All Mellow On the Western Front

By Chris Shedlick

Chemical warfare on the Western Front with an amusing twist, as the British and Germans attack each other with herbal and psychedelic weapons. Humor included at no extra charge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483553955

Book preview

9781483553955

Since September 1914, the terrible war in France had degenerated into an obscene, unbreakable stalemate of trench warfare. Both sides dug parallel lines of trenches from the Swiss border all the way up to the Channel coast. Weeklong artillery barrages failed to obliterate the enemy’s forces – which sprung up out of dugouts to man machine guns and mow down wave after wave of unsuccessful infantry attacks and doomed cavalry charges. Even the most callous and bloodthirsty generals on each side realized that their forces were finite in quantity and could eventually be permanently depleted. Some sort of new weapon was needed to break the stalemate and achieve a breakthrough.

In April 1915, the Germans unleashed a new and terrifying weapon, chlorine gas, on the unsuspecting and unprepared trench lines of the 1st Canadian Division, stationed north of Ypres, Belgium. Although failing to provide the Germans with the breakthrough they were looking for, the weapon traumatized the soldiers against whom it was used.

Moreover, in their usual Anglo-Saxon response to being fiercely attacked, the British were determined to fight back, someway, somehow, in kind. Some sort of equivalent or superior response was warranted, solicited, and immediately sought. General Leary was placed in charge of the effort to find a suitable gas-type weapon which could be used against the Germans, to give them a richly deserved