that federal troops thought contained part of their own army. And he was colorful.
Villa’s army attracted scores of reporters, and newspapers were filled with stories about his brilliance, his daring, and his humanity. By 1915, he had come to believe the stories. He thought he was invincible.
So when ObregOn, a middle-class pipsqueak from the state of Sonora, fortified Celayo, Villa decided to put him in his place. He got 25,000 of his best cavalrymen, Los Dorados (the Golden Ones) and launched them at OrbregOn’s fortifications. Singing La Cucuracha, the Dorados galloped at the Carrancista trenches. They never got there. The horses were caught in the miles of barbed wire, which formed entanglements in front of Celaya’s trenches, while ObregOn’s machine guns and quick-firing field pieces mowed them down. The Dorados fell back, then charged again. And again…and again. At the end of the day, when the remnants of the Golden Ones and their horses could barely stand, ObregOn brought his own cavalry out from behind the wire and swept them from the field.
Barbed wire, an American invention of the late 19th century, was intended for nothing more warlike than keeping cattle on their own pastures. It was quickly adopted by armies all over the world for non-peaceful purposes. In Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, the Spanish surrounded their forts with barbed wire fences. In South Africa, during the Boer War, the British had criss-crossed the veldt with barbed wire to limit the movements of mounted Afrikaner guerrillas. The wire was strung between bulletproof block houses, each block house within a long rifle shot of others. In the Russo-Japanese War, both sides used great tangles of barbed wire, which, as we saw in Chapter 27, could not be cleared by artillery fire.
Barbed wire, trenches, masses of artillery, and machine guns were what created the Western Front of World War I, the longest and bloodiest siege in history. It is still being used, although sometimes in a modified form, razor wire. Razor wire was invented by the Germans in World War I, because it could be produced more cheaply than standard barbed wire. Razor wire isn’t wire at all but long, thin strips of metal with sharp, jagged edges. It is cut from sheet metal, is harder to sever with standard wire cutters and deters as effectively as the original barbed wire. One recent improvement to razor wire is adding a fiber-optic core to the wire. Anyone tampering with the wire would break the core, thus indicating exactly where he was and providing a target for defenders’ fire.
Barbed wire can be used in several ways besides as a simple fence or fence top. One is in an ankle-high entanglement, which may be hidden in high grass.
It can be laid as “concertina wire,” in which troops place it in coils resembling the body of a concertina. Several rolls of concertina, some of the coils overlapping, may be used to make a particularly difficult barrier. Perhaps the most common way in carefully prepared field fortifications is in a wide entanglement with wire running in all directions and securely staked to the ground. In World War II, movies of troop training often showed soldiers falling on the wire while other soldiers crossed the wire on their backs. In real life, that seldom happened, if ever. The attackers’ object is to cross the wire without getting shot.
Anyone prancing over the top of an entanglement on the bodies of his comrades makes an excellent target. The prescribed method of crossing wire is to go under it, if possible on your back so you can see what to avoid or what to cut.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the enemy has planted land mines under the wire to make your crawl more interesting.
It is a testimony to the importance and prevalence of barbed wire that most modern bayonets are designed so that they can be used as wire cutters.
Chapter 34
Trouble in the Air: Poison Gas
April 22, 1915 had been a delightful day, warm and sunny — not all that common a spring day in Flanders. The war-ravaged village of Neuve-Chapelle was being held by French Algerian and Canadian troops. About 5 p.m. a gray-ish-green fog seemed to rise from the German trenches across no-man’s-land from the Allied line and drift toward the Algerians. The fog covered the Algerian trenches and flowed into them like water. Then the Canadians saw the North African riflemen running to the rear, coughing and choking. Their de-parture left a gap in the line 8,000 yards wide. A few minutes later, a bit of the fog drifted into the Canadian lines. The Canadians got a small taste of what the Algerians had been through, but fortunately, it was only a taste. They were able to hold their line and beat back the German infantry, who pushed forward as the green fog began dissipating.
This was the first use in modern times of deadly gas in war. A few months earlier, on January 3, 1915, the Germans had used tear gas on the Russian front, but it had had no effect on the Russians. The weather was so cold that the chemical in the gas shells had frozen instead of vaporizing. This may have been the reason the Germans made their second gas attack by opening cylinders when the wind was right: they could see whether the gas was vaporizing.
The gas this time was chlorine, a common chemical used in scores of compounds. Second-year high school students produce small quantities of chlorine gas in school labs. Engineers at I.G. Farben, the German chemical giant, worked out a way to produce vast amounts of chlorine gas, pack the liquid gas in cylinders, and release it from the trenches. It was the second scientific triumph for Farben and Germany’s leading industrial chemist, Fritz Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Earlier, Farben and Haber had invented a way to draw nitro-gen from the air, a development essential for Germany’s war effort, because the British Navy had cut off Germany’s usual source of nitrates, imports from Chile. Haber reportedly said the gas would “settle the hash of the wicked English.”
The Algerians took the rap for the British in the first gas attack. Two days later, the Canadians were the target of the second attack. On the 23rd, though, Canadian officers had identified the mysterious cloud as chlorine. Chlorine is soluble in water, so the Canadians tied wet cloths over their faces. That helped to mitigate the effects of the gas, and the Allies had moved more reinforcements up behind the Canadians. The line held, and Canadians, British, and French counterattacked. On May 1st, Haber’s invention was finally used against “the wicked English,” the First Battalion of the Dorset Regiment. Somehow, the Dorsets seemed not to have heard about the wet rag counter. When the men began to choke, many of them fled. A second lieutenant named Kestell-Cornish picked up a rifle one of the men of his platoon dropped and fired into the green cloud rolling toward him. The four men remaining from his platoon of 40 men joined him. Other British soldiers joined them. Once again, the Germans were beaten back, but the price the British paid was high. Ninety men died in the trenches. Some 207 were evacuated to the aid station. Of them, 46 died immediately; 12 others after long suffering.
Chlorine causes the lungs to fill with fluid, and the victim drowns. It was not the only gas in the German arsenal. The next one used was phosgene, a colorless gas that smells like new-mown hay and chokes its victim much more quickly than chlorine. Then there was mustard gas, a blistering agent. Mustard gas burns and blisters any tissue it touches — any exposed skin and also the lungs. It is extremely lethal, and many of the men it didn’t kill were crippled for life. Basil H. Liddell Hart, the British military commentator, was invalidated out of the army as a result of injuries from mustard gas. The Allies quickly countered the German gas offensive with gases of their own. The United States entered the race late but produced Lewisite, a byproduct of a search for synthetic rubber that out-blistered the blistering mustard gas.
One product all these gases had in common was that they were heavier than air. Instead of billowing into the upper atmosphere, they flowed to the lowest points on the ground. A veteran of World War I once told the author that he was more afraid of gas than any other weapon. He was in the Signal Corps, and his job was to help operate a telephone switchboard deep underground. His dugout was so deep, he explained, that he might not hear the gas alarm. Even if he did, the alarm might be too late. He wouldn’t have time to take off his head-phone and put on his gas mask before phosgene laid him low.
Gas was a true terror weapon — one that can cause fear out of proportion to its effectiveness. Actually, of the deaths on the Western Front, only about 1.1 percent were caused by gas, but fear of gas terrified whole nations on the eve of World War II. Governments tried to issue gas masks to their civilian populations, but there were far too few gas masks. Fortunately, no belligerent tried to gas an enemy’s civilians. Even if there were enough masks, they wouldn’t solve the problem. Mustard gas and Lewisite burn on contact with the skin, and the new nerve gases
