Poison gas was a horrible invention for the war, it would burn your lungs giving you a slow and painful death.
POISON Gas
Poison gas was one of the most frightening and horrific experiences in the trenches. If you were a second too late to put your gas mask on, you would experience an incredibly slow and painful death. There were various types of gases used, but the main ones were mustard gas and chlorine gas. These were new and unstable weapons at the time, and early knowledge of it was scarce and basic. The first preventative measure to be issued was to urinate onto a piece of cloth, and hold it over your mouth. The technology gradually advanced, with the invention of the gas mask, but still it was not 100% reliable. Pioneer Georg Zobel, a soldier in the French army, observed men dying from a surprise gas attack, saying, “There were men… who had been surprised by the gas. They lay or sat and vomited pieces of their corroded lungs” Normal civilians were not aware of how gruesome and painful these deaths were, until soldiers started to send back terrible and cruel imagery of the seemingly everlasting deaths that poison gas caused. There were roughly 1,200,000 deaths caused by gas in World War 1
Also, there is a famous poem by Wilfred Owen called Dulce Et Decorum Est. It is a poem written at the end of World War 1 and it describes a gas attack in the trenches. Owen is very graphic and relentless in his description of the gas, using such phrases as “froth-corrupted lungs” and “white eyes writhing in his face”. At the end of the poem, Owen addresses the reader directly. He angrily explains how cruel and futile he thinks the war is, and how lying to the young men is wrong and inhumane. His last two lines of the poem are:
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
The Latin phrase means, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country” Owen was passionate about letting everyone know about the reality of trench fighting, and the horrors that lay within. He sought to open the public’s eyes up to the terror, and by doing so; he was contradicting everyone’s previous thoughts