But for the brisk speed of the wind out of the northeast, Simon Jones said, “it would have been pretty much like this.” Jones, a fifty-year-old military historian from Windsor, England, was standing beside a towering memorial cross, squinting out over the newly furrowed fields around Ieper, Belgium, better known by its French name, Ypres. Behind him, a line of snapping white flags approximated the location of the trenches from which, a century ago today, German soldiers launched the first successful—which is to say, the first deadly —poison-gas attack of the Great War. Chemical weapons had been used before, Jones said, notably in a German tear-gas attack in Poland earlier in 1915, but those were false starts. Ieper (the Dutch pronunciation more or less rhymes with “keeper”) is where the chemical arms race truly began. “It’s the first lethal use, but it’s also a really dramatic, shocking first use,” he said. “It begins a process whereby more poisonous gases are sought out and developed.”
The attack took about two and a half months to prepare, and the Germans waited for weeks for the prevailing winds to begin blowing in the right direction. At around five o’clock on the appointed afternoon, they unleashed a ferocious artillery bombardment. Then they opened the valves on nearly six thousand canisters of chlorine gas, releasing about a hundred and fifty tons of the chemical toward the two enemy divisions—one of French-Algerian soldiers, one of older French reservists—on the other side of no-man’s-land. The French soldiers saw a white cloud that turned greenish-yellow as it purled slowly toward them. When the gas reached their positions, many dropped their weapons and fled. Others staggered back from the shallow trenches, blinded and gagging, tearing off their clothes, their chests turning purple as they drowned in the fluid filling their lungs. Two miles of the French line collapsed. The Germans, with little more than cotton rags to protect their noses and mouths, captured two key towns but failed to fully take advantage of the attack. Over the following weeks, at least four other gas attacks followed, and possibly more. In the end, though, the Allied lines held.
The French and the British had earlier experimented with gas, and the French had likely attempted to use it. The Allies condemned Germany’s chlorine attack, then promptly accelerated their own chemical-weapons programs. More innovations followed—first the asphyxiant gas phosgene, then the vomiting gas chloropicrin, then, in the summer of 1917, mustard gas, a blistering agent that was called the king of the war gases because of its horrendous physical effects and its tendency to linger on the battlefield. The attack of April 22nd did little to advance the German cause; the number of Allied dead was likely grossly inflated for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, it transformed the character of the Western Front, adding an element of barbarity to the conflict. “Now you’re at the stage where you seem to have crossed this line of civilization, using weapons that most Europeans didn’t even know existed,” Michael S. Neiberg, a war scholar and history professor at the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s not that these weapons kill at any wider a scale than, say, artillery does, but they kill in a very cruel kind of way, a novel kind of way. The novelty is largely what scares people.”
The First World War left behind many sites of silent infamy in Belgium and France; practically any day since last August could have been the centennial of some battle, some act of valor or cruelty. Jones, for his part, feels that the military significance of the first gas attack has been overinflated. Nevertheless, April 22nd has an undeniable resonance this year, because chlorine, the Germans’ gas of choice at Ieper, has been revived as a weapon in the Syrian civil war. Last month, chlorine barrel bombs were dropped on the town of Sarmin, in the northwest of the country, killing six people, three of them children, and affecting more than two hundred others. It now seems likely that the attack, which involved the use of a helicopter, was perpetrated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s President. As Amy Smithson, a scholar of chemical and biological warfare, told me a few days before the Ieper centennial, “Everything old is new again.”
On Tuesday, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was created, in 1997,to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention, held a commemorative meeting in a concrete-and-glass conference center in downtown Ieper. Perhaps because of the setting—images of masked soldiers adorn boxes in a chocolate shop on the town’s main square, and twisted shell fragments and mortars are for sale among the storefront bric-a-brac—many of the dignitaries in attendance echoed Smithson’s words, drawing parallels between 1915 and 2015. Jan Durnez, Ieper’s mayor, told me that the town is not proud of its association with chemical weapons, particularly the fact that Yperite, a British nickname for mustard gas, was derived from the town’s name. The reappearance of chlorine as a chemical weapon in Syria, he said, “is a disaster.” The O.P.C.W.’s director-general, Ahmet Üzümcü, was more circumspect. He didn’t mention Syria in his brief speech, instead praising the Chemical Weapons Convention as an unqualified success. “We have turned the legacy of chemical warfare begun at Ieper into a future that will never again know such weapons,” he said.
Later, at a press conference, he acknowledged the O.P.C.W.’s ongoing difficulty with enforcing the convention in Syria. “The reports of use of chlorine—and the earlier sarin, in August, 2013—have been very disturbing,” he said. But the Assad Administration’s apparent flaunting of the convention does not, he said, represent a weakness or a failure of the agreement itself. He pointed to the O.P.C.W.’s destruction, last summer, of some of Syria’s sarin and mustard-gas arsenal. “This should be seen—and this is seen, in fact—as a big accomplishment,” he said.
Jones’s next stop, after the Ieper battlefield memorial, was a cemetery about four miles to the east, where some of the German war dead are buried. It was a curious place. Newly hung flags fluttered at two of its corners, marking the eastern reaches of the chlorine attack, and ersatz gas canisters had been set up on the grassy lawn, as if part of some grim reënactment. But the stones laid along the curving lines where the German trenches had been were the same as during the interwar years, when the Germans chiselled the names of patriotic organizations into them, turning them into monuments to nationalism. Just inside the cemetery, Jones paused at a signpost with arrows pointing in the direction of every documented chemical-weapons attack since the First World War: Ethiopia, Yemen, Japan, Syria. “I was here on Friday, and this wasn’t here,” he said.
Jones has been interested in chemical weapons since he got over his youthful fascination with gas masks. He is an expert now, but a cautious one, and seems to feel some ambivalence toward the way that the memory of the April 22nd attack has been repurposed. “It has lots of facets, lots of meanings. It has a moral meaning. It has a historical meaning. It has an emotional meaning. And it does have a powerful symbolism—there’s no getting away from that,” he told me. “Whenever you try to use the past to prove a point in the present, you’re going to distort it.” Later, he said, “The dead don’t have a choice about how they’re used, do they?”