Picture it. Ypres, Belgium. Springtime. Birdsong in the distance. The smell of damp earth. And the gentle promise of a breeze—ah yes, a breeze. How lovely. Except this one didn’t carry blossoms or the sweet perfume of spring. No, this breeze was about to carry the industrial-grade scent of humanity’s utter moral collapse.
Because on April 22, 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, the German Army decided to try something new in the theatre of war. Something… innovative. Something… pungent. Something that, and I can’t stress this enough, turned the air itself into a bloody death trap.
They released chlorine gas. Not a few whiffs, mind you, but 168 tons of it—because if you’re going to war-crime, why not go big?
Now, let’s back up. War, up to this point, was awful, yes—but it had a certain etiquette. You shot people. They shot you. Everyone got trench foot. There were rules! But on this day, those rules were folded into a neat little paper airplane and launched into the sun.
The Germans, with an alarming amount of Teutonic confidence, uncorked thousands of gas canisters along a four-mile front and let the wind do the rest. Chlorine gas, for those fortunate enough to have avoided it in your daily lives, is a bit like breathing in bleach… if the bleach then decided to claw at your lungs, set your throat on fire, and drown you from the inside. Just a hint of zest, with notes of apocalypse.
The first to suffer were French colonial troops—many from Algeria and Morocco—who were given no warning, no gas masks, and no chance. Imagine standing in a trench and watching the air turn green. Then imagine that air searing your lungs, melting your eyes, and turning every breath into an act of suicide.
It worked. The Allied line cracked wide open. A five-mile gap. You could’ve driven a horse and carriage through it. Several, even. You’d think the Germans would seize the opportunity, wouldn’t you? Blitz through the chaos and change the war. But no. They were too surprised. “Oh look, Fritz, it worked!” “Ja! Scheiße! Now what?”
Enter the Canadians.
Yes, our polite, maple-syruped neighbors to the north, who up until then had been minding their own business, eh, suddenly found themselves the thin khaki line between disaster and slightly delayed disaster. With no gas masks of their own, they resorted to a method so desperate it would make Bear Grylls blush: they urinated on bits of cloth, tied them around their faces, and charged into the poison fog. Because nothing says heroism quite like “here, breathe through this wee-soaked rag and run directly at the people trying to kill you.”
At a place called Kitcheners’ Wood, they launched a night assault so bloody, so brutal, it’s still whispered about in military academies and Canadian pubs alike. They held the line—but at a horrifying cost.
And what did that line protect, exactly?
Oh, just the last shreds of military decency.
Because after this? The chemical floodgates opened. The gas genie was out of the bottle, and no amount of treaties or strongly worded telegrams was going to shove it back in. Soon came phosgene. Then mustard gas. Then a generation of young men who would never again draw a full breath without remembering the choking cloud of Ypres.
Over 90,000 would die from gas during the war. And far more would live with lifelong damage—lungs that wheezed, eyes that burned, memories that never faded.
Eventually, the world would say, “Right, let’s not do that again,” and signed the Geneva Protocol in 1925 banning chemical weapons. Jolly good. Except we did do it again. Iraq. Syria. A Russian park bench. A Tokyo subway. Turns out, the air is very hard to keep clean when people keep trying to turn it into a weapon.
So today, April 22, we remember a moment not just of warfare, but of transformation. When humanity, in all its cleverness, decided to turn something as essential, as intimate, as shared as breathing… into an act of war.
Ypres was not merely a battle. It was a warning. A whispered one, carried on a breeze.
