by Theo Emery
Four days into the drive, all of Company B regrouped on September 30 outside Véry. Higgie could see the mountaintop ruins of Montfaucon in the distance, a prized piece of elevated territory high above the town. For the moment, the men waited. Higgie was dispatched with a message for division headquarters in Épinonville. Orders came to move that night, about a mile north. He and Shap camped on the side of a hill, overlooking the valley outpost teeming with horses and men.
On the night of October 2, the Germans struck back. Higgie had just left the mess-hall line with a plate of food and was sitting on a hillside eating when a squadron of German bombers roared down the valley. The American encampment was full of men and horses, with a wooden road right down the middle, making for easy targets as the planes dropped their payloads. A storm of fire and explosions tore through the encampment, and bombs lit up the camp. One landed squarely on top of the kitchen that Higgie had just left, killing all the cooks and some horses. Men scattered everywhere, trying to escape the bombs, but there was nowhere to run or hide. Higgie hugged the ground, praying that no bombs would fall on him. As he looked up to the sky, a lone American plane banked and bucked overhead, chasing one of the German bombers to the ground. The air raid was the worst thing Higgie had been through so far.
A few miles to the west of Montfaucon, Jabine had crawled into a dugout near Charpentry to sleep. The battle had ripped apart the world around them as they waded through a stew of fire and rain and gas. Whole days had gone by without sleep. Over six days that were never fully light and nights that were never fully dark, the men had charged northward in pursuit of the Germans. For one night, at least, he could rest. Five other officers from Company C and a first lieutenant from the Medical Corps packed into the dugout with Jabine. Exhausted from the strain of battle, all seven men—Company C’s entire officer corps—had collapsed side by side in the bunker. Confident enough in the American gains, they fell deep asleep without wearing their masks.
As they slept, bombs began to fall. Jabine was likely asleep at 2:00 a.m. when the whistle of incoming artillery split the air overhead, or perhaps the sound jolted him awake. A gas shell landed in the dugout doorway, the fuse popped, and its payload exploded into the cramped confines of the bunker, enveloping Jabine and the other officers in a choking cloud of mustard gas. As earth and rocks showered around Jabine, none of the officers got their masks on in time. Within a few days, four of the men would be dead from the gas, but Jabine would survive to see the end of the war, severely gassed but alive.
The gas troops had done a fine job, General Fries concluded with satisfaction. After daylight broke and the dense fog lifted on the first day of the drive, he had motored up to the First, Third, and Fifth Corps headquarters near Verdun. From there, he went closer to the trenches that the Germans had abandoned that morning. In 1916, the Germans and the French had both suffered more than three hundred thousand casualties in the ten-month Battle of Verdun, a grinding, eviscerating tug-of-war over the blood-soaked land where Fries now stood. What a difference a day made. What had been no-man’s-land before daybreak was Allied territory by sunup, pocked with shell holes and strewn with the shattered remnants of the German defenses.
The chief could hear the crack and roar of the American artillery a few miles to the north, like a fast-moving thunderstorm rumbling into the distance. The fight was still going on—as he stood just behind the lines, he watched a burning observation balloon gutter to earth like a falling comet while the spotter parachuted to safety. The only Germans he saw were prisoners—a thousand of them, dispirited men drained of their will to fight. Fries couldn’t understand it; the Germans were barely fighting back. Either they didn’t have the strength to fight anymore, or they were retreating to regroup and counterattack. When they did fight, the Germans used very little gas. That made Fries suspicious. Perhaps they were running low and conserving what little they had left to spring a surprise after they retrenched and turned to face their pursuers. He would know soon enough. For now, the first day of the offensive had been a marvelous success. “We have had very few casualties today, but the Bosche may fight more tomorrow,” he wrote home.
Fries returned to First Army headquarters, then general headquarters the day after that. He had a fine night’s rest and spent part of a day straightening out problems at Hanlon Field. The dismal drenching rain that had fallen for days finally let up, and the weather turned cool and cloudy. He would return to the front again soon, though never close enough to be in any peril, he assured Bessie in his letters home. Every day, the papers carried more positive news—Bulgaria had had all the lead and shrapnel she could take. “Good,” Fries wrote home to Bessie. “The war looks better every day but I am not setting forward my peace date yet.”
The Americans were paying a heavy price in casualties, including in the First Gas Regiment. In the first two days of the drive, three enlisted men died in the fighting, and sixty-three were injured, most of them from gas. In the second week, there were seventy-two casualties, with one dead. The mustard shell that landed at the mouth of the Company C dugout where Tom Jabine had been sleeping had wiped out the company’s entire officer corps. “Severe casualties have been sustained by the Regiment during the progress of the present offensive. The majority of these have been caused by enemy gas shelling. ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies have suffered most… and ‘C’ Company in particular,” read the weekly regimental report for October 5. “While ‘C’ Company officers were at their headquarters, established in a dugout in the forward area, a large calibre mustard gas shell exploded at the entrance, all became casualties, and were evacuated.”
Fries had another problem. Some corps commanders were refusing to use the gas troops, fearing that deployed chemicals would wound or kill their own soldiers. And when corps commanders were assigned operations that involved gas platoons, they were sometimes resentful that their infantry units were coupled with the gas regiment. The biggest rupture came on the first day of the offensive, with Company F. Assigned to the Eightieth Division at Béthincourt, Company F was instructed to lay a smoke screen to cover the infantry assault and fire thermite shells in a counterattack. The after-action reports indicated they did all of these things and more, including rooting out machine-gun nests, rescuing wounded infantrymen, and taking prisoners.
Infantry commanders, though, reported their performance on the battlefield very differently. Four infantry officers complained bitterly to their commander that gas platoons from Company F didn’t follow instructions, failed to keep up with the infantry, or were absent altogether during the fighting. The regimental reports were so completely at odds with what the officers reported on the ground that one commanding general wondered if the official reports had been fabricated. In mid-October, the assistant chief of staff asked the commanding general of the Eightieth Division, Major General H. D. Sturgis, for his thoughts on the gas regiment. In turn, Sturgis sought comments from the infantry commanders who had gas detachments from Company F. But the men still had a war to fight. The inquiry had to wait.
On the night of the October 2 bombing raid over Montfaucon, Fries thrashed in bed, plagued with nightmares. He was hot and feverish, and sick with the flu once again, perhaps infected by one of his officers. The doctor ordered him to stay in bed. When he didn’t improve, the doctor suggested recuperation on the Mediterranean coast. The doctor recommended three weeks of rest, but Fries doubted that he could be gone for so long. He had another interallied gas conference on October 25 in Paris and he was sure that the war would grind on through winter.
He left for the French Riviera on October 12 in his purring eight-cylinder car. En route to the seashore, he kept careful watch over the progress in the war. “The Bosche still retires but burns as he goes,” he wrote home in a letter he posted from Combronde. “I suppose by the time I get back from this trip we can judge as to how near peace is.” The day after Fries departed for the Riviera, Germany offered to negotiate a peace agreement that would end the war. Two days later
President Wilson rejected the kaiser’s offer. There would be no peace terms. The war would only end when Germany surrendered unconditionally. There would be no pause in the fighting, no lull in weapons production, and no halt to gas warfare. The fighting would go on.
Inside the man-test chamber at American University, Carlos Isaac Reed sat at a table reading, shirtless, as an electric fan dispersed a plume of diluted mustard gas vapor through the chamber. He tried to relax and focus on the book he had brought with him. Faces peered at him through a glass window, watching him and a second shirtless soldier in the sealed-up box. Reed had been in the man-test house many times before, but never inside the gas chamber without a shirt or a gas mask.
It was October when the thirty-one-year-old physiologist stripped down to his waist inside the man-test house. He was surrounded by stationary bicycles and gas mask stations and a poster on the wall that read ARE YOU AMERICAN ENOUGH? PROVE IT! BUY U.S. LIBERTY BONDS. He left on his khaki pants and boots, but his chest, arms, and face would be an experimental canvas for the test he was about to undergo.
Reed was a handsome specimen, with hazel eyes, a dimple in his chin, and a head of kinky hair that earned him the nickname “Curly” at Ohio State University. Reed had been at American University since July. He received his commission in September, promoted to officer status along with many of the other scientists and chemists at the station.
The title of the test that day was the Minimum Concentration of Mustard Gas Effective for Man. Hundreds of dogs and other animals had died during tests of mustard, but even so late in the war, there had never been controlled tests for toxicological effects of mustard gas on men. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the smallest amount of mustard that would incapacitate a man and knock him off the battlefield. Reed was both in charge of the experiment and its subject. It’s unclear how he ended up as lab rat in his own test. Perhaps a superior officer like Eli Marshall, who headed the pharmacological division, ordered Reed to step into the chamber. Perhaps Reed volunteered out of a sense of patriotism and solidarity with other test subjects who were to follow in his steps. Perhaps he felt he had no choice.
The door closed and sealed behind Reed and the other soldier. The room was empty except for a table and chairs. The test began with the rush of air. An electric fan dispersed a weak mixture of dichloroethyl sulfide diluted with alcohol, just 0.0012 milligram per liter, a ratio of slightly less than 1 part mustard to 5 million parts air; a concentration of 0.008 milligram was deadly to animals after an eight-hour exposure. Through the chamber’s glass window, Reed’s audience would have been watching him closely. There was nothing to do but pace back and forth or sit at the table, reading, as mustard flooded the tiny room.
The minutes ticked by. Periodically, Reed checked the time and recorded his pulse and his breathing rate—normal so far. After three minutes, the mustard odor disappeared as the gas deadened Reed’s sense of smell. Five minutes later, the other soldier said he had lost his sense of smell as well. Reed began to feel irritation in his nostrils and nasal cavities. After another twelve minutes, Reed’s anxious companion asked to leave and was let out of the chamber. Reed stayed. After twenty-five minutes, his voice changed, sounding husky as if he were breathing in heavy dust. His eyelids felt heavy. He stayed another twenty minutes, then called it quits.
Once he was out of the chamber, the observation began. Hour after hour, doctors checked on Reed, recording his vitals and asking how he felt. A little more than five hours after he stepped out of the box, blindness began to set in. Light caused searing pain, and he lay in the dark with doctors hovering over him, increasingly indistinct and blurry until he could see nothing at all. Over the hours, his eyelids swelled shut and oozed liquid. Sleep was impossible, and for more than a day, he tossed in bed, nose burning and inflamed. By the end of the third day, his upper body began to itch intolerably, and his skin between his neck and waist turned bright red. An old scar from a previous chemical burn grew inflamed. Then, after seven days, the skin on his face and chest began to peel off.
The experiment was the first of its kind at American University, but it wasn’t the last. In a series of experiments that followed, at least twenty-two men were exposed to mustard in the same way, most of them with lesser concentrations than Reed. At the next meeting of the Medical Advisory Board, Reed’s report was one of nearly a dozen experiments that the doctors discussed. Another report presented after Reid’s was titled Individual Variation in Susceptibility to Mustard Gas V (The Susceptibility of Negroes). The two-page report documented skin tests on eighty-four black men at American University to determine whether the skin of black soldiers was more or less sensitive to mustard than white soldiers’. The Medical Division concluded that the skin of black soldiers was more resistant to mustard than that of white soldiers. As the doctors discussed the reports, one remarked how as a practical matter, it made sense for men who were less sensitive to mustard’s effects to work in jobs where exposure was expected. They went on to talk about the possibility of testing other racial groups as well, such as people from China or the Philippines.
The medical research, like the service’s technical work, had expanded far beyond its modest beginnings at Yale. Thousands of soldiers had their skin burned and blistered, wore gas masks for hours on end, put on gas-defense suits, boots, and gloves to test how well they protected from chemicals, and smeared protective pastes and salves on their skin before being exposed to chemicals. As with everything in the service, the medical research was shrouded in secrecy. Anyone connected to the medical research was forbidden from publishing or presenting their research at conferences. The doctors had even written to the army’s Military Intelligence Division asking for censorship of civilian medical papers related to chemical warfare. The Camp Leach surgeon, wondering why so many test subjects were arriving at his infirmary, wrote to the surgeon general asking if such experiments were authorized. The chief of the Medical Corps assured him that they were.
Now in fall of 1918, the doctors were preparing for a new kind of test. Yandell Henderson wanted large-scale man tests for the new “fighting mask” that the Gas Defense Plant in Long Island City was making. The clumsy start to the Research Division’s gas mask effort was a thing of the past; the service now had an effective and well-engineered model, a variation on the French Tissot make. The improved American version was lighter and fit far better than the clumsy and uncomfortable British respirator. Production had begun in August, and soon the Gas Defense Plant would be assembling tens of thousands of them each day for U.S. troops. In the tests Henderson envisioned, soldiers wearing the masks would run for miles to replicate the exertion of masked soldiers on the battlefield. Still another improved version of the Tissot was in the works, so comfortable that soldiers could wear them indefinitely, even in their sleep. The service planned to make a million per month.
But there was a problem—there wasn’t enough carbon for all the filters. The gas mask division had long ago found that the very best carbon for the canisters came from peach, plum, cherry, and olive pits, as well as from the shells of various nuts, such as walnuts, butternuts, and coconut shells. The army had a huge operation collecting shells from overseas, but getting the material to the United States was excruciatingly slow. Britain, meanwhile, had ordered fifty tons of carbon from the United States, then doubled the order to one hundred tons.
To meet the demand, the War Department needed a dependable source of shells and pits to make into carbon. Their solution was to mobilize civilians across the country to collect the materials for them. Since the war’s earliest days, millions of Americans had enthusiastically supported the war effort, from buying liberty bonds to sending care packages to soldiers. They suffered through heatless Mondays to conserve coal, and meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays to conserve food. But the nut and shell drive represented the first time the Chemical Warfare Service directly asked for help from the people of the United States.
Across the country, t
he army urged citizens to collect fruit pits and nutshells and deliver them to drop-off spots for the war effort. “Its meaning is that every man, woman and child can help our brave soldiers beat German poison gas. It means that fathers and mothers can help make their boys’ lives safe as they go over the top in a cloud of deadly gas to meet the Hun,” a publicity sheet read. Red Cross chapters would be the principal agents for collecting and delivering the shells and pits, with help from civic groups and the Boy Scouts. After barrels outside of grocery stores and fire stations and ice cream shops filled up, the day that the drive came to an end—Saturday, November 9—would be called Gas Mask Day.
The War Department printed thousands of public relations brochures and leaflets and deployed soldiers to make presentations at public meetings, movie theaters, and high schools, toting gas masks for demonstrations. Fact sheets were printed up with talking points, such as the fact that the army needed five hundred tons of shells daily, that two hundred peach pits created enough carbon for a single gas mask, and that the Gas Defense Plant had gone from thirty civilian employees in December 1917 to nearly ten thousand in September of 1918.
Over the weeks that followed the War Department appeal, articles appeared across the country, from tiny town gazettes to broadsheets in major cities. There was a ripple effect of secondary publicity, as local officials and county commissioners sent out circulars to school students and teachers, and local businesses bought ads in the papers, too. “Will you help?” the D. M. Read Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, asked its customers. “Clean stones nicely and bring them to the store. They will be forwarded to the Chemical Warfare Service, U.S.A.”
The collected shells and nuts would be shipped to New York for processing at the Gas Defense Plant. From there, the carbon would be sent to England or packed into respirator canisters and assembled into masks for American soldiers. “Let pleasure or business stop just long enough to do this important service,” an army-written publicity article implored. “Gas Mask Day—what will be the results? It is a challenge. The savagery of the Hun is brought to every American door. How will it be met?”