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Hold Your Breath |
On 31 January 1915 Germany debuted a new weapon on the stalemated Western Front of World War I, noted in a previous Op-Ed to have ended in immobile stalemate some months earlier after a decisive failure of both the allied and central powers in the so-called "Race to the Sea" phase of the fronts opening. The weaponry debuted was illegal under the Hague Convention of 1899, but would none the less become one of the iconic elements of the Western Front of World War I: Chemical Agents. Despite two previous uses of chemical shells by the belligerents in 1914, the 31 January 1915 attack by German forces would officially inaugurate both the escalation of the chemical warfare campaign by using a mass attack of chemical weaponry, and an arms race by both sides to develop and introduce more lethal gas agents to use en mass against enemy forces arrayed on the Western Front.
The use of chemical weaponry against enemy forces was not a new concept in warfare at the time, as far back as ancient times historical records have attested to the use of chemical weaponry such as arsenic being employed by the armed forces in combat actions to gain the upper hand. The same can also be said of biological weaponry, the use of which goes back to ancient times and has taken on many different forms such as the use of corpses known to have died from infectious diseases against an enemy force. What made the chemical warfare attack of 31 January 1915 unique was the military industrial complex behind it; for the first time in modern history, industry and arms had fused to create a machine that could produce as much of the chemicals either of the two sides wished to employ in far less time that would have been possible up till that time.
The use of chemical warfare had been discussed by representatives from various nations who had gathered in together in both 1899 and 1907 in order to compile an internationally agreed upon set of rules and guidelines for nations at war with other nations. These so called rules of war are perhaps best represented in our time by the phrase "Geneva Convention", which are actually a series of four conventions that lay out the modern rules and regulations for nations involved in armed conflict - perhaps most notably, these conventions establish the importance and legal protection for so called "non-combatant". In the period before World War I, however, such rules and laws were highly uncommon, and the agreements made at the the 1899 and 1907 conference were violated at various times by various nations for various reasons that made sense to both military and political leaders at the time, the latter of which factored politics into the war as the age of European Imperialism was still in full force and effect. No doubt the various leaders of the nations at war with one another were looking to extend by treaty and by occupation the amount of land on the earth that flew the flag of the nation they represented, and in such moments of foresight the concerns and agreements made in the present fell prey to the long term illusions of both national glory and triumph.
And so it came to pass on the trench lines of the Western Front on that fateful day the the Imperial German Army, utilizing multiple artillery pieces, fired some 18,000 artillery shells containing liquid xylyl bromide tear gas on Imperial Imperial Russian Army positions on the Rawka River, west of Warsaw during the Battle of Bolimov. Fortuitously for the Imperial Russian forces, the chemical froze and failed to have the desired effect on the force that the Germans had hoped for. All the same, the use of the agent and its psychological and legal impact opened the door for the other nations to follow Germany's lead in disregarding the chemical warfare provision of the Hague Conventions, which in time would lead to both one of the most enduring legacies of the Western Front of World War I, both in the terms of the chemical agents used and their effect on the troops on both sides of the trenches. Letters and eyewitness accounts of the suffering and horror these weapons brought ultimately resulted in their eventual classification as Weapons of Mass Destruction, which along with Biological and Nuclear weaponry would come to represent one of three types of weapons near universally banned on the battlefields of the modern world not so much by law as by the general consensus of nations that had seen what these weapons had brought their people in times of conflict.
Today, the number of nations known to have either chemical munitions or the capability to produce chemical munitions is comparatively low, and efforts by many nations in Eurasia and the Americas to eliminate these stockpiles all but ensure that these nations will not resort to such weaponry, however their remains a demand for the use of chemical-based weaponry in both times of war and times of peace. In the 1980s the Iran-Iraq war saw the use of Iraqi chemical weaponry against opposing Iranian forces, leading the participants in the 1990-1991 US-back coalition to liberate Kuwait to take precautions against chemical weaponry based attacks in the event that the Iraqi Armed moved to use their stockpile against coalition forces. More recently, uprisings in the Middle East and protesters in Asia have been met with riot police and armed officials employing tear gas in an effort to disperse the crowds with the irritants before they can create trouble for the establishment(s). While these chemicals lack the full destructive power of modern military grade chemical munitions, their effect on modern day protestors and/or rioters is the same effect they had on the soldiers of World War I, a vivid and decidedly unpleasant reminder of what the soldiers a century removed from us dealt with from 1915-1918.
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