Facing Scientific Savagery: Gas Masks and the Materiality of Modern War in Britain’s Domestic Front, c. 1915–45

Facing ‘Scientific Savagery’: Gas Masks and the Materiality of Modern War in Britain’s Domestic Front, c. 1915-45

Shortly after the unleashing of modern chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915, London wife and mother Georgina Lee wrote in her diary on April 29 that, “an appeal is launched to all the women of England to make respirators, thousands and millions of them,” based on a pattern circulated in The Daily Mail. Thus, simultaneously with the arrival of one of the most visible signals of the horror of the Great War came a visible and material emblem of a potential, if frightful, remedy.  While chemical warfare was widely condemned as an atrocity at the time and its effectiveness debated ever since, its long lasting legacy as altering the materiality of the modern experience of war via the invention of the respirator/gas mask remains underexplored.  This paper uncovers the legacy of chemical warfare via the development of a material object (the gas mask) that haunted the interwar imaginary.  It uses anthropological studies of the social life of things by Arjun Appadurai and the imaginative ways that materiality and material culture has been theorized by Daniel Miller among others as the basis for a study that places a material object with a precise chronology (1915-1945) at the center of the story of modern total war.   The rise and fall of individualized civilian anti-gas protection is a crucial aspect of the British experience of war at home.  In this essay, the gas mask serves as a vehicle for interrogating the altered relationship between the state and the civilian in a home front now under fire from the First World War to the Second.