Hellfire Boys Read online

  On a crisp November morning in 2012, I stood in a gaggle of reporters in the driveway of a stately brick two-story house across Spring Valley from Fifty-Second Court. The house sat at the bottom of the hillside behind the American University campus, abutting the South Korean ambassador’s residence. At the top of the hill, just out of sight, were athletic fields and a child-care center. The frosty air pinched red the noses and cheeks of the officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the driveway facing the reporters.

  More than ninety years earlier, Sergeant Maurer had stood on the same hillside and posed beside the pit called Hades with the jars and bottles of chemicals lined up next to him. The house in front of us had been built atop that spot, and the photo helped to pinpoint the pit’s location beneath the back patio of the house. A family named the Loughlins had lived there for several years before the cleanup around them forced them to move; fearful for their health and safety, they never moved back in and forced the builder to buy the house back. No one had lived there since. On that November morning, the Corps of Engineers was going to tear the house down. The cleanup of the property had proved so complicated, with so many lingering questions about what was still buried there, that the army decided that the easiest route was simply to demolish the house altogether and cart away whatever lay beneath.

  After a few questions, the corps officials asked the reporters to step back down the driveway. We retreated to the street, behind a barricade of Jersey barriers. The driver in the excavator cab started the engine and raised its long hydraulic arm. Almost gently, the bucket began to pluck at the brick façade. A few bricks rained down, then the bucket raked downward, and the bricks sheered away from the side. And then the driver punched the bucket through a window and began to rip out the guts of the house.

  In a sense, Hellfire Boys began that day. My curiosity about this history wasn’t sated by the two articles I wrote for the New York Times about the demolition. The more I searched for information about the American University Experiment Station, the more puzzled I grew over how little was known about what had happened there. It seemed strange that this history of chemical warfare in the United States, with its mysterious laboratory tucked into the nation’s capital, could be so little understood and so poorly documented. There were military histories and technical documents, to be sure, as well as articles in the Washington newspapers during the crisis on Fifty-Second Court. A handful of books have been written in the years that followed. None provides a complete picture about the day-to-day work in the labs, the men’s labors over beakers of poison gas, or the men who volunteered to go to France with the First Gas Regiment.

  But there were hints. I tracked down Sergeant Maurer’s daughter and grandson, who showed me other photographs from the American University Experiment Station: soldiers mugging in their uniforms, perched atop casks labeled TNT; Will Maurer grinning shyly beside his sweetheart in Washington, posing at the zoo; lyric sheets from a talent show for the soldiers on Mustard Hill. Eventually, I found eight copies of the station’s newspaper in the Library of Congress. The papers covered a two-month period toward the end of the war, revealing the daily lives of these men at the cutting edge of military science on the campus. Since then, I’ve visited or contacted dozens of libraries and archives. I’ve filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the army and the FBI. I tracked down soldiers’ descendants and asked them to check their attics and closets for letters and diaries. I’ve combed through newspapers. I accumulated tens of thousands of documents, photographs, and reports from the National Archives and Records Administration. A chance discovery there unexpectedly led me to the hitherto unknown story of Walter Scheele’s captivity and the secret laboratory where he labored over the last eight months of the war. My research took me to Flanders fields in Belgium, to see for myself where these weapons were used and how. It took me into the living rooms of descendants of the soldiers in the Chemical Warfare Service, descendants who were proud of their ancestors but not always comfortable with the work they undertook in war. The descendants wanted this story told, but some were nervous—they wanted it told fairly, dispassionately, factually. I promised to do the best that I could. I stand by that pledge.

  When I began this endeavor, I saw it as a sliver of lost history, a fascinating but long-forgotten fragment of American history. I worried that the passage of a fearful century, distended and warped by anxiety over weapons of mass destruction, would make a dispassionate chronicle of this legacy impossible, fraught with latter-day perceptions about the perils of chemical weapons. I worried that the peephole of the early twenty-first century, after a century of war and tribulation, would be an imperfect lens.

  And then gas warfare returned to the headlines. I would never have dreamed that chemical warfare would reappear in the news, like a phantom from beyond the grave. In 2013, the world learned of the sarin-gas attack in Damascus attributed to Bashar al-Assad’s forces and saw the horrific images of civilians dying from nerve gas. Then came the reports of barrel bombs filled with chlorine—the original chemical weapon of the twentieth century unleashed in 1915 outside Ypres, Belgium. Reports of ISIS launching mustard-filled shells followed, and then another sarin attack in 2017, again blamed upon Assad’s forces. Improbably, a weapon of the past became a weapon of the present, and the subject I had undertaken took on a completely unexpected relevance and urgency. As one chemical weapons expert told me, “Everything old is new again.”

  Prologue

  The sun beamed down on Marie Desaegher as she left her home in the west Belgian town of Boesinghe with her young sister, Emma. It was morning when the sisters set out on the road to Ypres. Marie was twenty-six and deaf, the oldest of eight children. She worked as a servant girl in Ypres, but that day she was walking the four miles south into the city for a typhoid shot. April 22, 1915, was calm and peaceful. The grass blazed brilliant green in the fields around them, and a brisk wind blew from north to south. As the two sisters walked side by side, with the cows lowing in the fields and the warm spring breeze at their backs, perhaps they even forgot they were walking across a battlefield.

  If Marie had walked in the opposite direction, she would have run right into the French front lines, where soldiers crouched in trenches facing the Germans a few hundred yards away across no-man’s-land. The Desaegher homestead was close to the battle lines, as were many other farmhouses and homesteads peppering the fields of western Flanders. The city of Ypres was swaddled by a five-mile radius of Allied territory that jutted into German territory—a bulge in the front lines called a salient—which insulated the city even through the First Battle of Ypres the previous fall. On the very land where fighting had raged a few months earlier, life went on. The farmers tilled their fields; the tea shops were open in Ypres. Soldiers with a few days’ leave from the front could find food and companionship in the bustling town of Poperinghe. On that clear spring day as the sisters strolled parallel to the levees of the Yperlee Canal, crossed the Ypres moat, and entered the fortified medieval city, it was as if the war had simply stopped.

  In the afternoon, Marie and Emma left Ypres for home. Marie was tired. Far off in the distance, machine guns rattled, and an observation balloon hovered high overhead. The sun was setting. Just before 5:30 p.m., flares exploded against the sky in the gathering dusk. The sisters were only a few minutes away from their house when they met soldiers and villagers on the road who tried to tell them something. Marie couldn’t hear them, but her sister froze in her tracks and refused to move. Emma was trembling, soundless words tumbling out of her mouth, and then she bolted toward a neighbor’s house. And then the shells began to fall.

  They fell all around Marie, her body turning ice cold in fear, as if the life had drained from her and left her a corpse. She ran toward the farmhouse. She vaulted over ditches and dikes, thorns tearing at her, shells falling all around her, until she reached cover.

  Some nervous French territorial soldiers had also taken shelter there from the shell bar
rage, including an injured man. Through the windows, she saw a horse-drawn ration wagon rumbling toward the house. As she watched, a shell fell almost directly on the team, the shrapnel killing the two horses instantly. After seeing that, she fled to hide in a pigsty.

  The ferocious artillery barrage went on and on, and the French responded with their own shelling. Then the German guns fell silent.

  For a few minutes, everything was stone quiet. In the observation balloon high overhead, a French soldier looking down on the German lines saw movement. So did the French territorials peeking up from their trenches, rifles leveled toward the German lines.

  The distant movement wasn’t the sight of German soldiers surging up from the trenches. It was something else, something they’d never seen before. Something evanescent, something that flowed and coiled. Wisps of bluish smoke, a haze rising from the German trenches, turning greenish yellow as the cloud undulated toward them on the wind. It purled, almost like water, sinking into depressions in the earth as it rolled southwest across the field in a six-foot-high curtain.

  A seventeen-year-old boy named Maurice Quaghebeur from Boesinghe asked a French officer billeted in his house what the cloud was. Smoke from the German guns, he told the boy. Nothing to worry about.

  Up at the lines, French commanders shouted for their soldiers to take positions at the top of their trenches, believing that the cloud was a smoke screen hiding advancing infantry. But there was no sound of an advancing army as the cloud swirled toward them, drifted into their trenches, and then spilled over their heads.

  From the city, a priest watching with binoculars saw soldiers begin to drop their weapons and flee wildly. Others were staggering back from the lines, blinded, gagging, tearing off their greatcoats, faces and chests turning bluish purple. Farther down the line, a British soldier crouched in trepidation as a thunder of hooves grew louder on the road. Galloping horses burst into view and raced past with two and three French soldiers per steed, in frenzied flight. Soldiers unable to escape collapsed, writhing on the ground, screaming for water.

  Canadian soldiers in trenches on the fringes of the attack watched in stunned surprise as the French territorials ran toward them in their blue coats and red pants, half staggering. Some foamed at the mouth, the buttons and buckles of their uniforms suddenly green with corrosion. The Canadians tried to stop them, to rally them to turn and fight, but they continued fleeing the gas cloud. The Canadians turned and shot at them as they fled.

  Boesinghe was on fire. Shells had fallen across the town, collapsing roofs and sending showers of debris over the streets. Homes were burning, the walls torn open to the sky, parents shrieking for their children, gathering a few belongings, locking their doors and windows, unsure whether to take cover or to flee. The town filled with wounded soldiers retreating south, away from the lines. The sound of bawling cows and screaming horses rent the air. An acrid smell that burned the lungs and the eyes consumed the town as the wave of gas rolled southward, surging on the breeze.

  The sleeping French guns came alive, machine guns rattling, every cannon firing as fast and as often as it could be reloaded. A din like no other filled the countryside, as if the ground had peeled open and hounds of hell had bellowed forth. The cloud rolled on, growing taller and taller, like a wave gaining strength before it crashes to shore.

  Then, after about fifteen minutes, the French guns began falling silent. After another fifteen minutes, everything was quiet once again. When the bullets stopped, the German troops were ordered up and out of their trenches. They stepped over the empty chlorine gas tanks they had opened up and crept forward across no-man’s-land. All the rodents that burrowed under the ground had come up from out of their holes and warrens and died in the cloud. Carcasses of rabbits, moles, rats, and mice lay everywhere. The burning stench of the gas still hung in the air. At the French lines, the soldiers were gone, the trenches almost empty. Farther on, they began to find the bodies. French soldiers, then British soldiers, sprawled on the ground, marks on their faces and throats where they had clawed at themselves for breath. Some leaned against earthen fortifications, their rifles beside them, as if in sleep. Some had shot themselves. When the Germans reached the farms, they found horses dead in their stables. Chickens, cows, dead. Everything was dead.

  Four miles of the Allied line had collapsed in the chlorine-gas attack. But the cautious Germans, whose protections were little more than cotton cloths soaked in a neutralizing agent, tied over their nose and mouth, did not press the advantage, perhaps too wary of their own weapons to advance. The British and Canadians rushed reserve troops back up to the lines and prevented the enemy from advancing more than a few miles past their original lines. With the gas attack finished, shelling resumed. The night lit up with shellfire and explosions, the constant rattle of bullets, and the shouts and screams of soldiers.

  When Marie Desaegher finally emerged from the pigpen where she had taken refuge, she found the farm overrun with Germans. The homestead was now behind the German lines. She did not see her family again for the rest of the war.

  Over the previous two and a half months, the Germans had set almost six thousand chlorine tanks into the ground in the front of their trenches. Fritz Haber, one of Germany’s preeminent chemists, had come up to the front personally to inspect the preparations. They waited weeks for a day when the weather was perfect and the wind just right to open the nozzles in a carefully synchronized cloud attack, in hopes of dislodging the British and French troops and breaking the stalemate that had gripped the western front.

  There had been hints that such an attack might be coming. A German deserter had told his British captors about carefully laid plans for a poison-gas-cloud attack at Ypres. No one believed him. The intelligence was dismissed in part because it seemed too outlandish to be true. But furthermore, the British could not believe that the Germans would so flagrantly violate international treaties banning asphyxiating gases, signed in 1899 and 1907.

  That first successful gas attack of World War I at Ypres set the stage for an arms race in a war already steeped in horror. At first, the press and Allied governments condemned the new tactic as a descent into barbarism. Then those same governments established their own gas programs. Soon after the attack in Ypres, a new phrase entered the lexicon for the grinding conflict in Europe: “the Chemists’ War.” In fact, scientists had been using the phrase even before the attack at Ypres, referring to novel uses of explosives, but now the use of industrial chemicals as weapons in their own right cemented the phrase as shorthand for a new kind of technology-driven warfare, in which scientists like Haber were just as crucial as military strategists in deciding the outcome of battles. Two years later, American chemists would enter that war as well.

  The attack on April 22, 1915, was not the last chlorine gas attack in Ypres. More German chlorine-cloud attacks came in the days and weeks that followed. For a young girl named Jeanne Battheu, memories of those attacks haunted her for the rest of her life. Jeanne was with her grandmother in the family’s house outside Poperinghe in 1916 when her mother threw open the door. Clouds billowed in the fields, and when Jeanne’s granny tried to go outside, she stumbled back, choking, “I can’t breathe. We can’t breathe.”

  The gas cloud swept past the house, and Jeanne was unharmed. Afterward, she walked into town. She was with a group of children, about ten of them, when two trucks arrived and Allied officers and soldiers jumped to the ground. They began unloading men on stretchers and lining them up alongside a ditch. The men had been gassed, their eyes bulging, their tongues hanging from their mouths. Some tore at their clothes, screaming. Jeanne and the other frightened children just stared, but the officers yelled to them, “Come on, children, come on.” The officers had buckets of milk, and they told the children to fill cups and bring them to the gassed men. Jeanne walked up and down the rows of stretchers, giving sips to the soldiers. The men were dying—not peacefully, not gracefully, but miserably, drowning in the fluid filling their lungs, we
eping and screaming for their mothers. A traumatized boy was so terrified by the scene of horror that he ran away from home and didn’t return for three days. Slowly, the thrashing stopped. The gurgling, gasping breaths fell silent. One after another, the men died as young Jeanne tried to help them swallow sips of milk. Jeanne never forgot that sight for the rest of her life. “I have never been a child,” she said many years later. “If you witnessed that, you cannot have been a child.”

  PART I

  CATALYST

  Chapter One

  Holy Week

  What horrors night foretells

  Of the living Hells

  Where thou and thy brave comrades fought for me

  On the bloody tarn

  Of the Meuse and Marne

  I’ll take a turn next month in place of thee.

  But banish now the thought,

  The past is wrought;

  I only pray to God to make me brave,

  And there in grim death smile,

  Feeling the while

  To-morrow we shall meet beyond the grave.

  —Robert B. MacMullin

  Company E, First Gas Regiment, AEF

  The chime of glasses and the clink of cutlery filled Rauscher’s banquet hall in Washington as Vannoy Hartog Manning and his wife, Emily, arrived for a late supper. On the evening of April 2, 1917, a cloud of war hung over the nation’s capital. Earlier in the night, President Wilson had delivered the most momentous speech of his presidency, asking Congress to declare war upon Germany. Red, white, and blue bunting draped the city, and throngs of prowar demonstrators roamed the rain-spattered streets, bellowing patriotic songs and jeering at protesters and pacifists in their white sashes and armbands. Here and there, fistfights broke out between opposing sides. As the night grew late, the crowds withdrew to indoor rallies, where partisans shouted the president’s pleas to Congress, read from the extra editions of the newspapers rushed off the presses.