The Project Gutenberg eBook of Callinicus
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Callinicus
A defence of chemical warfare
Author: J. B. S. Haldane
Release date: May 30, 2024 [eBook #73730]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925
Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALLINICUS ***
CALLINICUS
A DEFENCE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE
OTHER VOLUMES IN THE
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future
_By J. B. S. Haldane_
ICARUS, or The Future of Science
_By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S._
THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST
_By F. G. Crookshank, M.D._
New light on Man and the Great Apes. _Fully Illustrated_
WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES
_By Prof. A. M. Low_
Wireless in war, crime, business, and pleasure. _With 4 Diagrams_
TANTALUS, or The Future of Man
_By F. C. S. Schiller_
Man has still the primitive animal passions. He will destroy himself,
unless....
THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS
_By Professor Patten_
Experiments on animals’ intelligence throw light on the evolution of
morals in men and animals.
LYSISTRATA, or Woman and the Future
_By Anthony M. Ludovici_
PERSEUS, or Of Dragons
_By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A._
NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes
_By Gerald Heard_
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
CALLINICUS
A DEFENCE OF CHEMICAL WARFARE
BY
J. B. S. HALDANE
_Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry,
Cambridge University_
_Author of “Daedalus or Science and the
Future,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVE.
Copyright, 1925
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CALLINICUS
The public mind has to a large extent reacted against the opinions
impressed on it during the war by official propaganda. Some of these
have been overcome by counter-propaganda in the Press and on the
platform; others have been dropped because they led to effects which,
though admirable during a war, were undesirable in peace-time. But,
as chemical warfare will not assume importance until the outbreak of
the next serious war, and figures on the programme of no party, people
still think about it as they were told to think by the newspapers
during the Great War.
Now, I am to some extent a chemist, so I can no more be expected to be
impartial in my estimate of the value of chemistry than a politician
or a clergyman can be expected to give an unbiassed view of the value
of politics or religion. I can only plead that, unlike the average
clergyman or politician, I have warned my audience in advance, and
shall attempt (though no doubt vainly) to be impartial.
A few of my hearers hold the view that, while war in itself is a noble
occupation, the use of poisonous gas is an innovation as cruel as it
is unsoldierly. The majority are probably pacifists in the sense that
they prefer almost any peace to almost any war, support the League of
Nations or other devices for the prevention of international strife,
and look askance at preparations for future warfare, more particularly
for future chemical warfare. If so, I certainly share their objection
to war, but I doubt whether by objecting to it we are likely to avoid
it in future, however lofty our motives or disinterested our conduct.
War will be prevented only by a scientific study of its causes, such
as has prevented most epidemic diseases. For many centuries people
had guessed that epidemic diseases constituted a punishment for
human misconduct of some kind. They tried to prevent them by prayer
and almsgiving. Christians gave up washing, Hindus liberated rats
captured during plague-epidemics. Religious orders and priests of the
church gave the most magnificent examples of self-sacrifice in times
of pestilence. But that was not the way in which pestilences can be
prevented. Besides good intentions, a special type of accurate thinking
was needed. We have not yet made a scientific study of the causes of
war, and, until we do, may expect more wars. If we are to have more
wars, I prefer that my country should be on the winning side. That is
why I am speaking on warfare to my fellow-countrymen.
In general, pacifists are a very great military advantage to Britain.
On the outbreak of war the large majority of them become intensely
patriotic, whereas beforehand they lead our own military authorities
and also those of our potential allies and enemies to underestimate
our strength. This keeps us out of some wars, and leads to our showing
unsuspected power in others. After a few years of war, when the
originally bellicose politicians like Lord Lansdowne are getting tired,
ex-pacifists like Lloyd George and Pitt have just got into their
stride. The national staying-power is thus greatly increased. I need
hardly remark that future governments will not enter on war without
first persuading the vast majority of the people of its justice. This
appears to be a relatively simple process under modern conditions.
At the present moment, however, pacifists are combining with the less
competent soldiers in an attempt to check the progress of chemical
warfare. This I believe to be neither in our national nor in the
international interest.
Until 1915 the soldier’s business was to push or throw pieces of
metal at the enemy. Various devices had been employed for throwing
them fast or far, and some of them threw other pieces on arrival
at their destination, thanks, in the main, to the genius of the
unforgotten Major-General Shrapnel. It is true that early in the
eighth century A.D. the appropriately named Syrian Callinicus had
prolonged the life of the Eastern Roman Empire for another 750 years
and saved a large part of Christendom from Mahommedan domination
by his invention of “Greek fire,” an inflammable liquid which was,
however, later superseded by gunpowder. In the fifteenth century the
defenders of Belgrade against the Turks had hit upon a similar device,
under the direct inspiration, it was claimed, of the Holy Ghost, but
these weapons had fallen into desuetude, their effect being largely
psychological.
Chemical warfare had been so far foreseen by statesmen that in 1907
the signatories of the Hague Conference agreed to renounce the use of
projectiles the sole object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating
or harmful gases. They were thus debarred from using lachrymatory
gas, the most humane weapon ever invented; but permitted to discharge
gas from cylinders on the ground, an exceedingly cruel practice. This
regulation was well meant, but the path to August, 1914, was paved
with good intentions. In 1914 none of the great powers had made any
preparation for poison-gas warfare, and it was not till April 22nd,
1915, more than eight months after the beginning of the war, that the
Germans began its use.
During the war, twenty-five different poisonous weapons were employed.
Of these only three are gases at ordinary temperatures, and can be
discharged from cylinders in which they are stored under pressure. The
remainder are liquids which gradually evaporate, yielding a poisonous
vapour, or solids which are poisonous in the form of smoke.
These poisonous substances so far used fall into four classes
according to their effect on men. First come gases and vapours which
are poisonous when breathed, but have no effect on the skin, and
affect the eyes or nose only when present in concentrations which are
poisonous to the lungs. They can all be kept out by respirators, and
were of military value only against unprotected troops, or in local
surprise-action. This group, which included chlorine and phosgene, are
probably almost as obsolete as muzzle-loading cannon.
A second group are poisonous only in very high concentrations, but
irritate the eyes when present in amounts so small that one part in
five million may render a man blind with weeping in a few seconds.
There is no evidence, so far as I know, that anyone was killed or even
permanently blinded by these substances; but they had a great momentary
effect. They can be kept out by respirators, or even goggles.
The third group of poisonous smokes, mostly arsenic compounds, were
little developed during the war. They are, however, weapons of very
great efficiency, and it is well known that they would have been used
by the British at any rate on a very extensive scale in 1919.[A] In
small amounts, these smokes merely make one sneeze. In somewhat larger
amounts they cause pain of the most terrific character in the head and
chest. The pain in the head is described as like that caused when fresh
water gets into the nose when bathing, but infinitely more severe.
These symptoms are accompanied by the most appalling mental distress
and misery. Some soldiers poisoned by these substances had to be
prevented from committing suicide; others temporarily went raving mad,
and tried to burrow into the ground to escape from imaginary pursuers.
And yet within forty-eight hours the large majority had recovered, and
practically none became permanent invalids. These substances, when
in the form of smoke, will penetrate any of the respirators used in
the late war, though the British box-respirator would stop all but a
little of them in the concentrations then used. In future they will
probably be used in much larger concentrations and in finer particles
than those formed by the German smoke-shells. It is extraordinarily
difficult to produce a respirator which will completely stop very fine
smoke, for the following reason. In a gas the molecules (or ultimate
particles) are moving very rapidly, with speeds of several hundred
yards per second, continually colliding and rebounding. A gas molecule,
therefore, will probably hit the sides of a fairly narrow passage
through which it is drawn. But a smoke particle is moving at a speed
measured in inches per second, and is far less likely to hit the wall
of the respirator, and be held by its absorbent surface. If we try to
make the passages through which air is drawn very narrow, as by sucking
in our air through cotton-wool (which will stop most smokes), we find
that we have created an appalling resistance to breathing. There is
an electrical method of removing smoke-particles completely, but it
would probably more than double the weight of respirators, and does not
appear to be either water-proof or fool-proof.
[A] The American “Lewisite,” of which so much was heard in 1918 and
1919, is a substance of this class.
The fourth group, of blistering gases, contains only one substance
used during the war, dichlorethyl sulphide, or “mustard gas.” This is
really a liquid, whose vapour is not only poisonous when breathed, but
blisters any part of the skin with which it comes into contact even.
To take an example, a drop of the liquid was put on a piece of paper
and left for five minutes on a man’s sleeve. The vapour penetrated his
coat and woollen shirt, causing a blister the effects of which lasted
six weeks. And yet evaporation is so slow that ground contaminated by
the liquid may remain dangerous for a week. Mustard gas caused more
casualties to the British than all other chemical weapons put together.
Such are the weapons which chemistry has given us. It is often asked
why chemists cannot produce something which will put our foes
comfortably to sleep and allow us to take them prisoners. The answer
is that such substances exist, but that in small amounts they are
harmless, in large amounts fatal. It is only over a moderate range of
concentrations that their effect is merely stupefying. One has only to
think of the familiar case of chloroform vapour, and the skill required
to give neither too much nor too little.
It would be logical to speak of explosives under the heading of
chemical warfare, but there is curiously little chance of explosives
becoming any more effective. We know fairly well the maximum amount of
energy which can possibly be got out of a chemical action, and, though
explosives might perhaps be made which were about twice as destructive
as our best (or worst) to-day, they would probably be far less stable,
and therefore less safe to their users.
Of course, if we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist
inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I
do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would
save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation. But the
remoteness of the day when we shall use these forces may best be judged
by an analogy. Some thousands of years ago someone first realized that
the sun, moon and stars were not mere bodies as large as a plate or a
house, but very large, and moving very fast. It was an obvious idea
that their motions might be exploited in some way. Wise men observed
them and hoped, for example, to increase the probability of success
in their own enterprises by beginning them when Jupiter was in the
ascendant. These attempts were unsuccessful, though far more valuable
to humanity than most of the methods successfully employed for the
same purposes, such as fraud, violence and corruption. They led to
astronomy, and so to all modern physics. We now know that the only
probable way of harnessing the kinetic energy of the heavenly bodies is
to employ tidal power to create electric currents. But five thousand
years ago “hitching one’s wagon to a star” was a reasonable project and
not a poetic metaphor. The reason we cannot do it is a simple matter
of scale. And the reason why we cannot utilize subatomic phenomena is
just the same. We cannot make apparatus small enough to disintegrate or
fuse atomic nuclei, any more than we can make it large enough to reach
to the moon. We can only bombard them with particles of which perhaps
one in a million hit, which is like firing keys at a safe-door from a
machine-gun a mile away in an attempt to open it. We do occasionally
open it, but the process is very uneconomical. It may be asked why we
cannot bring our machine-gun nearer, or improve our aim. To do this
we should require to construct apparatus on the same infinitesimal
scale as the structure of the chemical atom. Now we can arrange atoms
into various patterns. For example, we can arrange carbon, hydrogen
and oxygen atoms in patterns which constitute the molecules of sugar,
glycerine, or alcohol at will. This is called chemical synthesis. We
have been doing it by rule-of-thumb methods for thousands of years,
and are just beginning to learn a little about it. But even chemical
molecules are much too large for our purposes. We can no more ask a
chemist to build our apparatus than expect a theatrical scene-painter
or a landscape-gardener to do us a miniature. We know very little about
the structure of the atom and almost nothing about how to modify it.
And the prospect of constructing such an apparatus seems to me to be
so remote that, when some successor of mine is lecturing to a party
spending a holiday on the moon, it will still be an unsolved (though
not, I think, an ultimately insoluble) problem.
To see how chemical weapons are likely to be used in future we must
study their employment in the late war. Lachrymatory gas was only once
used under ideal conditions――by the Germans in the Argonne in 1915.
They captured a fairly extensive French trench system and about 2,400
prisoners, almost all unwounded, but temporarily blind. When they
gave the number of prisoners, the French authorities not unnaturally
protested that this number was practically equal to the total of their
casualties. And this was quite true. The French were unprotected. They
were deluged with shells giving off a vapour which temporarily blinded
them. They could not even run away. The Germans walked across, removed
their rifles, and formed them up in columns which marched back, each
led by a German in goggles. In order to make future wars humane it
would only be necessary to introduce the two following rules:――
1. No goggles or other eye protection shall be worn;
2. No shells shall be used containing any other substances save
ethyl iodo-acetate (or other lachrymatory compound) and a small
bursting charge.
Certainly it is unlikely that such rules will ever be adopted, but I
do contend that to forbid the use of such substances is a piece of
sentimentalism as cruel as it is ridiculous.
Gases of the first group were used in clouds discharged from cylinders,
sometimes on a front of several miles. They probably caused at least
20,000 casualties among unprotected or inadequately protected British
troops. At least a quarter of these died, and that very painfully, in
many cases after a struggle for breath lasting several days. On the
other hand, of those who did not die almost all recovered completely,
and the symptoms of the few who became permanent invalids were mainly
nervous. Apart, however, from the extreme terror and agitation produced
by the gassing of uneducated people, I regard the type of wound
produced by the average shells as, on the whole, more distressing than
the pneumonia caused by chlorine or phosgene. Besides being wounded,
I have been buried alive, and on several occasions in peacetime I
have been asphyxiated to the point of unconsciousness. The pain and
discomfort arising from the other experiences were utterly negligible
compared with those produced by a good septic shell-wound.
The first German cloud-gas attack was in April, 1915, the last in
August, 1916, though the British continued them until the end of that
year. They gradually became more and more ineffective as the efficiency
of the respirators used on both sides increased. The first few German
attacks were very well conducted, so far as the liberation of the gas
was concerned, as they were arranged by Haber, an extremely competent
chemist, who afterwards supervised their production of explosives.
On the other hand, the German respirators were bad to begin with;
and later on were not so good as the British. This was, apparently,
because the most competent physiologist in Germany with any knowledge
of breathing was a Jew. This fact was quite well known in German
physiological circles, but apparently his race prevented the military
authorities from employing him. The result was that they were unable
to follow up their gas-attacks at all closely, but had to wait till
the cloud had passed off, by which time resistance was again possible.
That was how the Germans paid for anti-Semitism. It is very probable
that it lost them the war, as never again, not even in March, 1918, had
they as complete a gap in the Franco-British Western front as during
the first gas-attack in April, 1915. It was, indeed, fortunate for the
Germans that the Russians were still more anti-Semitic than themselves.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews volunteered for service in 1914.
They were mostly refused, and in no case granted commissions. They then
proceeded to turn their combative instincts into other channels, to the
no small advantage of the Germans. If one goes to what is, perhaps, the
opposite extreme from Russia, one finds the army of the world’s most
democratic nation, Australia, commanded by a Jew, Monash, and notes
with interest that the Germans regarded the Australian troops as, on
the whole, the most formidable, man for man, of all their opponents.
The other reason why the cloud-gas attacks were indecisive was that
the Germans had relatively few reserves to put into the gap they made.
Their reserves in April, 1915, were in Poland. If they had trusted
their scientific men they could certainly have captured Calais and
Boulogne, and probably have annihilated the British Army.
In addition to clouds released from cylinders in the trenches,
gas-cylinders were fired from trench-mortars, some hundreds at a
time, into the enemy’s lines, producing a sudden and dense cloud of
gas before the men had time to put on their respirators. But these
bombardments, though they caused many casualties, were never decisive,
as the cloud-attacks would have been, but for causes which we have
discussed.
Mustard gas is a very different thing. It was never used to force a
decision by breaking the enemy’s lines, but to cause him casualties
and deny him the use of ground. For, after a given area has been well
sprayed with dichlorethyl sulphide from bursting shells for some time,
it is death to occupy it without a mask, and the vapour may blister
the skin, while anyone touching the ground will be certain of a very
serious blister. Someone placed a drop of the liquid on the chair of
the director of the British chemical warfare department. He ate his
meals off the mantelpiece for a month. The most interesting thing,
however, about mustard gas is that, though it caused 150,000 casualties
in the British Army alone, less than 4,000 of these (or 1 in 40) died,
while only about 700 (or 1 in every 200) became permanently unfit. Yet
the Washington Conference has solemnly agreed that the signatory powers
are not to use this substance against one another, though, of course,
they will use such humane weapons as bayonets, shells, and incendiary
bombs.
It is worth while attempting to analyse the reasons for this rather
curious decision. First, perhaps, we must put the complete and shameful
ignorance of most of the politicians and many of the soldiers who took
part in the Conference. Their ideas of gas warfare were apparently
drawn from the descriptions of the great German cloud-gas attacks
of 1915, which killed at least 1 in 4 of their casualties, and were
written up on a large scale for recruiting and political purposes.
But it is the business of politicians and soldiers, conceivably even
of journalists, to know the truth about such matters before coming to
decisions, or even impelling others to come to decisions about them.
To this ignorance, however, there was joined one of the most hideous
forms of sentimentalism which has ever supported evil upon earth――the
attachment of the professional soldier to cruel and obsolete killing
machines. I would remind you of the conduct of the Chevalier Bayard,
whom his contemporary soldiers described as _sans peur et sans
reproche_. To captured knights, and even bowmen, he was the soul of
courtesy, but musketeers or other users of gunpowder who fell into
his hands were invariably put to death. It is worth remembering that,
until the invention of gunpowder, fighting had for many centuries been
remarkably safe for everyone who could afford a good suit of armour,
while the abominable arquebus and its descendants have saved the
remnants of Christendom from the Turks, Mongols, and other paynims who
had by Bayard’s time successfully overwhelmed one half of its original
extent.
I remember an excellent example of Bayardism in the war. A Turkish
airman had developed considerable flair for shooting down our
observation balloons. A British officer sent up one of these latter
with a large cargo of gun-cotton, and blew up the Turk in question. For
this deed he was severely reprimanded by the local officer commanding
R.A.F. for unsportsmanlike conduct. This gentleman, doubtless, felt
little objection to bombing, for example, Turkish transport columns,
consisting mainly of non-combatants and animals, incapable of
retaliating. (One may remark that between wounds and thirst perhaps
30,000 Turkish transport animals perished during our final victory in
Palestine.) But he objected to airmen being killed except by other
airmen. I, fighting in the mud beneath them, and exposed to the
bombs of both sides (I was severely wounded by one of our own), felt
differently. An attempt by the professional soldiers to stereotype
the art of war into the channels which correspond to the ideas of
1914 might lead to a future rather different from that which I shall
venture to predict, a future in which the military organizations of the
world were overthrown by the exponents of some other mode of thinking,
employing all the resources of science, and fighting “dirty.” The
opponents of the present world-order may, therefore, welcome Bayardism
in their governments.
Meanwhile, the Bayardists have nobbled a curious assortment of allies
in their so far successful attempt to prevent the humanization of
warfare. First are a number of out-and-out pacifists, who object to
all war, and apparently hope to make it more difficult by restricting
the means of fighting allowed. Some, of course, genuinely believe
that gaseous weapons are more cruel than solid ones. Those who know
the facts seem to me to be the victims of loose-thinking. With them
are associated a group of sentimentalists who appear to me definitely
to be the Scribes and Pharisees of our age. These people, who are to
be found in all political parties and most religious and irreligious
sects, are generally willing (after a decent interval) to accept any
application of science which appears to them profitable, or any social
institution (such as war) which is hallowed by use and wont. They salve
their consciences for such behaviour by attacking, in the name of their
god or their ideals, every novelty, whether in thought or in action,
which presents any loophole. In particular they are distinguished by a
ferocious opposition to, and contempt for, any attempt at the solution
of human problems by honest and simple intellectual effort. Mustard gas
kills one man for every forty it puts out of action; shells kill one
for every three; but their god who compromised with high explosives has
not yet found time to adapt himself to chemical warfare.
More respectable in every way are the candid reactionaries, like Lord
Cecil, who believe in their hearts that in abandoning traditional
religion of the medieval type for scientific thought, man has
definitely chosen the wrong path, and who fight with their eyes open
against its application. These people have a case, and are prepared to
argue it. They would honestly desire to give up the gunpowder of Lazare
Carnot for the sword of Bayard. But one cannot congratulate them on
their associates.
And behind these follow like sheep the predestined victims of the
next war, the peoples of the civilized nations who will undergo the
extremity of suffering rather than think for themselves.
How profound and unreasoning the objection of the military mind to
chemical warfare is can best be judged by one simple fact. About
three years ago the British regular army gave up the instruction of
every soldier in defence against hostile gas. For one thing, speed in
adjusting respirators being of more importance than elegance, it did
not form the basis of a satisfactory drill, like those curious relics
of eighteenth century musketry which still occupy so much of the time
of our recruits. But the truth no doubt was that the officers did
not like that sort of thing. The chemical and physiological ideas
which underlie gas warfare require a certain effort to understand, and
they do not arise in the study of a sport, as is the case with those
underlying shooting and motor transport. One of the first acts of the
late Government was to reinstate some modicum of anti-gas instruction
in the normal training of the Army. But it may be hoped that this
pernicious and demoralizing teaching will once more be dropped with the
return to power of one of the gentlemen’s parties.
Personally, I must confess that I would go very much further than the
Government, and seriously consider the provision of gas-masks for the
population of London and other large towns, and the instruction of
school-children in their use. If this is not done, there is at least
the possibility of a disaster of the very first magnitude at an early
stage in the next war. It is also one of the very few military measures
which could hardly be regarded as provocative by the most ardent of
foreign militarists or British pacifists. At the present moment,
however, this need does not arise, as the French, who alone could bomb
London, have very slight facilities for making mustard gas.
It is interesting to compare the attitude of our militarists to
defence against gas with their attitude before the war to a possible
German invasion. The fear of the latter, although the naval experts
always stated that it was impossible on any serious scale, had been
so impressed on the military mind by the propaganda of the National
Service League and its like before the war that, from 1914 to 1918
hundreds of thousands of troops were quite unnecessarily kept in
England. There however, this very fundamental difference between a
defence against invasion and a defence against gas. The one would
increase the importance of the professional soldier: the other would
not. One does not need to be a very profound psychologist to see in
this fact one reason why the military authorities dropped anti-gas
training, and why I, being a biochemist and therefore a person of the
type who would become important if gas war returned, am advocating its
extension. As to which of us is justified, I would suggest that it
is more likely to-day that poisonous gas will be used against British
soldiers or civilians in future wars than it was in 1912 that Britain
would be invaded by the Germans.
We have seen that a case can be made out for gas as a weapon on
humanitarian grounds, based on the very small proportion of killed to
casualties from gas in the war, and especially during its last year.
Against this may be urged the probability that future research will
produce other gases or smokes which, as weapons, will be as cruel
as, or more cruel than, the chlorine and phosgene used in 1915 and
1916. The answer to this is quite simple. First, as regards gases or
vapours. Only a limited number of chemical substances are appreciably
volatile, and of their vapours only a small proportion are poisonous.
Now every chemical substance has a definite molecular weight. Those
with a small molecular weight, _i.e._, whose molecules are relatively
light, are on the whole the most volatile, _i.e._, go most easily
into vapour. Now the large majority of the possible volatile chemical
substances of small molecular weight, and therefore relatively simple
chemical composition, are already known. Mustard gas, for example, was
discovered and its properties described in 1886. There are probably
substances of high molecular weight whose dense vapours are even more
poisonous than mustard gas. But the charcoal of our respirators has the
property of adsorbing heavy molecules of vapour quite independently of
their chemical composition. It is, therefore, somewhat unlikely, though
not, of course, impossible, that any very poisonous vapour will ever
be found which will go through a mask impermeable to mustard gas or
chlorine. It is, to my mind, far more probable that skin irritants may
be discovered which are even more unpleasant than mustard gas.
The question of smokes is more serious. It was the hope of the
producers of irritant smokes that they would penetrate the gas-masks
in sufficient amounts to cause sneezing and force their victims to
remove their masks, thus exposing themselves to greater concentrations
of smoke and to poisonous vapours liberated along with the smoke.
This was the German view when they introduced the “Blue Cross” shell
in July, 1917. Fortunately, by that time our defence against gas and
smoke was extremely good, and we had foreseen the smoke menace and
introduced, between April and June, 1917, a filter which effectively
stopped it in the concentrations then met in the field. It is not,
however, at all unlikely that concentrations of smoke will be produced
in the future which will penetrate our present masks. If our anti-gas
measures are sufficiently neglected the consequences may, of course, be
very serious.
It would seem likely that the chemical weapons of the future will
not be so very unlike those of the past. The main efforts of the
soldier who uses them will be devoted, first, to blistering his
enemy, secondly, to tiring him out by forcing him to wear a respirator
continuously, which, of course, enormously hampers him for doing
anything else.
In the Great War mustard gas and sensory irritant smokes were not used
as the principal weapons of attack or defence, because the smokes
would not incapacitate everyone in a given area, though they would
make them keep their respirators on. Mustard gas, on the other hand,
could make any area absolutely untenable by the defenders, but the
vapour persisted for so many days that it could not be occupied by the
attackers either. It was mainly used to produce casualties a few days
or weeks before an attack on the units which would be defending, and
to protect the flank of an offensive against counter-attack. Thus in
April, 1918, Armentières, the original Northern limit of the German
attack in Flanders, was so heavily shelled with “mustard” that the
gutters in the streets were reported to be running with it. The Germans
themselves received orders forbidding them to enter its ruins for a
fortnight.
Nevertheless, mustard gas is so adequate a weapon that the attempt
will almost certainly be made to use it not merely for making ground
untenable for both sides, but for gaining it from the enemy. For this
purpose the following methods suggest themselves. First, attempts might
be made to protect troops completely from the effect of gas on their
skins by encasing them in airtight overalls and gloves. These were
used with a certain amount of success by machine-gunners in the Great
War, but would hardly be practicable for attackers, who would, except
perhaps in winter, die of heat-stroke if encased in such apparatus.
Air-tight tanks with adequate arrangements for filtering the incoming
air are probably more hopeful, as mustard gas will not poison motors as
it does men. (The motors would, of course, have their own air-supply,
as it would hardly be practicable to filter air in the quantities
needed by them.) To support the tanks and to tackle specially protected
machine-gunners use will probably be made of immune infantry. One
attack of gas-poisoning, whether by the lungs or skin, produces no
immunity to a second attack――in fact, it generally increases the
sensitivity of the victim. If a vapour is discovered against which
immunity can be conferred, it will be the most effective weapon in
history as long as its secret is kept. On the other hand, some people
are naturally immune. The American Army authorities made a systematic
examination of the susceptibility of large numbers of recruits.
They found that there was a very resistant class, comprising 20% of
the white men tried, but no less than 80% of the negroes. This as
intelligible, as the symptoms of mustard gas, blistering, and sun-burn
are very similar, and negroes are pretty well immune to sun-burn. It
looks therefore as if, after a slight preliminary test, it should
be possible to obtain coloured troops who would all be resistant to
mustard gas blistering in concentrations harmful toward most white men.
Enough resistant whites are available to officer them.
One sees, then, the possibility of warfare on somewhat the following
lines:――
Heavy concentrations of artillery would keep an area say thirty miles
in length and ten in depth continuously sprayed with mustard gas.
After allowing, say, two days for the development of blisters, the
gassing of the positions within two or three miles of the front line is
discontinued, but a long-range bombardment, especially of roads, goes
on. Suddenly, behind the usual barrage of high explosive shells appears
a line of tanks supported by negroes in gas-masks. They meet with but
little opposition in the area still reeking of gas, and occupy the
hostile lines to a depth of two or three miles. A counter-attack, even
if successful, involves concentration in an area under gas-bombardment
and enormous casualties from blistering. The only satisfactory
counter-attack would be from the air. In this way the side possessing a
big superiority of mustard gas should be in a position to advance two
or three miles a day.
This kind of tactics was impossible during the Great War for a very
simple reason. There was not enough mustard gas. The Germans used a
quite surprisingly complicated process for its manufacture. When we
decided to follow their example, one of our chemists (a Cambridge
man, I am glad to say) hit on a vastly cheaper and speedier method of
manufacture. Unfortunately, our first supplies only arrived in the
field in September, 1918. There is reason to think that the knowledge
that we were at last about to develop gas and smoke warfare on a large
scale had a good deal to do with the acceptance by the Germans of the
armistice conditions.
The reason why we did not use mustard gas earlier is also simple and
rather instructive.
In 1915 a British chemist proposed to a General who was concerned with
such questions that the British should use dichlorethyl sulphide.
“Does it kill?” asked the General. “No,” he was told, “but it will
disable enormous numbers of the enemy temporarily.” “That is no good
to us,” said the man of blood; “we want something that will kill.” It
is interesting to find how completely the ideas of this worthy soldier
as to the object of war coincided with those of the average intelligent
child of five years old. I may remind you that Clausewitz held the view
that the object of war was to impose one’s will upon the enemy. This
idea would, however, appear to have been too abstract, too complicated,
or too humanitarian for the British military mind. At any rate, it
had its fill of killing. It was not, therefore, until the Germans had
demonstrated upon the persons of some tens of thousands of British
soldiers (we had 14,000 casualties, though with only 400 deaths,
during the first three weeks of the mustard gas war) that there was
something to be said for a weapon that was not primarily designed to
kill, that we began to use it.
It seems, then, that mustard gas would enable an army to gain ground
with far less killed on either side than the methods used in the late
war, and would tend to establish a war of movement leading to a fairly
rapid decision, as in the campaigns of the past. It would not much
upset the present balance of power, Germany’s chemical industry being
counterpoised by French negro troops. Indians may be expected to be
nearly as immune as negroes.
And clearly, the more war is complicated, the more unimportant become
semi-civilized powers, such as Turkey and Russia, even as allies. The
Turks were seldom capable of organizing a combined attack by any number
greater than a battalion, or a shoot by anything larger than a battery.
Yet small groups of them fought very well, and their individual guns
made very good shooting. But gas-warfare demands organization, both
of attack and defence――attack, because one tries to keep up a certain
concentration of vapour over a whole large area rather than to knock
out given groups of men; defence, because respirators and discipline in
wearing them must be perfect. I need not say that in the Great War our
military leaders strongly deprecated the use of gas against the Turks,
on the ground, I believe, that the latter were “gentlemen.” They showed
their gentlemanly character by such acts as the killing of 45% of the
prisoners taken at Kut-el-Amara, not to mention some millions of Greeks
and Armenians who had the misfortune to be Christians. But they never
used gas: so perhaps they may have preserved their quality of gentlemen
in the eyes of our Bayardists.
I claim, then, that the use of mustard gas in war on the largest
possible scale would render it less expensive of life and property,
shorter, and more dependent on brains rather than numbers. We are
often told the exact opposite, that it will make it more barbarous
and indecisive, and lead to the wiping out of the population of whole
cities. Let us consider for a moment this latter allegation. Can
aeroplanes do more against a hostile town with gas than with high
explosive and incendiary bombs? We were threatened with gas bombs
during the war, and certain London pharmacists made very large sums by
the sale of alleged anti-gas masks. It could be, and was, urged at the
time that as the carrying of these curious objects seemed to calm the
civilian population in a moment of national emergency, they served a
useful purpose. The same argument has been brought forward on behalf
of amulets and other pious frauds sold in the name of religion. In the
case of the above gas-masks, they inspired such faith (for they had a
better finish than the official pattern and looked like one’s idea of
what a gas-mask ought to be) that some thousands were sent out by fond
relatives to soldiers at the front, a number of whom in consequence
perished miserably.
Was there anything in the gas-bomb scare? In the first place, many
otherwise well-informed people have very erroneous views as to the
poisonousness of gases. Gases are dangerous in the laboratory or
factory if they kill without giving warning by odour and irritation;
but gases of this kind, such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen arsenide,
have to be present, in order to kill, in concentrations which cannot
practically be produced in the open. The insidiousness of hydrogen
arsenide has, however, so alarmed chemists that a tradition persists
of a man having been killed by a single bubble of it, while they are
so afraid of smelling carbon monoxide that it is generally stated
to be inodorous. Besides errors due to this cause, there were errors
of arithmetic. In one calculation which was made to show how easily
London could be poisoned a decimal point went astray in one place!
As the calculation was concerned with volumes of gas, the result
came out as 10 metres cubed or 1,000 cubic metres, in place of one.
For this reason it appeared that ten aeroplanes could do the damage
which would actually have required ten thousand. However, most of
the prophets of disaster from gas-bombs made no calculation at all.
Let us try to make a rough one. On the nights of March 11th to March
14th, 1918, just before the great offensive of March 21st, the Germans
fired 150,000 mustard gas shells into the villages and valleys of
the Cambrai salient, an area of about twenty square miles, the same
as that of central London. This caused 4,500 casualties, of whom only
fifty died (all of them because they took off their respirators too
soon). The area was not evacuated. In central London, if the population
had had gas-masks, the casualties would have been perhaps ten times
greater. But we have to compare this hypothetical air-raid, not with
any raid that actually occurred, but with a bombardment of 150,000
high-explosive shells or their equivalent in bombs. This would hardly
have left a house in central London untouched, and the dead would have
been numbered not in hundreds, but in tens of thousands. Such an attack
would have required the visits on repeated nights of something like
1,000 aeroplanes. Such a number is not yet a practical possibility.
We are, perhaps, inclined to underestimate the potentialities of
town-bombing with high explosive and incendiary bombs. In London, for
example, there were never too many big fires started at any given time
for the fire-brigades to deal with. An attack by ten or twenty times as
many aeroplanes as ever bombed London simultaneously might well ring
round a given area fairly completely with wrecked streets or burning
houses, in which case most of the buildings and a good proportion of
the inhabitants would perish. In one or two air-raids on other towns
it seems probable that the Germans were not far from outstripping the
capacities of the fire-brigades and producing very large conflagrations.
The reasons why explosives are more likely to be effective than
poison on a town are as follows. Houses are far more vulnerable to
explosives than earthworks, and do far more damage to their occupants
in collapsing, besides being inflammable. And, on the other hand, they
contain far more refuges which are nearly gas-proof. A shut room on a
first or second floor would be nearly proof against gas released in the
neighbourhood if it had not got a lighted fire to drag contaminated air
from outside into it. Moreover, civilians could, and would, rapidly
evacuate an area which has been heavily soaked with mustard gas,
whereas soldiers have to stay on at the risk of their lives.
Gas-bombs would certainly be far less effective than high-explosives
on a town whose inhabitants were provided with respirators, probably
even if they were unprovided. But, so long as London is undefended
in this respect, it constitutes a standing temptation to any power
desirous of making this kind of experiment. Judging from experience,
there is no doubt that a gas or smoke attack from the air would
occasion a first-class panic. The introduction of each new chemical
weapon produced great terror, as did even such a militarily unimportant
(though cruel) weapon as the _Flammenwerfer_ (flame-projector). This
was certainly due to ignorance. The French Colonial troops who were
caught in the first cloud-gas attack were far more frightened than the
Canadians, and appear to have had far more casualties, although they
mostly ran away: which the Canadians did not. For the Canadians made
some attempts to improvise respirators, and almost any damp fabric
will reduce the concentration of chlorine passing through it to half
or less. They also breathed less because they did not run. As a matter
of fact, a most efficient respirator against chlorine (though whether
against mustard gas I do not know) can be made by knocking the bottom
off a bottle, filling it with loose earth, placing its neck in the
mouth, and breathing through it. Very great alarm was caused by the
first mustard gas bombardments in France, as no one had ever seen
anything resembling the blisters it caused. But very soon familiarity
bred contempt, or even liking, for aeroplanes dropped sheaves of
pamphlets explaining how any soldier tired of the war could become
a casualty without danger either of death or detection by allowing
earth contaminated with mustard gas to touch the skin or the clothing.
A good many wound-stripes were earned by this simple and up-to-date
method, though, as we had the superiority in the air and the German
soldiers were both more tired and more confiding than our own, the
German casualties from this cause were probably still greater. But let
us tell our civilian population before and not after they are attacked
with blistering gases that the blisters produced are considerably
less dangerous than measles. It was predicted during the war that the
survivors of lung-irritant gases would get consumption, while those
burned by mustard gas would develop cancer. This has not happened, but
it is the sort of rumour that easily starts.
For, after all, our greatest weapon in chemical warfare is not gas,
but education, and education of all classes. By education I mean a
process which puts people in general in touch with the thought of the
abler minds of their own and past times, whether in literature or art,
in science, mathematics, or music. An educated man knows enough of
science, for example, to be able to distinguish a gas from a smoke,
or a Grindell-Matthews from a Marconi, even if he is not thoroughly
versed in the kinetic theory of gases or the laws governing radiation
through the ether. Educated men are rather rare. It will be worth
while giving some examples of how our uneducated politicians and
soldiers failed to adjust themselves to the scientific thought of their
contemporaries.
In April, 1915, a relatively educated member of the Government got
hold of a physiologist, whose name I suppress as he is a modest man.
He found a rather curious state of affairs. On the _Emden_, a German
cruiser captured in the Indian Ocean, a German sailor had been found in
possession of a pad of lint with tapes to tie in front of his mouth. It
did not even cover his nose, and, though it might or might not have
been of some value against smoke, it was of none at all against gas.
There was, however, a very prevalent belief at that time, and may be
still, for all that I know, that German men of science were vastly
superior to British. It is perfectly true that there are more of them,
but I think that their average attainments in the last forty years have
been, if anything, slightly below those of our own. So hypnotized,
however, were some of the authorities in this country by this theory
that it was being proposed to issue these articles to our troops. After
pointing out their uselessness, the physiologist in question was rushed
over to France in a destroyer, along with a chemist. He identified the
gas used by the Germans as chlorine. On his return, he got a cylinder
of that gas, let some into an air-tight chamber, and devised a rough
respirator which would keep most of it out, trying various possible
methods on himself. On his return to the War Office, rather short
of breath from the chlorine he had breathed, he found to his horror
that the appeal to the women of England for home-made respirators had
been issued. Their design was apparently based on the captured German
one, which had very probably been made on the _Emden_. As they were
quite useless, he secured a promise that they would not be sent out
to France. Things were not made easier by the opinion held in high
military quarters that, offence being more important than defence, the
great thing was to reply to the Germans by gassing them. As, however,
this could not be done in less than five months, while respirators
could easily be made in a week, it led to delay at a somewhat vital
moment. Finally every important decision taken in England had to pass
through the hands of Lord Kitchener, who naturally had not time to
weigh the arguments at all fully. It is not my intention to attack Lord
Kitchener: that the war could be carried on at all under such a system
proves that he was a great man. But, if he had managed to delegate some
of his powers, he would have proved himself a greater. As the result of
all this delay, a great many of the first respirators had to be made in
France.
Convalescent soldiers and the nuns in a convent on the Mont des Cats
were conscripted to make respirators, which, if inelegant, were fairly
efficient. Unfortunately, consignments of “Women of England” and other
home-made respirators were continually appearing in France, and every
now and then led to a battalion or so being wiped out. I am able to
give these details, because at this time I, who before and after was an
honest infantry bombing-officer, made my brief incursion into chemical
warfare. I arrived at St. Omer from my comfortable trench as being a
person accustomed to poisonous gases in civil life. In a large school
there, converted into a hospital, there was a small glass-fronted room,
like a miniature greenhouse, into which known volumes of chlorine were
liberated. We had to compare the effects on ourselves of various
quantities with and without respirators. It stung the eyes and produced
a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed. For this reason trained
physiologists had to be employed. An ordinary soldier would probably
restrain his tendency to gasp, cough and throw himself about if he were
working a machine-gun in a battle, but could not do so in a laboratory
experiment with nothing to take his mind off his own feelings. An
experienced physiologist has more self-control. It was also necessary
to see if one could run or work hard in the respirators, so we had a
wheel of some kind to turn by hand in the gas chamber, not to mention
doing fifty-yard sprints in respirators outside. As each of us got
sufficiently affected by gas to render his lungs unduly irritable,
another would take his place. None of us was much the worse for the
gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to
go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable
of running for a month or so. This work, which was mainly done by
civilians, was rewarded by the grant of the Military Cross to the
brilliant young officer who used to open the door of the motor-car
of the medical General who occasionally visited the experiments.
The soldiers who took part in them could, however, for some time be
distinguished by the peculiar green colour of their brass buttons due
to the action of the gas.
Even when arrangements had been made for the manufacture of respirators
in England, the supply suddenly dried up. It was found that the girls
who made them were working as best they could with raw and bleeding
fingers, and London was being scoured for rubber gloves. Someone had
altered the formula of the mixture in which the respirators were dipped
by substituting for carbonate of soda caustic soda, which has the
property of dissolving the human skin. His name, needless to say, does
not appear in the official history.
Such were some of the difficulties which we incurred in our anti-gas
work, through the ignorance of highly-placed persons. As, however, our
defensive (though not our offensive) measures were ultimately better
than those of any other nation, things must have been still worse
elsewhere. The success of our respirators was largely due to one man,
Harrison, whose name is insufficiently known to his countrymen. He was
an analytical chemist, and author of that admirable and too little read
work _Secret Remedies_ (published by the British Medical Association).
He enlisted as a private, but was a Lieutenant-Colonel when he died of
influenza and overwork in 1918.
Naturally the ignorance of our private soldiers was of an even
more abysmal character. In the early days they often removed the
respirators from their faces and tied them around their chests, as it
was there that they felt the effects of the gas. Again in 1917 80% of
the mustard-gas cases vomited, while this symptom was rare in 1918.
Apparently it took five months for the British Army to realize that
gas-poisoning did not necessarily mean poisoning through the stomach.
If, then, in future wars we are to avoid gross mismanagement in high
places, and panic and stupidity among the masses, it is essential that
everyone should learn a little elementary science, that politicians and
soldiers should not be proud of their ignorance of it, that ordinary
men and women should not be ashamed or afraid of knowing something
of the working of their own bodies. If we persist in the belief that
we can be saved by patriotism or social reforms, or by military
preparation of the type which would have sufficed in former struggles,
we shall go down before some nation of more realistic views. We do
not know what type of scientific knowledge will be needed: we can be
certain that some type will be. The British are a tired people: they
like to rest “in breathless quiet after all their ills,” and to pin
their faith to the promises of leaders whose eyes are fixed on the
past. It has all happened before.
“Ganz vergessener Völker Müdigkeiten
Kann ich nicht abthun von meinen Lidern,
Noch weghalten von der erschrockenen Seele
Stummes Niederfallen ferner Sterne.”
(“I cannot lift from my eyelids the weariness of quite forgotten
peoples, nor hold away from my terrified soul the dumb downfall of far
stars.”)
The Roman and Spanish Empires appear to have perished largely from
intellectual torpor. Are we to go the same way?
We have got to get over our distaste for scientific thought and
scientific method. To take an example from the war, the physiologists
at the experimental ground at Porton, in Hampshire, had considerable
difficulty in working with a good many soldiers because the latter
objected so strongly to experiments on animals, and did not conceal
their contempt for people who performed them. And yet these soldiers
would have had no hesitation in shelling the horses of hostile
gun-teams, and the vast majority of them were in the habit of shooting
animals for sport. I have never known a physiologist who went in for
shooting animals: physiologists know too much of the processes which
occur in a wounded beast or bird that creeps away to die. And, though I
have seen a good many scientific experiments on animals, I have never
seen one which, so far as concerns the pain given, I should object to
having performed on myself. That this attitude is not unusual would
appear from the following experiment described by the director of the
Porton experimental ground, in which he wished to compare the effects
of hydrocyanic (or prussic) acid gas on himself and a dog. They both
entered a chamber containing 1 part in 2,000 of the gas.
“In order (he writes) that the experiment might be as fair as possible
and that my respiration should be relatively as active as that of
the dog, I remained standing, and took a few steps from time to time
while I was in the chamber. In about thirty seconds the dog began to
get unsteady, and in fifty-five seconds it dropped on the floor and
commenced the characteristic distressing respiration which heralds
death from cyanide poisoning. One minute thirty-five seconds after the
commencement the animal’s body was carried out, respiration having
ceased and the dog being apparently dead. I then left the chamber. As
regards the result upon myself, the only real effect was a momentary
giddiness when I turned my head quickly. This lasted about a year,
and then vanished. For some time it was difficult to concentrate on
anything for any length of time. It is hard to say to what extent this
was due to the experiment.”
As the result of this work, hydrocyanic acid was given up for use in
the field, as phosgene is effective at fifty times this dilution, and
mustard gas at one thousand times.
One of the grounds given for objection to science is that science is
responsible for such horrors as those of the late war. “You scientific
men (we are told) never think of the possible application of your
discoveries. You do not mind whether they are used to kill or to cure.
Your method of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with
molecules and atoms, renders you insensible to the difference between
right and wrong. And so you devise the means of universal destruction,
and sell them into the hands of unrighteous and bloody-minded men.”
I note that the people who make these remarks do not refuse to travel
by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or to read mechanically
printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in their back-gardens
to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, with its
interesting and variegated fauna. But it is quite easy to show that
the destructive and horrible nature of modern warfare is due, not to
the weapons used, but largely to the other applications of science
which constitute the material basis of our civilization. Let us imagine
the Great War fought with all our means of transport and preventive
medicine, but no weapons more complicated than swords, spears, and
possibly a few bows. With fewer munitions the armies could have been
mobilized even more rapidly, and more men put in the fighting line.
The Germans would probably have tried, as they tried in 1914, to bring
about a “Schlacht ohne Morgen,” a battle on reversed fronts modelled
on Cannae. The fighting would probably have been about as severe as
at Cannae, and men would have been fighting in close order, ten or
twenty deep, along a hundred-mile front. No doubt it would have been
over sooner, but the losses would probably have been just as great. The
French and Germans would doubtless both have gone on fighting until at
least half their armies had become casualties, and, with four years’
fighting compressed into as many weeks, it would have been impossible
to tend more than a fraction of the wounded. The chief difference might
have been that the Russians would have been victorious by mere weight
of numbers, and the French defeated. In former wars slaughter was
limited by the fact that large armies could not be fed, and developed
epidemic diseases. They also moved very slowly. So it took twenty-three
years (from 1792 to 1815) to wear down the resistance of the French
nation. Moreover, the Great War was the first since the Second Punic
War of the 3rd century B. C. between two great civilized nations, each
fighting with all its might. This fact accounts for its ferocity.
Modern transport and hygiene made its scale possible; the weapons used
merely served to prolong it.
The objection to scientific weapons such as the gases of the late war,
and such new devices as may be employed in the next, is essentially
an objection to the unknown. Fighting with lances or guns, one can
calculate, or thinks one can calculate, one’s chances. But with gas
or rays or microbes one has an altogether different state of affairs.
Poisonous gas had a great moral effect, just because it was new, and
incomprehensible. As long as we permit ourselves to be afraid of
the novel and unknown, there will be a very great temptation to use
novel and unknown weapons against us. Now, terror of the unknown is
thoroughly right and rational so long as we believe that the prince
of this world is a malignant being. But it is not justifiable if we
believe that the world is the expression of a power friendly to our
aspirations, or if we are atheists and hold that it is neutral and
indifferent to human ideals.
It will by now have become clear to you that I am writing somewhat
parabolically. What I have said about mustard gas might be applied,
_mutatis mutandis_, to most other applications of science to human
life. They can all, I think, be abused, but none perhaps is always
evil; and many, like mustard gas, when we have got over our first not
very rational objection to them, turn out to be, on the whole, good. If
it is right for me to fight my enemy with a sword, it is right for me
to fight him with mustard gas: if the one is wrong, so is the other.
But I have no sympathy whatever for Mr. Facing-both-ways when he says
that, though he is prepared on occasion to fight, he will not use these
nasty new-fangled weapons. Of course I am not suggesting that we should
violate or prepare to violate the Washington Agreement on this subject.
I do, however, believe that we ought to denounce it at the earliest
possible opportunity.
Such are the facts about chemical warfare. They will not be believed
because a belief in them would do violence to the sentiments of most
people. They will not be promulgated, as there is no money to be
made out of them. (Chemical manufacturers make both high explosive
and mustard gas, and the former more easily.) The views which I have
expressed do not coexist in the mind of any party leader or newspaper
proprietor, and must therefore be those of a crank. But until some
stronger argument can be waged against them than that they are unusual
and unpleasant, there remains the possibility that they are true.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALLINICUS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
