AmAJ°riir'  i^lrm'  )         Methods  of  Gas  Warfare. 
259 
METHODS  OF  GAS  WARFARE.1 
By  S.  J.  M.  Auld,  British  Military  Mission. 
(Communicated  by  L.  J.  Briggs.) 
All  I  can  do  in  the  short  time  available  is  to  give  you,  if  I  can, 
a  general  idea  of  what  gas  warfare  really  means  on  the  Western 
Front  at  the  present  time.  Some  of  you  may  have  gotten  the 
idea  that  gas  is  just  an  incident,  and  that  there  is  not  as  much 
attention  being  paid  to  it  as  there  was  two  years  ago.  That  idea 
is  entirely  wrong.  Gas  is  used  to  a  tremendous  extent,  and  the 
amount  that  has  been  and  is  being  hurled  back  and  forth  in  shells 
and  clouds  is  almost  unbelievable.  I  will  try  to  give  you  a  gen- 
eral idea  of  what  is  occurring  and  make  the  lecture  rather  a  popular 
than  a  technical  description.  I  shall  also,  for  obvious  reasons,  have 
to  confine  myself  to  describing  what  the  Germans  have  been  doing, 
and  will  say  nothing  about  what  we  are  doing. 
Possibly  the  best  plan  would  be  to  state  more  or  less  chron- 
ologically what  occurred.  I  happened  to  be  present  at  the  first  gas 
attack  and  saw  the  whole  gas  business  from  the  beginning.  The 
first  attack  was  made  in  April,  191 5.  A  deserter  had  come  into  the 
Ypres  salient  a  week  before  the  attack  was  made,  and  had  told  us 
the  whole  story.  They  were  preparing  to  poison  us  with  gas,  and 
had  cylinders  installed  in  their  trenches.  No  one  believed  him  at 
all,  and  no  notice  was  taken  of  it. 
Then  came  the  first  gas  attack,  and  the  whole  course  of  the  war 
changed.  That  first  attack,  of  course,  was  made  against  men  who 
were  entirely  unprepared — absolutely  unprotected.  You  have  read 
quite  as  much  about  the  actual  attack  and  the  battle  as  I  could  tell 
you,  but  the  accounts  are  still  remarkably  meager.  The  fellows 
who  could  have  told  most  about  it  didn't  come  back.  The  Germans 
have  claimed  that  we  had  6,000  killed  and  as  many  taken  prisoners. 
They  left  a  battlefield  such  as  had  never  been  seen  before  in  war- 
fare, ancient  or  modern,  and  one  that  has  had  no  compeer  in  the 
whole  war  except  on  the  Russian  front. 
Wrhat  the  Germans  expected  to  accomplish  by  it  I  am  not  sure. 
1  Report  of  a  lecture  delivered  before  the  Washington  Academy  of 
Sciences  on  January  17,  1918.  Reprinted  from  Journal  of  the  Washington 
Academy  of  Sciences. 
