The HORRORS of Mustard Gas (Why Soldiers Didn't Know They Were Dying)

[00:00:00]The shelling stops. For three days, the German guns have walked their fire across your sector. And now, near midnight, they go quiet. You wait for it. The green wall, the rolling cloud of chlorine that every man in this trench has been drilled to fear. The one you can see coming. The one that makes your lungs seize on the first breath. [music] It doesn't come. The air just sits there. And when you finally lift the edge of your mask to test it, all you catch is something faint and almost domestic. A whiff of garlic or horseeradish or the mustard your mother spread on bread. No burning, no choking, no sting in the back of the throat. So you decide the attack missed. You pull off the hot, suffocating rubber that's been strangling you for an hour. And you lie back against the wall of the trench and you sleep.

[00:00:52]That was the mistake because the attack didn't miss. It landed perfectly. And the reason you can't feel it is the entire point of the weapon. Somewhere on the skin of your neck, invisible, painless. A thin film of oil is already soaking inward and a clock you cannot hear has started counting down the hours until your own body turns on you. This is the story of what those hours do.

[00:01:20]Start with the weapon itself because almost everything people believe about it is wrong. Beginning with the name mustard gas isn't a gas. On the night of July 12th, 1917, on the eve of the third battle of Epra, [music] German gunners fired a new shell marked with a yellow cross. And inside was a volatile oily liquid that burst into a fine mist and then settled back down as a slick onto the mud. the sandbags, the wool, the skin. The French would name it Eperite after the town. The Germans had a colder label from the lab, and the chemists simply called their compound by their own initials. But forget the name for a second. What matters is what they engineered it to do. Chlorine and fosgene were killers. They flooded the lungs and they did it fast. Mustard was something new and in a way something worse. Because mustard wasn't really built to kill at all. It was built to disable, to fill hospitals, to take a soldier off the line for weeks or months and force three more men to carry him, wash him, and [music] feed him. A dead soldier costs the enemy one man. A blind, blistered, choking soldier costs them four. That was the math. And to make that math work, the weapon had to be quiet. It had to get its hooks into you [music] before you ever knew you'd been touched.

[00:02:52]Here's how it does that. Your uniform is wool, and you trust it. Against chlorine, [music] cloth buys you a few seconds. Against mustard, cloth is barely a suggestion. The agent is intensely lipid soluble, which is a clinical way of saying it loves fat and oil and anything greasy. And it treats the fibers of your tunic the way water treats a paper towel. [music] It wicks straight through. Then it reaches your skin, which is also at the microscopic level, largely fat. And it doesn't stop there either. Roughly eight in every 10 parts that touch you simply evaporate off, but the rest sinks in. Some lodges in the skin, some slips all the way into your blood and starts to travel. And through all of this, the thing that should be saving your life, the alarm system of pain, stays [music] completely silent. There are no nerve endings screaming because nothing yet is obviously being destroyed. The molecule is small. It's fast, and it's polite. It knocks, it enters, [music] and it waits.

[00:03:59]And it isn't only waiting on your skin.

[00:04:02]This is the other half of what made mustard so hated. Because it was an oily liquid and not a true gas, it didn't blow away on the next breeze the way chlorine did. It settled into the mud in the timber and the sandbags, and it stayed there, still active for days, sometimes weeks, occasionally longer, depending on the weather. A trench could be shelled at midnight and still be a trap at noon 2 days later so that a man walking through hours after the attack.

[00:04:32]Brushing a contaminated wall or kneeling in poison soil could be dosed by a weapon fired at troops who'd already moved on. The German gunners understood this better than anyone. When they loaded these shells, they had to ring their own gun positions with chloride of lime just to keep from poisoning themselves on the leaks and the premature bursts. That was the genius and the cruelty of it. The attack didn't end when the barrage ended. [music] The ground itself became the weapon. And it kept working long after the guns went quiet. What the agent does while it waits inside you is the actual horror.

[00:05:08]And it's happening in a place you'll never feel. Sulfur mustard is what chemists call a beunctional calculating agent. Picture a molecule with two reactive hands. It reaches into a living cell, finds the twisted ladder of your DNA and grabs it with both. It bonds to one strand DN. Then it bonds to the other and it welds them together. A permanent cross link that fuses the ladder shut. A cell whose DNA is stapled closed can't copy itself. It can't divide. And when it tries, it triggers its own destruction instead. Now think about which cells in your body divide the fastest because those are the ones that die first. The basal layer of your skin constantly renewing. The lining of your gut and quietly invisibly the marrow inside your bones. The factory that builds the white cells your immune system needs to fight infection. Mustard poisons all three at once. Remember that last one, the marrow. It won't matter tonight. In about a week, for some of these men, it's going to be the thing that kills them. For now, though, the trench is silent. The men sleep, the oil works, and the countdown [music] runs down toward dawn.

[00:06:29]The eyes go first. Somewhere between 6 and 12 hours after that false all clear, a man wakes because something is wrong with his face. It starts as grit, a feeling of sand under the lids, the kind you'd rub away without thinking. So he rubs and it gets worse, and it keeps getting worse. The delicate wet tissue of the eye is some of the fastest turning tissue in the whole body, which [music] makes it exquisitly vulnerable to a weapon that kills dividing cells.

[00:07:03]Its whites go red with a savage conjunctivitis.

[00:07:06]Then the lids begin to swell and they don't stop swelling. And within a couple of hours, they've puffed shut over eyes that feel like they're full of ground glass. Light becomes unbearable. And for a great many of these men, the world simply goes dark. At the first mustard bombardments around, the casualty clearing stations behind the line watch something they'd never seen at this scale. The blindness came on so fast that by the time the men reached the aid posts, they couldn't see to walk. So they were formed into files. Each man put a hand on the shoulder of the man in front and a single orderly or one lightly wounded soldier who could still see led the whole blind column forward step by shuffling step. If you've ever seen John Singer Sergeant's painting of it, a line of bandaged men roped together by touch, that's not artistic license. That's the medical reality of the summer of 1917. For most of them, the blindness was temporary. For some, where the agent ulcerated the cornea itself, it never fully lifted, and the eyes were only the first alarm. If you're getting something out of this, take a second to subscribe because this channel goes to this level of detail on the mechanics of survival. Now stay with me because we've reached the part the weapon was really designed for. And it's happening under the uniform where no one thought to look.

[00:08:35]The skin has been quietly cooking this whole time. Wherever that oil settled and stayed, wherever it pulled against warm, damp, closed-in flesh, the cross- linked cells have been dying in sheets.

[00:08:47]And now the damage surfaces, not as a rash, as blisters. enormous taut fluid-filled domes that the doctors call oole and they don't erupt evenly across the body. They map with a kind of obscene precision to exactly the places a soldier is most warm and most damp and most tightly bound. The armpits where the belt and the waistband cinched wet wool against the hips, the soft inside of the thighs, and worst of all, [music] the groin. Anywhere skin met skin or webbing pressed fabric hard against the body, the mustard had pulled and soaked and lingered. And now those exact seams bloom into burns that ooze a thick yellow fluid when they finally tear open. These were chemical burns, secondderee and sometimes deeper, and they behaved like the [music] worst burns a body can take. A nurse treating them left a description that says more than any statistic. [music] The men, she wrote, could not be bandaged and could not even be touched. So the staff built little tents of propped up sheets to keep anything at all from resting on the raw skin. And she noted something else.

[00:09:56][music] Soldiers with shrapnel wounds with shattered bones would lie there in silence. The gas cases were the ones who couldn't stop crying out. Blisters like these took weeks to close, and the worst of them took months. And every open one was an invitation to the infection that was already circling because the marrow had stopped making the cells to fight it. And here's the trap. Inside the trap, a gas mask worked. It sealed the eyes and it filtered the lungs. And a man who got his respirator on fast enough was largely spared the blindness and the worst of the breathing damage.

[00:10:28]But a mask covers a face. It does nothing for the rest of a body wrapped in wool that the agent walks straight through. So, the only real defense was to get out of every contaminated stitch you were wearing fast and to isolate it and to scrub the exposed skin with hot water before the oil finished sinking in. In the middle of a night barrage, blind and burning, most men could do none of that. And the danger didn't even stop with [music] the wounded. The orderlys and nurses who cut those uniforms off the casualties were handling saturated cloth with their bare hands. And they were burned too by the residue on the men they were trying to save. Whole degasing stations had to be built behind the line just [music] to strip and wash the poison before anyone could safely touch them. But a man could survive his eyes and survive his skin.

[00:11:17]The ones [music] who breathed it in were a different story. Not everyone got their mask on in time. And against the vapor drifting up off a contaminated trench floor, plenty of men simply inhaled. Here, the weapon reaches the tissue it damages worst. And here is where the old story about mustard gas is both true and slightly wrong. So, let's get it exactly right. Because the reality is stranger than the myth.

[00:11:45]You've probably heard that gas men drowned with chlorine. That's literally what happened. The lungs flooded with fluid and the man drowned in open air.

[00:11:56]Mustard does something else. And to understand it, you have to go back to those two chemical hands, stapling DNA shut. The agent strips the living lining straight off the inside of the airway, off the larynx, the windpipe, the branching tubes below. And the body, trying to protect the raw surface underneath, responds by laying down a replacement film, a thick yellowish false skin that doctors compared to the membrane you see inside the throat in a case of dtheria.

[00:12:27]It's a repair. The body cannot finish because that membrane isn't anchored. It sloughs. It peels away from the wall of the trachea and loose sheets and slides down into the pipe. And now the man is trying to pull air through a tube that his own body is shedding into. In the deepest exposures, the small airways and the lung itself weep fluid on top of it.

[00:12:48]So yes, in a sense, these men drowned, but they drowned on the dissolved lining of their own throats days into a hospital stay miles from the trench that had already gone quiet and green behind them. And even that wasn't usually the final blow.

[00:13:06]Go back one more time to the bone marrow, the detail I told you to hold on to. While the eyes swelled and the skin blistered and the airway shed, the marrow had been failing in the dark the entire time. And a man whose marrow has stopped building white blood cells, has no immune system left to speak of. So the wound in his lungs, that vast raw stripped surface, became the perfect ground for bacteria.

[00:13:35]Days after the attack, when the burns were starting to scab and the swelling was going down and a man might have let himself believe the worst was behind him, the fever would climb. And what finished him then again and again in the records was bronco pneumonia. Plain infection taking hold in a body whose defenses the gas had quietly stripped away days before. in the dark while he [music] slept.

[00:14:06]There's a post-mortem in the British official medical history that holds the whole sequence in a single body. A soldier, 39 years old, gassed at the end of July 1917, admitted the same day, dead about 10 days later. The examiners noted a brown pigment staining wide areas of his skin where the agent had burned it. They noted a clean white ring on his wrist, unmarked, a band of skin the exact width of the wrist watch that had shielded it.

[00:14:42]And when they opened [music] the throat, they found the whole length of the trachea lined with the yellow membrane.

[00:14:49]10 days. That's the ark. From a man rubbing grit out of his eyes to that.

[00:14:56]So now the number of every hundred men that mustard gas put into a casualty clearing station roughly two or three died. [music] That's it. Compared to the meat grinder arithmetic of the western front, Mustard barely killed anyone. And that number, the smallalness of it is the actual horror of this weapon because it was never a failure. [music] It was the design. The other 97 walked out.

[00:15:25]They walked out blind for days or weeks, [music] some of them for life. They walked out with skin that had blistered off their groins and their armpits. And they carried away lungs scarred into a lifetime of coughing, chronic bronchitis, ruined breathing, and for some, a cancer that arrived decades later to finish the job. Mustard didn't want them dead. Dead men are cheap.

[00:15:47]Mustard wanted them broken and clogging hospitals and haunting the men who saw them. And it succeeded on an industrial scale. Look at what that first bombardment actually bought the German army. In the days after those opening yellow cross barges atra, German unit histories recorded that the British guns opposite them fell almost completely silent for as long as 2 days because the men who worked them couldn't see and couldn't breathe and couldn't stand. No trench was stormed. No line was broken.

[00:16:20]The weapon just quietly removed the crews [music] and left the artillery sitting there useless in the mud. And that pattern held for the rest of the war. This single agent [music] went on to account for the overwhelming majority of Britain's gas casualties. And it did most of that work without a cloud anyone could see coming.

[00:16:39]There was a cost to the survivors that never showed up in a casualty return, too. Soldiers who'd stood their ground under high explosive shelling would come apart at the mere rumor of gas. Because a shell you can hear and a blast you can see are terrors a man can brace against.

[00:16:57]A poison that arrives as a faint smell of garlic and then does nothing for half a day is a different kind of fear entirely. It taught every man in the line that feeling fine meant nothing.

[00:17:11][music] That safe was just a word for the hours before the symptoms. And there's no bracing against that. [music] Which brings us back to the trench near midnight. And the man who lifted his mask and smelled something like garlic and decided the attack had missed. He was wrong in the most complete way a person can be wrong. He hadn't survived the gas. He'd simply been given a head start on not knowing. The oil was already in him. The clock was already running. And the crulest engineering in the whole design was never the blisters or the blindness or the yellow membrane.

[00:17:51]It was the silence at the start, the false all clear. [music] The 12 hours of ordinary darkness a man spent asleep, breathing easy, certain he was safe, while the weapon that had already won took its time.

[00:18:07]If you want to understand how the other weapons of this war actually killed from the inside out the way we just did here, subscribe and stay with us. There's a great deal more the history books gloss over. We don't.