STEENSTRATE, Belgium — As a spring breeze wafted into his trench, Cmdr. Georges Lamour of the French 73rd Infantry saw something almost surreal drift his way. A yellow-green cloud.
He barely had time to react. “All my trenches are choked,” Lamour cried into the field telephone to headquarters. “I am falling myself!”
These were the last words heard from Lamour. World War I, and warfare itself, were never the same.
Chlorine gas — sent crawling in favorable winds over Flanders Fields from German positions — sowed terror and agony for the first time April 22, 1915. The era of chemical weaponry had dawned. The weapon of mass slaughter came to symbolize the ruthlessness and, many say, futility of the 1914-18 Great War.
“It is a new element in warfare. It is indiscriminate,” said Piet Chielens, curator at the In Flanders’ Fields Museum in nearby Ypres. And what’s more, he said, “you create psychological terror.”
Foaming at the mouth, crazed and blinded, the French soldiers fled in all directions — sucking for oxygen, finding poison instead. About 1,200 French soldiers died in the chaos of that first five-minute gas attack and the fighting that followed. Lamour, like scores of comrades, was never found.
“You drown in your own lungs,” Chielens said.
On Tuesday, the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will hold a commemorative meeting close to the fields. The organization today monitors reports that chlorine gas has repeatedly been used in Syria’s civil war.
The first use by allied forces came in September, when the British unleashed poison gas on the Germans at the Battle of Loos, just across from Ypres in northern France.
Rival armies ultimately launched 146 gas attacks in Belgium, which covered only a small patch of the Western Front. The Germans used about 150 tons of gas in their first attack. Germany ultimately used 68,000 tons. The Allies used more: 82,000 tons.
Historians estimate that more than 1 million soldiers were exposed to gas — and 90,000 killed. The end of the war brought no end to the suffering caused by the weapon.
“A lot of the effects did not kill you, but they were lasting. You have chronic bronchitis, pneumonia,” Chielens said. “The veterans of the war took it with them to their graves.”
Dormant shells littered farmland. Even today, farmers suffer health problems after digging up this toxic harvest.
The French army told Georges Lamour’s wife, Angele, that he either died from gas or was taken prisoner. She kept believing her husband was alive.
Month after month, she wrote letters to “Mon bien cher Georges.” On May 2, 1918, three years after his presumed death, she still wrote: “Is springtime coming so late for you as it is for us?”
