A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Changing Nature of War 895

(Left) French soldiers wearing gas masks prepare to attack. (Right) Victims of a

German gas attack lining up at a field hospital.

then faced a vigorous counterattack. The Germans lost 75,000 killed and
wounded, the French 145,000, for not more than a few miles of ravaged
land. Still, Joffre ordered another attack. The result was the same.
Soldiers also faced new, frightening perils. German attacks against
British positions around Ypres featured a horrifying new weapon, mustard
gas, which, carried by the wind, burned out the lungs of the British sol­
diers. A member of the British medical corps wrote, “I shall never forget
the sights 1 saw by Ypres after the first gas attacks. Men lying all along the
side of the road... exhausted, gasping, frothing yellow' mucus from their
mouths, their faces blue and distressed. It was dreadful, and so little could
be done for them.” The gas mask soon offered imperfect protection—“this
pig snout which represented the wars true face,” as one combatant put it.

War in the Air and on the Seas

Airplanes became weapons of combat. In the first months of the war, air­

planes were only used for reconnaissance in good w'eather; in 1915, tech­

niques evolved and pilots began to photograph enemy trenches. Some pilots

kept carrier pigeons in a cage, so that, if they had to ditch their planes,

they could scribble their approximate location on a paper and send the infor­

mation back to headquarters with the bird. Pilots fired pistols and hurled

hand grenades and even bricks at enemy planes and troops before both

sides discovered that machine guns could be mounted and timed to fire

between the blades of the plane’s propellers.