Transcript
Ben (0:03)
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Company Design Butter New Dominion Design Company Gray Toad Tallow the Kings Ridge Elderberry Squirrely Joe's Coffee Stone Crop Wealth Advisors and our supporters@supercast.com China has identified the cause.
Brian (0:35)
Of the mysterious new virus. Coronavirus.
Ben (0:39)
Coronavirus.
Brian (0:45)
The death toll now has risen above that of the SARS outbreak.
Ben (0:50)
17.
Brian (1:14)
City may have to temporarily bury.
Ben (1:16)
Bodies on public land if they run.
Brian (1:19)
A.
Ben (1:32)
It was early April in the year of our Lord 1915. The Great War ravaged Europe, fanning flames of hatred that would linger like smoke for years to come. The first truly modern war, it painted the hills and meadows of France, Germany, and Belgium red with rivers of blood. Bullets flew incessantly in those days, and storms of artillery rained down like deafening tornadoes until the world itself was made new, made less and different by the force of it all. Young men died, an entire generation lost, and with their deaths, Christendom began its final hemorrhage in the West. At this time of early spring, the western borders of Belgium were being constantly pushed here and there by the Allied powers from their French stronghold and the Central Powers pouring out of the German bulwark. France, with her soldiers arrayed in the bright colors of a more gentlemanly time, was suffering. It was still early in the war, but she could already feel the cold drafts blowing in from multiple chinks in her armor. She had not even tasted the hell of Verdun or the forsaken fields of the Somme yet, but she already felt crippled. Thus it was that she called up legions of reserves from within her own country, as well as other reservists from Algeria across the Med to reinforce the line in Belgium. They arrived to the north and western town of Ypres about one week into April. From there they took a short train ride to the small village of Langemark. One can imagine how they felt as they disembarked and looked on the fullness of what one man can do to another behind the cloak of militarized vendetta, ruin upon ruin. Buildings crumbled in, roads heaved up by the machinations of war. A city in tatters. Woe to the bloody city. The men were solemn and sad. Many knew that by arriving there they arrived at the beginning of their own deaths. Yet still duty called them up to courage, and so they walked through the town to meet the trenches that would house them. They climbed down into those trenches and walked through the muddy maze towards the front line. There they waited for doom. Some two weeks later, on April 22, that doom finally came. But its scope far outpaced those few precious French souls living in the ground. The day was especially warm and sunny. If not for the existential dread facing down both sides of the world represented there, separated by a no man's land only a few hundred yards wide, it would have been the ideal day for any Belgian farming village. With the sunrise, though, came the steady stream of deafening gunfire and artillery. In two weeks, not an inch had been gained by either Allied or Central Powers. Langmarck and the larger Ypres were a stalemate, but the fighting raged on ceaselessly. Nonetheless, the sound of gunfire would occasionally be interrupted by the screams of a soldier who had poked his head above the ground, only to be horrifically injured or maimed, but not immediately killed. The day wore on like this, just as the other ones before it had until later in the afternoon. It was at that point that something changed. The wind shifted. It had been blowing south for days, but suddenly it turned and. And began blowing west from behind the German lines. With this change came a far more noticeable change. The Germans stopped firing. As this new breeze kissed the haggard faces of the newly minted French and Algerian forces, they relished the first moment of true stillness they had tasted since they arrived weeks prior. Some, especially brave among them, poked their heads up to see what had come over the Germans. They didn't see their camp burning by some act of God or nature. They didn't see their trenches inexplicably abandoned like they hoped for. They didn't see anything different at all, save the fact that they were now no longer shooting. Many minutes went by like this, minutes of unprecedented quiet. It was long enough for some of the younger Frenchmen to tempt themselves with the idea that somehow the war was over and they had won. But that dream was squashed down in a moment as they watched a new devilry rise up from the German trench. Clouds of greenish yellow and then bluish silvery smoke streamed from a trench line four miles wide. And at the very front of the German position, a new trench further forward than the French had noticed before. It coalesced into a heavy cloud that moved still silently across the field of no Man's Land, riding the wind that had refreshed the weary men only a moment before. With nowhere to go, the French waited to endure this new thing, a thing they took to be some kind of fog and nothing more. It rose up like a great wall of some ancient city before them, and each man felt some sense of threat rise up in his heart with it. Dirty faces stared upwards from the trenches eyes bleach white against their filthy skin. And they looked like worshipers, terrified before an awful God. When the wave of cloud finally hit, the coughing and choking and heaving fits began right away. Mounds of young men doubled over one another as they sought to wrench their own guts out of their mouths. Desperate coughs and desperate screams. It was no fog or smoke. These men had freely inhaled a thick plume of pure chlorine gas and now suffered the torturous pain of poison that felt like needles filling their lungs. There was no escape. And just as the wailing cries of agony reached a new crescendo, the German lines began to sing with a fresh barrage of gun and artillery fire to drown it out. It was the beginning of the Second Battle of Ypres. But it was also so much more than that. April 22, 1915, marked the first time chemical weapons were used in a field of battle on the earth. It was a turning point in the severity of man's wrath and cruelty. And it opened a Pandora's box that, as history tells us, has led to particularly heinous evil. But why is this? Why do we recoil at the thought of chemical weapons in a theater of war? Aren't all the arts and weapons of war a horror? Aren't they all meant to maim, kill, conquer and destroy? Perhaps it is the despair it inspires. What do you do if the enemy's weapon is in the very air you're forced to breathe? Maybe it calls to mind images of bloodstained men walking through cloudy killing fields and wearing masks that make them look like something less than human.