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. Oh, they were a nuisance, but that was the first gas mask that came in.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. And you had two goggles here on to look out, two glasses to look out and with your breath it didn't take long before the glasses were steamed up and you couldn't see where you were going. ![]() Well then they got this, the improved type. The chemical was pretty near as bad as the gas. It was something like flannelette, wool serge would probably better describe it. You respired through this heavily, heavy material. You inhaled through your nose and respired through your mouth. The old one we had first, you pulled it over your head like a balaclava. I remember the old one, the one that this was a respirator, you know, one that you clamped on your head with an elastic. I remember one night, some of our fellas put them on when we come to a dead horse, that was the only reason. ![]() I don't remember ever putting my gas mask on. If you hadn't used it then you wouldn't mark anything on this. Every time you used your respirator you were supposed to mark how long you had it on, if you used it. The gas officer would always, when you had your staff parade in the morning, he would test your, he would look at your respirators and you had to have that ticket, the little ticket. MacLeod gives a good comparison between the original respirator and newer gas masks used by Canadian soldiers. ![]() However, the masks could not protect them against mustard gas used later in the war, which burned the skin, caused severe breathing problems, and could cause blindness. ![]() Allied troops were given gas masks to protect against chlorine gas attacks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |