No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War

Serge M. Durflinger is a historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

Tim Cook takes his readers on a fascinating, horrific, and ultimately
important journey through the terrifying gas warfare experiences of the
Canadian Corps during the First World War. In an exhaustively
researched, well-written work offering a large number of firsthand
accounts, Cook powerfully conveys the meaning of gas warfare to a
Canadian soldiery at first wholly unprepared for its unsheathing. He
illuminates the activities of the little-known Canadian Corps Gas
Services and the role it played in integrating gas in the offensive and
defensive doctrines of the Corps and in instilling in it gas-prevention
education and drill. He insists that the Canadians’ immense
battlefield gains in the last 100 days of the war would not have been as
successful without their heightened understanding of the use of gas,
going so far as to note that “the Canadian way of war was steeped in
poison gas.”

Before this publication, the understanding of even well-rounded
Canadian military historians about Canadian experiences with gas warfare
was more or less limited to the famous stand of the 1st Division at
Ypres in 1915. Cook demonstrates that while most historians dismiss gas
as an ineffective weapon, the threat posed by long-lasting chemical
contaminants remained serious and constant throughout the war. By 1918,
gas was an integral part of all major military operations. Poison gases
inflicted more than one million casualties during the war, and their
psychological impact—a topic Cook examines in detail—was
devastating. It all makes for sad, morbid, but strangely compelling
reading: tales of desperate, agonized men gasping for life while
suffering the dehumanizing effects of this terrible scourge.

Cook also explores the role of gas in the historiography, claiming that
its repulsive stigma of immorality and barbarity expunged it from the
record of most histories. Few participants in the war admitted its use
or described its shockingly brutal consequences. Even Nicholson’s
official history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force ignores gas
doctrine and fails to mention the Canadian Corps Gas Services.

Cook’s first-rate book ably fills a gap in the literature on
Canada’s participation in the First World War and makes a major
contribution to our understanding of this underexplored aspect of
Canadian military history.