy that the bureau asked mayors from Baltimore up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to ship their stray cats and dogs to New Haven, where the division was emptying out dog pounds as quickly as animals could be scooped up.
In mid-September, while McKinley Hall was still a construction zone, the chemists began to move in. Fieldner and his gas mask division arrived first, taking first-floor rooms down the left hallway of the L-shaped building, with more on the other side of the building next to the labs where Arthur Lamb set up his chemical defense work. James F. Norris claimed rooms for his work on offensive and defensive gas research. Eli K. Marshall moved his physiology research from Johns Hopkins up the curving lobby steps to the second floor. George Richter’s pyrotechnics labs were on the top floor. A machine shop hummed in the basement.
In just a few short months, the hill became the hot center of the war gas universe, a riotous mix of construction and chemistry. Workmen brushed past chemists already at work, bent over makeshift tables and benches amid the swirling chaos of the half-finished labs. There was no time for waste or complaint, and no room for slackers. The improvisation among chaos had a lasting impression on E. Emmet Reid, the Johns Hopkins chemist. “I well remember the wild life at that time,” he recalled.
But even when complete, McKinley Hall was not big enough to contain the rapidly expanding Research Division. The chemists would need outdoor stills to manufacture test batches of gases. They would need munitions pits and storage for the precursor chemicals. A firehouse in case an experiment started a blaze. Trenches and bunkers to replicate those on the front. The scientists would need man-test laboratories, chambers like the one in Pittsburgh where soldiers could test masks or expose themselves to chemicals so the effects could be studied. Kennels were needed—when Henderson transferred his operation from Yale in late September, he brought along the dogs he used as test subjects. There would be other animals, too: goats, monkeys, mice. The chemists would be designing horse masks, which meant the hill would need a stable and a blacksmith. The school had already approved construction for a concrete bomb pit, where the chemists could detonate bombs and grenades to study the clouds they released.
Besides research facilities, there was one thing the expe
riment station lacked: barracks. The engineers at Camp American University had their own cantonments, but the chemists boarded in private homes, and the Bureau of Mines constantly ran discreet classified ads in the newspapers seeking furnished rooms in neighborhoods nearby.
The enterprise that began in the two campus buildings inexorably spread. Over the following months, the army leased properties adjoining the campus for experimentation and training. The wealthy banker Charles Glover signed contracts with the army for one of his tracts of land, as did other area landowners like Charles Spalding and Robert Weaver, giving the bureau hundreds of rolling acres reaching all the way west toward the Dalecarlia Reservoir and north toward Maryland.
Responses to the scientific census that Manning had announced with such fanfare in April had continued to flow into the director’s office through the summer and into the fall. Designed to locate scientists and chemists, it succeeded. In all, 22,500 men responded from all over the country. Some 7,500 of them were mining experts, while 15,000 were in chemical industries. Manning compiled a separate list of those with experience in foreign countries. In early October, he labeled the report Technical Paper 179 and shipped it off to the National Research Council. “These lists are now at your service at the Bureau of Mines and should prove of great value to the country in this emergency,” Manning wrote in a cover letter.
As the research in Manning’s department expanded, the census continued to provide a systematic, methodical approach to identifying candidates for Manning’s scientific army. Manning originally planned to have 250 scientists working on gas, but the sheer volume of new investigations was outstripping the number of men available to carry them out. In August, the War Department had approved Manning’s request that 120 drafted chemists be diverted to work on gas investigations. This accommodation must have cheered Manning, because his whole enterprise relied on legions of scientists who might otherwise end up as cannon fodder in France.