Jad Abumrad

Whatever you call it.

This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western Front.

The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians, and the British on the other.

And there, behind the German lines, is...

Our friend, our frenemy, Fritz Haber.

He's bald, he has a pot belly, he has these pince-nez spectacles, he's chomping on a Virginian cigar, he was always smoking these Virginian cigars, and he's wearing a fur coat in what is basically like the Baghdad of his time.

But nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it.

So basically, at 6 p.m.

on April 22nd,

When the wind was just right, he says.

Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valves on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine.

That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.

I'm just trying to imagine that.

Is that like a green cloud?

Some people describe it as a cloud, and then others describe it as this kind of 15-foot wall kind of hugging the land, and it's just sort of approaching.

And it's moving at about one meter per second.

And according to some accounts, as it crept across no man's land... The leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal.

Birds would just fall from the air.

Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side, and as soon as it did, soldiers began to convulse.

They were gagging.