The first successful large-scale gas attack occured outside Ypres. The Ypres Salient had long been known for suffering, and in the early afternoon of 22 April 1915 it provided the setting for one of the Great War’s greatest horrors. A special detachment of troops, the first to be trained in the science of chemical warfare, opened the valves on nearly 6000 steel cylinders set out along the German defensive perimeter. Within ten minutes, more than 160 tons of asphyxiating chlorine gas lifted into the air and floated towards the opposing French trenches.

One of the Great War’s greatest horrors: Masked men drill for a gas attack. Donning this protective clothing hampered soldiers in the line, adversely affecting their vision and agility. And often the masks proved ineffective. Gas was one of the war’s most inhumane weapons – in this image, the masks dehumanise the wearers, conferring a cruel anonymity on their suffering. Courtesy State Library of Queensland.

The use of gas took the Allies by surprise. The line folded across a six-kilometre front as French and Algerian troops retreated in terror. The slow-moving wall of gas killed more than 1000 Allied soldiers, and seriously wounded 4000 more. A British soldier serving nearby captured the pandemonium:

[I watched] figures running wildly in confusion over the fields. Greenish-gray clouds swept down upon them, turning yellow as they traveled over the country blasting everything they touched and shriveling up the vegetation . . . Then there staggered into our midst French soldiers, blinded, coughing, chests heaving, faces an ugly purple colour, lips speechless with agony, and behind them in the gas soaked trenches, we learned that they had left hundreds of dead and dying comrades.1

That attack was the first of many. There were dozens of types of gas developed during the Great War. The Allies and the Germans competed for new ways to blind, choke, cripple and kill the enemy. Historians have dubbed this ‘the race to toxicity’.2

Mustard gas was first used in July 1917. It drifted in a heavy cloud across no-man’s-land, poisoning everything in its path and settling in the trenches. Mustard gas blinded men while they fumbled with their masks. It blistered any exposed skin on contact, scarred bronchial tubes and damaged the lining of the lungs. In the worst cases of exposure, mustard gas could burn skin and flesh down to the bone.

Men severely affected by gas seldom recovered – that, of course, was the intention. Taking a gassed man out of the line weakened the enemy’s defence, but keeping him alive posed a cost to the state long after his evacuation. The ‘whispering men’, as they were called, haunted the streets of postwar Australia, a pathetic burden on the community and their families.

Repatriation files suggest something of their misery: ‘Patient is unable to keep any food down. Is weak and breathless. Suffers from giddiness, constant nausea, severe abdominal pain.’ ‘Has no confidence in himself,’ one doctor added; a reminder that a physical injury often shaped a mental outlook.3

Gas cases often lingered for years in hospitals and sanatoriums. While they were able, they gulped down tonics for their stomachs, breathed through medicated atomisers and swallowed bottlefuls of painkillers. Wheezy, dizzy, weak and listless, coughing blood and spitting mucous, gassed men died years after they were injured. Samuel Rolfe was one of them.

Private Rolfe was badly gassed near Albert in France, discharged ‘medically unfit’ and sent home. They called him ‘the Man in the Bath’.4 Mustard gas had blistered much of his skin and there was ‘a scaly feeling all over his body and face’.5 Any treatment in such a case was likely to be palliative. Immersion in a tub of special fluid numbed his pain just a little.

The Man in the Bath: A headline on the death of Samuel Rolfe. Virtual confinement to a bath mirrored the claustrophobic imprisonment of the trenches. Although it checked the searing pain of mustard gas burns, boric acid caused its own cruel discomfort. The Man in the Bath became a metaphor for Australia’s postwar trauma and reminds us of the way the horrors of war spill into peace time. As late as 2013, an elderly woman remembered visiting the men in the baths in a Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne. A child at the time, she was horrified by the suffering concealed behind the screen and wondered what comfort, if any, these long-suffering men took from her visit. The North Western Courier, 15 December 1924 courtesy National Library of Australia.

For almost four years Samuel Rolfe virtually lived in a bath of boric acid. A screen was drawn around his tub in the Prince of Wales Hospital. Visitors – and there were never many – spoke to Samuel though a screen, never seeing his eyes, never touching his body. The Man in the Bath lived in a kind of liquid prison. Rolfe’s family lived in Inverell and could seldom come to Sydney.

In December 1924, Samuel Rolfe’s condition suddenly altered for the worse. ‘Skin condition unchanged,’ a doctor jotted down in his casebook a few days later. ‘Had a convulsion two days ago, struggled violently, since then patient has lapsed into a coma. His breathing is laboured and his chest full of mucous.’6

As with many a gas victim, Rolfe’s lungs were dissolving. The Man in the Bath would drown in his own fluids.

Lungs dissolving: Thousands of atomisers like these were distributed to gas victims in the aftermath of the Great War. At best they offered temporary relief. At worst they were virtually useless. British Red Cross Collection, London courtesy Bruce Scates.

Samuel Rolfe died of war-related causes just a week shy of Christmas 1924. Gas would go on killing men decades after the fighting had ended. Over 1.3 million men were casualties of gas attacks during the Great War.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the service dossier of Samuel Rolfe NAA: B2455, ROLFE SAMUEL EARL; his repatriation file NAA: C138, NC043642-01; and contemporary newspaper accounts. For a brief history of chemical warfare prior to the Great War see Arthur Butler, Official History of Australia Army Medical Service in the War of 1914–1918, vol. III Special Problems and Services (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1943). For general histories of gas warfare see L.F Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Moore, Gas Attack! Chemical Warfare 1915–1918 and Afterwards (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1987); Robert Joy, ‘Historical Aspects of Medical Defense Against Chemical Warfare,’ in Frederick R Sidle, Ernest T Takafuji and David R Franz (eds), Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare (Washington, DC: The Borden Institute, 1997); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915: Stalemate’ in Jay Winter (ed), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 65–88; G. Fitzgerald, ‘Chemical warfare and medical response during World War I’, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 98, no. 4, 2008, pp. 611–625; Amos Fries and C. J. West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw Hill, 1921); Albert Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

1 O.S. Watkins, Methodist Report, cited in Joy Robert J.T., ‘Historical Aspects of Medical Defense Against Chemical Warfare,’ in Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, (Washington, DC: The Borden Institute, 1997) p. 90.

2 Oliver Lepick, La Grende Gueere chimique, 1914-1918, cited in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘1915: Stalemate’, in Jay Winter, (ed) The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 70.

3 B. LeRoy Evidence, 3 December 1919; NSW Acting Assistant Commissioner 22 December 1919; Medical Certificate 22 September 1920; NAA: C138 C138/2, C59810.

4 G. Fitzgerald, ‘Chemical warfare and medical response during World War I’, American Journal of Public Health, vol. 98, no. 4, 2008, p. 611; Watkins O. S., Methodist Report, cited in Amos Fries and C. J. West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw Hill, 1921), p. 13.

5 Doctor’s Report, 5 December 1924, NAA: C138, NC043642- 01 Rolfe.

6 ibid.