by Theo Emery
At the same time that Lewis left the hill, the next company of Hellfire Boys had also decamped. The recruitment call for the gas and flame regiment had brought more enthusiastic volunteers than Companies A and B could accommodate, so the engineers organized Company C in early December of 1917, then Company D a short time later, moving the new battalion across the Potomac River to Fort Myer in Virginia.
When Companies A and B marched from Washington on Christmas Day, their ranks included farriers and cooks, buglers and saddlers, but no chaplain. That changed on January 19 when James Thayer Addison walked into Colonel Atkisson’s office at the regimental headquarters. Tall and slim with gray eyes, the Harvard graduate had married just before Christmas, taken his chaplaincy exam on January 4, and a few days later received his commission, with orders to report to Fort Myer. “At last, my real war job!” Addison wrote in his journal.
Affable and good-natured, the thirty-year-old chaplain knew nothing about gas warfare, or about military chaplaincy, for that matter. What he knew, he gleaned from books he read late at night after he retired to his barracks. Colonel Atkisson told Addison he was pleased to have him—the regiment needed a chaplain who could establish himself as a friend of the soldiers.
That night, an officer brought Addison up in front of the soldiers at a raucous gathering at the fort YMCA. “I am proud to belong to a regiment that’s going to have such a lively future!” Addison said, and the men roared with applause. It was a warm welcome, but when he retired to his freezing barracks, he felt like a nervous schoolboy. “Oh, it’s wonderful to be in uniform as an officer and soon to be in the thick of the greatest war in history!” he wrote in his diary.
Addison’s ardor for camp life quickly cooled. Storms buffeted the camp, depositing ever-growing snowdrifts outside the barracks. Target practice was impossible. Motorcycles wouldn’t start; trucks got stuck in the snow. Addison noted the foul weather absentmindedly, but he had other things to think about. His bride, Margaret, took up residency in one of Washington’s downtown hotels. Almost daily, he taxied to see her, staying overnight in the hope of starting a family. On nights when he did sleep at the camp, he was sometimes the only person in the officers’ quarters.
On one of his return trips from Washington, he picked up a moving-picture reel about gas attacks. A few days later, the regiment officers and soldiers crowded into the YMCA to watch the film of a staged gas attack at American University. The New 30th Engineers in Action, the newsreel was called. In the darkened room, the men watched the soldiers in their gas masks with rapt interest. There was a speech afterward, but Addison didn’t stay to hear it. Instead, he hurried back to Washington to see Margaret. His time was running out. He would be leaving soon, and he might never see her again.
Chapter Nine
“A Constant Menace”
Winter barreled into Washington with bone-rattling cold. Day after day, snow fell with gloomy predictability, and drifts grew across the city. A storm on January 28 shut down trolleys, snarled traffic, and delayed freight. Another foot of snow brought the city to a standstill again two days later. Public schools ran out of coal, children stayed home, and the district ordered “heatless Mondays” to conserve fuel.
At American University, the cold seeped in through the drafty windows and between the planks of the shacks peppering the campus. The rushed renovation of McKinley Hall had created subpar working conditions for the chemists; now they had the cold to contend with, too, and drafts guttered in the fume hoods. The most detested winter duties on the hill were assignments in the unheated sheds around McKinley Hall.
Like the rest of Washington, the campus ran short on coal. Three train cars loaded with 140 tons arrived to replenish the supply. As the shipment awaited trucks to off-load the fuel, word spread through nearby neighborhoods about the arrival of the train. Hundreds of desperate residents, women and children among them, showed up with buckets and bags, pleading to buy the coal. Some began to swarm the train cars to grab what they could. Soldiers arrived with rifles to hold back the crowd with bayonets. People in the crowd begged the soldiers to allow them to take some fuel. The pained soldiers remained stoic as the loaded trucks rumbled away to the campus. The winter seemed never to end. On February 4, another nighttime gale hammered the city, flipping planes at an airfield, cutting off train service, and freezing the Potomac River.
In February, the temperature soared, turning midwinter into spring. The frozen Potomac began to break up, releasing an ice jam that hurtled downstream, grinding up tugboats and jetties and flooding Georgetown. On the morning of February 16, Private James Smith crouched in front of an outdoor brick furnace on the north side of the campus, within sight of the barracks at Camp American University. Another private named Markle Hurtt was at his side, overseeing the experiment. Hurtt watched as Smith poured ground arsenic from a can into a galvanized pail. After he emptied the can, he reached for a second, then a third. When all three were empty, the pail contained twenty-one pounds of pulverized arsenic. Next, Smith poured in magnesium and stirred the compound with a stick.
Hurtt showed Smith how to put in the blasting fuse. It was a slow-burning fuse, which would give the men almost a minute to retreat to a safe distance down the wooden boardwalk nearby. Smith pushed the fuse into the mix of arsenic and magnesium, then slid a lid on the pail and weighted it with bricks. Smith struck a match and lit the fuse. Hurtt retreated down the boardwalk as Smith hefted the pail inside the furnace and slammed shut the cast-iron door.
The two privates were waiting for the reaction when two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, strode down the boardwalk. Private Hurtt warned them of the experiment in progress. This was at least the fifth time the experiment had been conducted. Every time the slow-smoldering fuse reached the powder mix in the bucket, it was the same result: a flash, a puff, and a cloud of granulated arsenic. It would only be a few seconds, Hurtt assured them. Best to wait. The four stood on the boardwalk, waiting for the puff of smoke.
Instead, the mixture exploded with a roar. The detonation flung off the iron cover and blasted the furnace into pieces, turning the bricks into missiles that flew in every direction, shattering windows of nearby buildings. A curtain of heat and flame roared from the furnace, searing Hurtt and Smith, and flying projectiles shredded the skin of the lieutenant and the captain. Bleeding and singed, ears ringing, the stunned men looked back at the experiment site. Nothing remained of the furnace except a circle of brick and arsenic-coated debris scattered in a wide radius.
Men came running to see what had happened. Soldiers chained a dog downwind of the blast site as a barometer for airborne toxins and sprinkled a caustic solution on the ground to neutralize the spattered arsenic. The force of the explosion had tossed a fifty-pound chunk of bricks at least thirty feet from the blast site, and more debris landed one hundred feet away. The whole area was shut down and nearby buildings evacuated, and the injured men were helped to the College of History building for first aid, and two of the men were sent to Walter Reed Hospital. While nobody died in the accident—it was never determined whether it was caused by bad luck or bad chemicals—it was a reminder of the violent power of the substances that the chemists worked with. Explosions, chemical burns, and accidental gassings were common at the station. The campus safety engineer concluded that “steps should be taken immediately to secure a much larger tract of land for experimental purposes.”
It wasn’t just the scientists who were vulnerable to accidents and miscalculations; the Corps of Engineers also complained about the chemists’ dangerous experiments. The engineers drilled on the campus quad uncomfortably close to where the chemists occasionally fired off mortars. On March 16, Lieutenant Colonel Earl Marks was standing with a group of soldiers near the YMCA when a large piece of wood landed with a thud about ten feet away. Moments later, an iron shell casing tumbled to the ground nearby as well. As Marks watched, other fragments of debris rained down on the parade ground from hundreds of feet in the air. Marks was livid.
He had heard about such carelessness, including unexploded shells landing near the engineers’ cantonments, but hadn’t seen it himself. He fired off an irate note to Lauson Stone, the experiment station superintendent, demanding that the chemists use greater care.
Stone wrote a contrite response a few days later. He had taken up the matter with the Research Division, and there was agreement that a new and larger proving ground was needed, farther from the activities of the engineers. “The location of such grounds, and obtaining the necessary privilege thereof will take some time, but as soon as it can be effected, this character of the work will be removed to a position where it will not be dangerous to your camp or the men therein,” he wrote.
Manning, neat as a pin and fussy by nature, had already taken note of how the state of the experiment station had deteriorated. There were no paved roads around the buildings, just bare ground churned into yellowish mud or frozen into ruts. Dogs maimed in experiments limped through the campus, sometimes in a pathetic state from the injuries sustained from exposure to gas. Corpses of dogs killed in the trials rotted in buckets. The stench from the animal cages was overpowering. Gas clouds huffed from the open-air stills and sheds that the chemists erected helter-skelter around the campus. Sometimes the stench of gas wafted all the way into the city’s neighborhoods, earning the campus the new nickname “Skunk Hill.”
A few days after the debris rained down near the engineers, a sanitary inspector came through the experiment station. As he strolled through the campus, he jotted down what he saw: water-filled bottles, barrels, jars, and tin cans strewn on the ground—potential breeding grounds for mosquitoes when the weather warmed. He noted an enormous refuse pile of ashes, paper, scraps, and lumber. There were feces scattered around the grounds, and with the weather finally warming, flies swarmed around dog carcasses left in the sun. Flies also swarmed around empty animal crates smeared with excrement, and pools of standing water stagnated in pits and sewer trenches. “There is, apparently, no attempt to police the area and its appearance is unsightly as well as unsanitary,” he wrote.
Marks forwarded the report to Brigadier General Frederic Abbot, pointing out that the unsanitary conditions of the experiment station “are not new and have existed for some time.” The mess was tolerable in winter, he wrote, but as warm weather arrived, “it will prove a constant menace to the health of the men of this camp.”
Abbot fired off a short note to Manning. “The within letters show that something has got to be done to improve conditions at American University.” Manning’s reply was prompt and courteous, indicating that he was aware of the dismal state of the experiment station and promising to do whatever was necessary to remove cause for complaint.
The sanitary and safety issues further deepened the antagonism between the Bureau of Mines and the army. Calls from within the War Department to militarize the civilian-led research arm had gained strength in the fall, and still more over the winter. In January, as organizational problems mounted, the army sacked Charles Potter as director of the Office of the Gas Service. Manning managed to stave off the military men, however, and the hill remained his fiefdom.
The Research Division also grappled with the problem of security as new enlisted men appeared every day. On March 1, there were 743 men working on chemical weapons research. By mid-May, there would be 1,125, of whom 554 were civilian chemists, 114 were commissioned officers, and 487 enlisted men. On April 3, Military Intelligence Division chief Ralph Van Deman alerted the camp’s intelligence officer about a report he had received that the chemists working on the hill were not being discreet about their work and were still talking very freely “on the subject of certain poisons thought to be under consideration there.”
This was not a new concern. Despite crackdowns on dissent and laws aimed at spies and domestic adversaries, a constant undercurrent of anxiety over infiltration and espionage crackled through Washington. The Military Intelligence Division carried out periodic security inspections on the hill, and coincidentally an intelligence officer had even been on the campus the day of the February 16 explosion, investigating a soldier who had written a suspicious letter. But the Research Division had a new and unexpected demand for security. A new chemist was coming to the hill. This was no graduate student who had puttered through lab experiments or graying academic moved to join the war effort. This chemist arrived in Washington under armed guard. The German spy Walter T. Scheele had been captured in Cuba, and he was coming to work for the gas service.
On Thursday, April 4, the sky over Washington was clear and cool. Two days before the anniversary of Congress’s war declaration, the German army was poised at Amiens for a massive offensive, and the War Department wanted 150,000 draftees inducted in April—three times the usual monthly quota.
The Senate was debating a bill introduced by President Wilson seeking harsher penalties for German spies under the Espionage Act. State governors meeting in Washington had demanded summary execution of German agents, accusing the federal government of leniency with traitors.
In Van Manning’s office in the Bureau of Mines, George Burrell awaited agents from the Bureau of Investigation. He had invited a few of his technical men to be there as well: George Richter, Wilder Bancroft, and Elmer Kohler. They were joined by a glowering twenty-seven-year-old chemist named Bruce R. Silver, who worked for the inventor Thomas Edison, and Richmond M. Levering, the Indiana oilman. If Burrell had a touch of nerves, pacing Manning’s office or glancing out the window, it would have been understandable.
Just after lunchtime, two special agents with the Bureau of Investigation finally arrived at Manning’s office. They hustled a third man into the office with them. Walter Scheele was easily recognizable from the long scar crossing his right cheek and more scars webbing the left side of his face. Vigilante mobs were threatening anyone suspected of disloyalty to the United States, and the agents had to usher Scheele secretly into Manning’s office. Abandoned by his country and facing execution, he had offered up everything he knew about German chemical weapons in exchange for his life.
After he had fled Hoboken in 1916 steps ahead of the authorities, Scheele had assumed the identity of a journalist, using the name William Rheinfelder, to escape by boat to Cuba. He disembarked in Havana and, knowing no Spanish, made his way to the German embassy. The embassy secretary ordered him to go to a hotel, and the next day, after sleeping overnight in a train station, he went to the secretary’s home, where another man arrived in a car to take Scheele away. This man, Juan de Pozas, was an agent for a German supply company, a smuggler, and a gunrunner. He brought Scheele to his house outside Havana, where he introduced him to his family and gave him an airy guest room. De Pozas politely but firmly instructed Scheele never to leave the room except for meals.
Living in seclusion in his gilded prison, Scheele felt his former life fade away, and his existence submerged into the shadowy underworld of the island. His name changed again: he became James G. Williams, American expatriate. He spent almost every waking moment in his room, sleeping in a bed draped with a mosquito netting, crossing the tiled floor to a balcony where he could stare out the window at the gardens, forbidden from even going down to the courtyard. A checkered tablecloth covered a small table where he sat and wrote home to his wife, Marie, in America, sending the letters to friends and sympathizers in the United States who delivered them to Marie. His paycheck from the German government arrived every month, but he had nothing to spend his money on, so he sent most of his pay back to his wife and some to de Pozas. When Scheele corresponded with Marie, he signed his name “Nux” or “Fritz.”
Not long after he arrived, Scheele fell ill with food poisoning so severe that at one point he lapsed into a coma. He spent several months convalescing, then fell sick again, this time with a tropical fever. After Scheele was nursed back to health, de Pozas grudgingly allowed him to go outside into the garden. He became a sort of groundskeeper, tending the plants, painting murals, and overseeing maintenance around t
he mansion. He tried to stay abreast of current events as the United States entered the war. Not long after, Scheele’s host country declared war on Germany as well. Spies or not, Germans were no longer welcome in Cuba.
In February of 1918, a police captain arrived at the gate of de Pozas’s house and asked to speak with de Pozas’s mysterious guest. The captain asked Scheele questions. Why did he spend all his time inside? Did he speak multiple languages? In his thick German accent, Scheele answered as best he could.
The police captain asked de Pozas to come to the station and sign a statement attesting to his guest’s good character as a foreigner. The next morning, de Pozas ordered Scheele to leave. Most likely the smuggler had tired of his houseguest and his open-ended stay; he was probably panicked over the attention from police. De Pozas had worries of his own over his wartime activities for Germany, which included smuggling gold and supplying dynamite to blow up a German ship interned in Havana to keep it out of U.S. hands. Now that word was out that his guest was not an American living a leisurely expatriate life, Scheele was a liability and a danger.