| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joel A. Vilensky. Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction. Assisted by Pandy R. Sinish. Foreword by Richard Butler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiii, 213. $24.95.

If World War II was the war of the physicists, then World War I was the war of the chemists. The tremendous destructive power of long-range artillery shells accounted not only for the highest portion of the war's terrible and unprecedented death toll; it accounted, as well, for the predominant symbol of the western front: a deforested, cratered landscape dotted with pools of poisoned water. By war's end, those pools often were infiltrated by an insidious substance known as "mustard gas." Mustard, so named because of its odor (it was unrelated to mustard seed), had been brought to the war by Germany in the summer of 1917. It followed in the grim tradition of chlorine and phosgene gases, also introduced during the Great War. But mustard was different: far more toxic than phosgene, it would—once vaporized—cling tenaciously to everything, and remain active for weeks. The gas masks that had worked well against mustard's predecessors offered little protection: soldiers now had to fear every step they took. Skin contact caused painful blisters; eye contact could lead to blindness (temporary or permanent); inhalation meant seared lungs, wretched coughing, vomiting, and even death. Within three weeks of the introduction of mustard, 14,000 British soldiers had become casualties to it (more gas casualties than in all of the previous year). Had the war lasted into 1919, an even more horrific chemical agent would likely have become known to the world: called "lewisite," it was developed by the U.S. Army for the battlefields of Europe.

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