by Theo Emery
At the end of March, Companies A and B of the Hellfire Battalion were supposed to peel off from the British gas companies to operate independently in the American sector. But on March 21, the same day Higgie set off his first projector show, the Germans had launched a ferocious new drive to punch through the British lines. The first phase had been to Higgie’s south, an attack code-named Operation Michael. A second phase, Operation Mars, followed at Arras. Now the third phase, Georgette, was beginning in early April. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers streamed back from the Middle East, Palestine, and other far-flung fronts to bolster the troops. As part of the surge in troops to halt the German advance, the scattered platoons of Companies A and B were ordered to stay with the British First Army, move up, and assist with a cloud gas attack in the Lys Valley along a five-mile line stretching north from Lens to Bessée. Their work with the British continued, in one of the hottest sections of the front.
As he and Shap struggled with the heavy tank, Higginbottom fumbled for footing on the duckboard deep in the muck. His boots skidded off the waterlogged boards or punched through rotten ones, sinking him up to his knees in the mud. As they reached no-man’s-land, gas shells whistled overhead, and Higginbottom and Shap squeezed into a dugout. When the barrage finally quieted, they began to move again. An old trench jutted into no-man’s-land. The water there was even deeper. The cursing from the Americans was so loud that the Germans must have heard them a mile away, but they didn’t care. With every tentative step he took in tandem with Shap, the cylinder swaying on the pole, Higginbottom was sure he would drop the tank into the mud. For the first time, he wondered if he would make it out alive.
Hour after hour, the supply line snaked through the trench, slowly bringing cylinders up to no-man’s-land. With Very lights blazing overhead, the gas companies sank their shovels into the soil, burying the cylinders that would send clouds of gas toward the Germans.
Toward daybreak, Higgie pulled back, returning through the trenches for a ride to the ammunition depot. From there, he hiked to his billet in a French family’s house. He shucked off his mud-caked clothes, laid them out to dry, then tramped through the kitchen and up the stairs, where he collapsed on his bed. It had been his worst twelve hours so far in the war.
He slept all day, then came downstairs for the dinner that the family made for him. Before he could go back to sleep, orders came for Higgie’s platoon to slap their uniforms back on and return to the front on the supply train.
The train had just begun moving when a German shell came over and exploded close by. Gas shells followed, one after another. Higgie and his platoon leaped from the train bed and sprinted for cover across a field. In his hurry, barbed wire snagged his clothes. Bombs exploded all around him as he struggled to disentangle himself. For a few moments, he was sure he would die right there, ensnared in wire, but he tore himself free and dove into the trench.
For hours, Higgie’s platoon huddled in the trench in their gas masks, peering out through the glass eyeholes as gas wafted around them. One of the men had been badly gassed when he took cover in a crater where a gas shell had just broken, and when the shelling finally eased up at 10:00 p.m., Higginbottom and the others carried him back to a dressing station. After they left him, the men got lost on their way back toward their billets behind the lines, blundering in the darkness through the blasted outskirts of Lens. About midnight, Higgie finally reached the French homestead where he was billeted. The family gave him a cup of tea before he went up to bed.
In the morning, he went to the hospital for treatment. Higginbottom, too, had gotten a dose of gas before he had gotten his mask on, but he was lucky—seven members of his platoon were in the hospital that morning. He was told to rest for the remainder of the day.
Georgette began in earnest that day. Wave after wave of shells fell in a rolling cannonade that shook the ground. The ferocious noise went on and on—some eighty thousand shells in all, most filled with mustard, showering the Lens sector. Gas was everywhere, forcing the Americans at the front to wear their masks twelve to fifteen hours a day. Ambulances careened back and forth to pick up fresh casualties. Refugees swarmed the woods and took to the roads, fleeing in straggling columns.
In the evening, Higginbottom and his platoon set out for the front once again. The rain was still falling, and an impenetrable mist swaddled the trenches as they sloshed their way forward with gas cylinders.
When they reached the end of the trench, Higgie went over the top to deliver the tank into the batteries in the wide-open wasteland beyond, following a sunken road out into no-man’s-land. The phosphorescent streaks of Very lights illuminated the blasted moonscape around him. When the flares burst over his head, he froze, stock-still in the fog, until the light faded and he could keep going through the mud. On his way back toward his billet, the fog was so thick that he kept one foot on the supply-train track to avoid getting lost in the dank soup around him. He reached the depot at 4:00 a.m. When daylight finally arrived, the rising sun scarcely pierced the shroud of mist and gas that hung over the valley. Mustard shells fell everywhere. In all, the Americans suffered nearly nine hundred casualties in a single night. More than fifty men of Company A had been injured or gassed, and two men died, the company’s first deaths. Company B—Higgie’s outfit—had fourteen casualties, and his entire platoon was put on the sick list and told to rest. But Higgie had made it through alive.
As the battle raged across the British sector, Fries held court in the officers’ mess hall in the AEF’s new headquarters in Chaumont. It was April 3, and a half-dozen officers from the gas service gathered around the chief. Addison was among them, and so was Atkisson, listening closely to his genial commander, with his mop of curly black hair and healthy ego. Addison had never met Fries, but the chaplain took an immediate liking to the colonel.
As the meal went on, the conversation turned to the fighting up north. Atkisson and Fries felt that the Germans and the British were probably suffering equal numbers of casualties. One American unit had been hit badly, with hundreds of men gassed. The losses were the result of poor leadership from higher officers, Fries and Atkisson agreed.
The battle was far from over as the Germans flung themselves against the Allied defenses and drenched the front with mustard shell barrages. By the time the officers gathered over dinner, it had become clear that the German push had stalled. The greatest danger had passed, and the offensive had been contained. Paris was safe.
Yet while the lines had held, the Germans had used more gas than the Allies had ever seen, and the mustard-packed yellow-cross shells had taken their toll. Casualty numbers were rising quickly—the 88 gas casualties in the American Expeditionary Forces in February increased sixfold to 535 in March, and then to more than 600 in April. Those numbers would soon explode into the tens of thousands. The mustard shell barrages that showered Lens were a sign that gas was no longer an intermittent, occasional threat, as it had been through 1917. It had become a permanent feature of the front, as constant as the mud churned beneath the soldiers’ boots and the trenches in which they fought and died.
While the Hellfire Boys waded through mud in the Lys Valley, Addison was receiving his own induction into gas warfare, albeit far behind the lines. After he returned to Humes from Chaumont, he joined the battalion for a nighttime march. Partway through the hike, the men stopped to practice putting on their gas masks in the dark. The next day he listened to a lecture about gas defense from a British officer who brought bottled gas samples and demonstrated the strombo horns and signals that warned of gas. The following day, Addison attended a long lecture on gas warfare, the various chemicals and their gruesome effects, which gave him more enthusiasm for his gas mask. “It was a long tale—a compound of science and horror, giving one a lively respect for the toxic effects of Teutonic gases,” he wrote in his journal. Amid the gloom, he received a glimmer of good news from home. A letter from his wife, Margaret, had arrived with tidings he had long hoped to hear: she was
pregnant.
A few days after Fries, Atkisson, and Addison dined together with the other officers, Atkisson returned to the mess hall to join the chaplain after dinner. Atkisson had spent a day driving with Fries to gas training schools and ammunition depots. The two men got along well, and they had something in common beyond chemical warfare: both were high-level Masons. In the mess hall, Atkisson spoke admiringly, almost reverently, of Fries and the gas service. Fries had been “magnificently on the job under discouraging conditions since early fall,” Atkisson said. While it was only a modest regiment now, Fries was angling for a vast expansion. Soon it would have five thousand men in six battalions, Atkisson said. It would be a powerhouse.
Atkisson grew circumspect. A grim future lay ahead for the gas regiments, he told the officers. All the old rules of combat, the chivalric codes that had defined warfare, were a thing of the past. The future of warfare would be a fight to the death, combat a l’outrance. The regiment’s goal would be simply to kill as many Germans with gas as soon and as often as possible. “Some new method to defeat them must be found—gas or the air, or a combination, or something wholly new,” Atkisson mused.
After leaving Chaumont and the gas regiment, Fries had gone to the Hotel Continental in Paris just before midnight on April 6, the anniversary of the U.S. war declaration. Germany’s Paris guns had shelled the city while he was there, but he assured Bessie that he was in no danger. Fries was in Paris to visit a general who was laid up in the hotel with a bump on the head, but the trip also allowed the colonel a bit of rest. Fries gave the impression of being inexhaustible, a perpetual-motion machine of energy and activity. In truth, he felt the strain of his responsibilities. He couldn’t shake a stubborn cold and cough, despite his regimen of daily exercise. The dank weather at Chaumont hadn’t helped, nor did his grueling travel schedule. The breakneck pace barely afforded the colonel a moment’s pause. Finally, in Paris he could rest. When he got to his room, he drew a bath, took a long soak, and afterward went straight to bed.
He was in Paris only for a day or two before motoring back to his new headquarters in Tours. Since the beginning of the German drive, Fries had fretted about the raging battle, unsure of whether the attack could be repelled. Even close to the front, details were scant, and he watched with trepidation, scanning the headlines when the newspapers arrived each day at noon. He wondered just how the Germans hoped to break through. “Certainly they know the British expected them. The slaughter must be frightful,” he mused. Amid the dread, a note of fatalism crept into Fries’s words. “And the sun shines as brightly, the flowers bloom as prettily, and the sowing and the reaping, loving and weeping go on much the same as ever even here almost in the shadow of the terrible holocaust,” he wrote home.
As the days went by and the British succeeded in stopping the German advance, Fries’s doubt fell away. He was more confident than ever about the gas service as well. Just before arriving in Paris, Fries had submitted his plan for reorganizing the gas service. Soon General Pershing would review it. “It promises to go through. In fact it must,” Fries wrote to Bessie.
As he wrangled with such logistics, Fries anticipated a not-so-distant future in which smoke screens, gas, and thermite attacks would be a prelude to every assault. A future in which fleets of airplanes would drop payloads of chemical and smoke bombs over enemy territory. He was convinced that gas warfare would become more of a decisive factor in the war. He hoped there would be twelve or more chemical companies producing gas for the 2 million American soldiers overseas, triple how many were working at the moment. He estimated that the United States would need to produce fifty-five hundred tons of gas per month after July 1, and that half of all shells should be filled with gas. The gas and flame regiment alone would need one thousand tons of gas per month in 1919, if the war continued.
For all of these things to come to pass, to have a chemical warfare capacity unfettered by some other army department, Fries firmly believed the gas service needed to stand on its own, as an independent department of the army that relied on no other. On May 1, Fries submitted to Pershing his most forceful argument for the creation of what he called a Gas Corps, on a par with more established sections of the military like the Corps of Engineers. Though he met regularly with the general, he made his case into a kind of dossier, with a proposal for the organization, a draft general order to create it, and a memorandum with his arguments. “Because of its vast resources, America can not only make much more gas than any of its allies, but it can make enormously more than Germany. If placed in a position to do so effectively, the Gas Service will be able to have produced, and used, enough chemicals to gas thoroughly all the Germans facing American sectors,” he wrote.
The domestic gas service was reorganizing, too, and cabled Fries to send by courier his plans for the AEF’s service. Fries was skeptical about the domestic service and its ability to get done what he felt was necessary. The technical men in Washington were too far from the action, and the ocean that lay between them and the army in Europe was more than just an inconvenience: it was an impediment to progress. In Fries’s view, the U.S. Gas Service was like a crippled ship, “with no man at the steering wheel and a broken rudder.” Nor did it help that the chemists in Washington seemed to believe that the AEF Gas Service worked for them, rather than the other way around. His harsh views of Potter softened considerably after the former gas chief wrote to Fries to lament over how bureaucracy and disorganization had hamstrung the domestic Office of the Gas Service.
With Pershing’s blessing, Fries’s remedy to the distance and divide had been to build the experimental field near Chaumont, as well as the laboratory that he had been pressing for since fall. The location he had found was in a former state tuberculosis hospital in Puteaux, a commune about five miles west of central Paris. Assuming no spare lab equipment was available in France, the scientists had ordered all of it from the United States: twelve hundred shipping crates containing 110 tons of chemistry paraphernalia. Much of it went astray en route, and only about eighty cases had arrived by mid-May. What happened to the rest was an enigma that sparked frantic requests for the misplaced equipment to be tracked down. Eventually, it began arriving at the laboratory around June 1. When it was up and running, the laboratory usually had about a dozen officers and between fifty and sixty enlisted noncommissioned officers and privates, all chosen for their scientific prowess. They analyzed German gas, smoke, and explosive shells sent from the front and conducted their own research into gas masks. Beginning in the spring and continuing into summer, the lab developed a protective salve, sag paste, smeared on the skin to protect it against mustard, which Fries believed would save hundreds of lives. He felt that the AEF’s lab was getting things done “faster than they ever dreamed of doing them in the States. Such things can’t be done there for they don’t get the touch of the front so necessary to a quick understanding of the problems.”
No matter how well the laboratory in Puteaux worked, there were some things Fries could never do in France. One of them was synthesizing new chemical weapons. With the exception of the phosgene plant in Gièvres, making war gases in France simply wasn’t practical, due to the cost of shipping huge amounts of precursor chemicals. Back in the United States, work on producing war gases was in full swing. More than 900 people entered the American University gates each day now—about 400 civilian employees and almost 500 military men. Another 160 or so were at work at another eighteen locations under the oversight of the Bureau of Mines.
At Gunpowder Neck, a building frenzy began over the winter, plagued by the storms that paralyzed the region. Temporary barracks went up, with tar paper on the outside and composition-board walls inside. Later ones were permanent, with tile walls and showers. Pumps drew water for the filling plants from the Bush River, and potable water was piped from Winter’s Run, a river four miles away. Accidents and injuries were a certainty in the plants, and so a temporary hospital went up, with plans to build three permanent base hospitals la
ter. A twenty-thousand-kilowatt electrical plant powered the factories. The men would need distractions from the dangerous work, and so the YMCA and the Knights of Columbus both built recreation huts with libraries and movie screens. Football teams and a camp band were organized. There was a bakery and a laundry and a shower house.
On April 2, the army’s General Administration Bureau had appointed William H. Walker, now a lieutenant colonel with the Army Ordnance Department, to command Gunpowder Neck Reservation, which was renamed Edgewood Arsenal in May. Edgewood turned into a boomtown of chemical weapons production. At first, the Ordnance Department had planned to erect only phosgene and chloropicrin plants at Gunpowder Neck but in time decided to make mustard there as well. Construction on the shell-filling plant, which had begun in the fall, was finished at the end of January, ready to begin packing shells full of war gases. Filling Plant 1 was an enormous facility, with four long, low buildings radiating out from a central power plant. Each one of the four filling buildings had its own gas-handling-and-mixing room, washing towers, and carefully spaced fans to keep the air moving through the building and prevent the accumulation of gas. Each building could operate independently should accidents or leaks shut down other buildings. Construction on the chloropicrin factory had begun in January, and work commenced on the phosgene factory a week later. Walker commanded dozens of engineers at the arsenal, and his jurisdiction went far beyond Gunpowder Neck: chemical-manufacturing plants in Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia would all be under his command as well.