Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

And then came April 22, 1915. Late afternoon, near Ypres; bright sunshine; a light breeze blowing from east to west. The Allied trenches in this sector, or “salient,” were occupied by Canadian and French forces, including a division of Algerian soldiers. The opposing Germans launched an offensive, which as usual began with shelling by distant artillery. This was terrifying enough, and the French and Canadians knew by experience it was a prelude to a head-on infantry attack across no-man’s-land, but at about 5:00 P.M. the look of the battlefield abruptly changed. A gray-green cloud rose from the German side and began drifting across the blasted terrain as German soldiers opened the valves on six thousand tanks filled with over 160 tons of chlorine gas arrayed along a four-mile stretch of the front—the first ever use of lethal gas on a battlefield.