Germany accuses the French of using gas

On 14 April 1915 the German war communiqué, issued daily by the Supreme Army Command, reported from the Western Front: “North-west of Verdun the French yesterday used against our lines bombs giving off a thick yellowish smoke and a gas with an asphyxiating effect.” The brief mention, squeezed in between news of the fighting at Berry-au-Bac and between the Meuse and the Moselle, passed almost unnoticed in the press. Seen from today, however, it is part of a series that has its significance.

A series of communiqués

It was not the first such accusation. As early as 1 March 1915 a German communiqué had stated that the French “again, as a few months ago”, had fired shells that gave off foul-smelling gases on bursting, which in any case did no harm. On 13 April, the day before the mention discussed here, it spoke of shells with “stupefying” gas north-east of Suippes in Champagne. After 14 April the accusations grew stronger. On 16 April the communiqué stated that the French were using bombs with asphyxiating gas more and more often, and on 17 April that the British had also used such grenades and bombs east of Ypres.

None of these reports can be verified in detail today. It is not known exactly what fell on the German trenches near Verdun on 13 April. They may have been French tear-gas grenades, but they may just as well have been ordinary shells whose smoke the German soldiers took for gas.

A grain of truth

The accusations were not made up out of thin air. The French army was equipped with so-called asphyxiating cartridges (cartouches suffocantes), 26 mm grenades fired from a signal pistol. Each contained a few dozen grams of ethyl bromoacetate, a substance from the group of lachrymators, that is, tear gases. They had originally been produced for the gendarmerie and police, for riot control. According to many studies, the French used them sporadically at the front from August or the autumn of 1914, and on 21 February 1915 the French War Ministry circulated notes on the use of shells with “stupefying” gas (the Germans published the text a few months later as proof of their case). The amount of gas in a single grenade was, however, so small that in the open field its effect was negligible, and for a long time the Germans did not notice it at all.

The French and German tear agents were meant not to kill but to incapacitate. Their advocates argued that they did not violate the declaration adopted as part of the Hague Conventions of 1899, which banned projectiles whose sole object was the diffusion of asphyxiating or poisonous gases. The Germans used similar arguments when at the end of January they shelled the Russians at Bolimów with shells filled with xylyl bromide.

Preparing the ground

When these communiqués appeared, thousands of German cylinders of chlorine, prepared under the direction of the chemist Fritz Haber, had already been dug into the ground on the front at Ypres for weeks. A lethal war gas on such a scale was something entirely different from the French tear-gas grenades. Historians usually take the view that the April accusations were meant to prepare public opinion in Germany and in neutral countries for what was to come. If the enemy accused Germany of breaking the laws of war, it could reply that he had been the first to resort to gas. And that is what happened when a few days later, on 22 April, the first cloud of chlorine drifted across the lines at Ypres. The dispute over who had started it went on long after the war, but it was the Germans who were the first on the Western Front to use a gas that was meant to kill.