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Hold Your Breath |
On 31 January 1915, Germany debuted a weapon on the Western Front of World War I, which, as noted in a previous Op-Ed, had become stalemated some months earlier after the Allied and Central Powers failed to achieve a breakthrough in the so-called "Race to the Sea" when the front opened. The weaponry debuted was illegal under the Hague Convention of 1899, but would nonetheless become one of the iconic elements of the Western Front: 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 masse 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 was previously possible.
The use of chemical warfare had been discussed by representatives from various nations who had gathered in together in both 1899 and 1907 to compile an internationally agreed set of guidelines for conducting war. 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 non-combatants. In the period before World War I, however, such rules and laws were highly uncommon, and the agreements made at the 1899 and 1907 conferences were violated by various nations for various reasons that made sense to both military and political leaders at the time, the latter’s actions being informed by the age of European Imperialism. No doubt the various leaders were looking to extend by treaty or occupation the amount of land on the earth that flew the flag of the nation they represented, and in such moments of foresight their concerns and agreements fell prey to the long-term illusions of national glory and military triumph.
So it came to pass on the trenchlines of the Western Front on that fateful day that the Imperial German Army, utilizing multiple artillery pieces, fired some 18,000 shells containing liquid xylyl bromide tear gas on Imperial Russian Army positions on the Rawka River, west of Warsaw during the Battle of Bolimov. Fortuitously for the Russian forces, the chemical froze and failed to have the desired effect 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 agents used and their effect on the troops on both sides of the trenches. Letters and eyewitness accounts of the suffering 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 demand remains 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 1990–91 US-backed coalition to liberate Kuwait to take precautions against such weaponry in the event that the Iraqi Armed moved to use their stockpile against coalition forces. Civil uprisings, such as recently seen in the Middle East and Asia, continue to be met with riot police and tear gas in an effort to disperse the crowds with the irritants before they can create trouble for the establishment. While these chemicals lack the full destructive power of military grade chemical munitions, their effect on protesters and/or rioters serves as an unpleasant reminder of what the soldiers a century removed from us dealt with during 1915–18.
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