From Ypres to Syria: why poison gas haunts us still

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/24/ypres-syria-poison-gas-still-haunts-us

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There are two aspects of life in Britain, in the spring of 2015, that a visitor from the Britain of 1915 might find familiar. The first, and most innocuous, is the fashion for full beards, which has left parts of east London resembling a vast, open-air, George V-lookalike competition. The second parallel is that among the fears that stalk our nightmares is the terror of chemical weapons, despite those facing the threat being thousands of miles away.

Only last week, civilians in Syria were being offered advice on how to survive chlorine gas attacks. Those countermeasures – stay on higher ground and breathe through a cloth dampened with water or, better still, urine – are the same rudimentary instructions issued to British, Indian, Canadian, French and French African troops who, without gas masks, held the trenches around Ypres a century ago. They did so at a terrible cost.

Our fear of gas comes from a dark place in our psychological make-up. This was already the case in the First World War. The tank was the new monster of the battlefield, hi-tech and other-worldly. The submarine killed silently and covertly; it tapped into a deep, cultural paranoia about the shipwreck, a fear that occupied the equivalent place in the Edwardian imagination that the air crash does in our modern psyche. But gas was different.

Poison gas plays on our atavistic sense of disgust, contamination and pestilence; it triggers reflex responses that are hard-wired and subconscious. As a poison, it is also loaded with cultural baggage. From the sagas of the ancient Greeks to the Victorian penny dreadfuls, poison was the weapon of the assassin, the hysterical lover (almost always female) and the regicidal. It reeks of betrayal and cowardice. My suspicion is that poison gas works as a terror weapon, in part, because its effects are imaginable.

We can see ourselves as the victim of gas in Wilfred Owen’s famous poem, the man spluttering and drowning in a sea of green mist. As most of us have, thankfully, never been anywhere near an explosion, death by artillery – although far more common in the France of 1915 and in the Isis war zones of today – is less tangible, less accessible to our imaginations.

Yet gas has never been a big killer, let alone a war-winning weapon. Poison gas was responsible for only around 2% of the millions of casualties of the First World War. This, in part, was because its effects were so quickly countered by the rapid development of the gas mask.

The real power of gas was as much psychological as military. Chlorine and other chemical agents have the capacity to induce terror, making them a perfect fit for Isis, a movement seemingly dedicated to stressing the “terror” within “terrorism”.

If the strategy behind the regular carnivals of horror with which Isis regularly floods the internet is to provoke a western reaction, ideally a military one in the Middle East, then their adoption of the same chemical weapon that shocked the world a century ago is a masterstroke.

What experts such as Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon fear is not that Isis will stumble upon the key to deploying gas on the battlefield that eluded all sides in the First World War. The nightmare scenario is not a repeat of the Second Battle of Ypres, but a repeat of a more recent calamity – the attack 20 years ago on the Tokyo subway, in which the Aum Shinrikyo cult released the nerve agent sarin, killing 12 and injuring more than 1,000 commuters.

De Bretton-Gordon has warned that there is evidence that some of the foreign fighters among Isis’s ranks are being trained in the use of chlorine gas in preparation for possible attacks against British targets upon their return.

When we embarked last year upon this four-year period of remembrance for the war of 1914-18, the return of the conflict’s most crude and reviled weapon was something few people envisaged.

David Olusoga is the author of The World’s War