These feelings would therefore help to explain why poison gas and the gas mask were such important technologies in German attempts to retell and understand the war. It was these men who would later claim that poison gas best symbolized the mechanized fighting of World War I because it removed any sense of individual human agency on the battlefield survival was a mere matter of chance and protective technologies like the gas mask, as Remarque’s quote reveals, always maintained the possibility for lethal error. This percentage increases, however, for the Germans, who directed many of their remaining men and resources to the Western Front in the final official year of the war. Furthermore, gas was not a tactically effective weapon until the last year of the war and a large percentage of soldiers, across the diverse global theaters of the war, never encountered the gas soaked trenches of 1918. This fact is quite striking given that gas produced less than 1% of the war’s total causalities.

It was the sense of unknown duration, in tandem with its invisibility and creeping movement, that made poison gas one of the most feared weapons in World War I. Listening to the soldiers stertorous breathing and heightened pulse helps communicate to the audience that the soldiers must now live and fight in an environment that weaponizes breathing, one of the most basic elements of human survival. Furthermore, the experience of a World War I poison gas attack was not solely defined by the moment of alarm. For this reason, the gas mask serves as the more important physical representation of the attack, conveying not only the presence of gas but also the strange and dangerous technological world that the men now inhabit. While yellow-green smoke may approximate certain World War I gases like chlorine, others like phosgene were nearly invisible to the naked eye. The ephemeral nature of poison gas certainly makes it difficult to visualize. With these methods, the films attempt to depict a weapon that tends to defy narrative conventions. Smoke then clouds the viewer and the soundtrack shifts to an uncanny silence, punctuated by the sound of heavy breathing and racing heart beats. After the first screams of alarm wash over, the soldiers begin to react, pulling out gas masks and placing them on their faces. Upon presumably sensing the gas, either via sight or smell, the soldiers begin to scream and panic, thus trying to bring the reader or viewer into a complete sense of disorientation. And while poison gas was just one of several new weapons that Remarque described in order to convey the brutality of modern trench warfare, his gas scenes maintained enough salience to make it into in each of the three subsequent films based on the novel (1930, 1979, and 2022).Īll three of the All Quiet on the Western Front films attempted to convey gas attacks with the narrative methods that Remarque first employed. In the above lines from All Quiet on the Western Front, the renowned German war novelist Erich Maria Remarque introduced his readers to gas attacks in the western trenches of World War I. Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe.

I grab for my gas-mask…Gaaas-Gaaas- I call…my helmet falls to one side, it slips over my face…I wipe the goggles of my mask clear of the moist breath…These first minutes with the mask decide between life and death: is it tightly woven? I remember the awful sights in the hospital: the gas patients who in day-long suffocation cough their burnt lungs up in clots.

Nazi ww2 gas mask