BY WILLIAM WALKER
“It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining,” Willi Siebert, a German soldier stationed in the Ypres Sector 1915, recalled in a letter to his son. “Where there was grass, it was blazing green. We should have been going on a picnic, not doing what we were going to do.”
In that area of Belgium near the North Sea, sunny days were rare. A prevailing wind from the west blew frequent sea showers onto the lowlands, where Germans were battling Canadian and French armies for control of the ancient city of Ypres at the northern tip of World War I’s Western Front. The earth was so wet that soldiers from both sides often had to construct trenches by piling sandbags on the parapet of the shallow ditches they had excavated. Even with the extra effort, they often had to stand watch in water that reached their thighs.
On April 22, however, the wind had shifted to the north, and Siebert yearned to bask in the clear, springlike weather it brought. But he knew that he had work to do as his chemical-warfare unit prepared, as part of Operation Disinfection, to open the cocks of 5,730 large pressure tanks containing 168 tons of chlorine gas.
“We sent the infantry back and opened the valves with the strings; everything was stone quiet,” Siebert wrote. “We all wondered what was going to happen. As this great cloud of green-grey gas was forming in front of us, we suddenly heard the French yelling….The hail of bullets going over our heads was unbelievable, but it was not stopping the gas. The wind kept moving the gas towards the French lines. We heard the cows bawling, and the horses screaming.”
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