Chlorine Warfare
Reading edition
A Reuter dispatch, dated Amsterdam, June 26, 1915, reports that the "Kölnische Zeitung," in a semi-official defence of the German employment of gases, says:
"The basic idea of the Hague agreements was to prevent unnecessary cruelty and unnecessary killing when milder methods of putting the enemy out of action suffice and are possible. From this standpoint the letting loose of smoke-clouds which, in a gentle wind, move quite slowly towards the enemy is not only permissible by international law, but is an extraordinarily mild method of war. It has always been permissible to compel the enemy to evacuate positions by artificially caused flooding.
"Those who were not indignant, or even surprised, when our enemies in Flanders summoned water as a weapon against us, have no cause to be indignant when we make air our ally and employ it to carry stupefying (betäubende) gases against the enemy. What the Hague Convention desired to prevent was the destruction without chance of escape of human lives en masse, which would have been the case if shells with poisonous gas were rained down on a defenceless enemy who did not see them coming and was exposed to them irremediably. The changing forms of warfare make new methods of war continually necessary."