Posted on 11/10/2018 5:13:23 AM PST by C19fan
A few thoughts.
1) First they try to give you the impression the whole area is barren. Then the lush growth makes it hard to remember a war was fought there.
“What they could not have known then, as they counted the cost, was the damage they had done to the land. “ (from the article)
2) Interesting article on Arsenic and plants. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368394/ Been so long since I have read any REAL SCIENCE. In low concentrations, it is a growth stimulator. The mechanism is unknown, like a lot of things in REAL SCIENCE.
There appear to be plants that absorb and process the arsenic, so God has a plan.
3) Arsenic is not created or destroyed. “Arsenic, a metalloid and naturally occurring element, is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust and is found throughout our environment.” Right now it is in the Forest. Maybe a better place than where it was? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4186553/
4) Salvarsan, was hailed as “the arsenic that saved” the world. [4, 5] In 1918 two organic arsenical compounds, Lewisite and Adamsite, vesicant and respiratory irritant agents, were developed by the US Army as chemical warfare weapons but not in time to be used in the war.
Other countries: For example, the Soviet Union produced huge quantities of the material, disposing of approximately twenty thousand tons of it in the Arctic Sea during the late 1940s and ’50s. More recently, a plant specifically designed to incinerate lewisite and mustard gas has become operational at Gorny, Russia.
Interesting history here. We did not use in WWI http://www.historynet.com/weaponry-lewisite-americas-world-war-i-chemical-weapon.htm
This led to a heavy metal antidote, which we still use today.
EVERTHING HAS GOOD POINTS AND BAD POINTS.
After the war, many newspaper articles sensationalized lewisite, attaching properties to it that the poison gas did not have. The Cleveland Plain Dealer on June 15, 1919, reported that lewisite was seventy-two times more powerful than mustard gas, considered the king of war gases at that time, and that a single drop on the back of a hand was fatal. Also, on February 26, 1923, the San Francisco Journal stated that lewisite would sterilize the ground so that ‘nothing will grow upon it for at least two years and perhaps longer’ and that one drop of it on living flesh caused ‘mortification.’
Agreed, the Islamic whackos that burn people alive, lop off heads, stone people to death, etc are not soldiers. They are nut job terrorists and do not deserve the respect a common soldier deserves.
In the early evening of April 22, 1915, the first lethal poison gas attack of World War I occurred at Ypres, Belgium. German troops discharged approximately 160 tons of chlorine gas that slowly crept toward the Allied trenches with the aid of a gentle wind. French and Algerian soldiers first noticed two strange yellow clouds approaching, and soon men began to choke, cough, suffocate, and retreat in horror. Smoke and fumes made their panic worse because they could not see around them. Some soldiers buried their faces in the dirt, hoping to protect themselves from the unknown killer. A few officers who were educated in chemistry realized the value of urinating on a cloth and breathing through it to crystallize and neutralize the chlorine, and they instructed others to do so.
Later read
The whole war was a senseless tragedy
And we were stupid enough to let Britain drag us into it to save their sorry ass
Regardless, England suffered the loss of a generation of her young men. As with our war dead, they deserve to be honored....every day.
My great-uncle, John Stanley Holmes, who fought with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces was killed two months before the Armistice in France, and is buried there.
++.
I, for one, could give a small rat’s ass about some archduke being shot.
He did survive the results of his creat...er, chemical cocktail, although he did require hospitalization.
Don't know when it was weaponized.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you weren't a politician or oligarch in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1914 either.
We were never going to live with unrestricted submarine warfare
Interesting fantasy show on TV called “ Man in the High Castle” about parallel worlds one in which Germany and Japan won WW2
We weren’t staying neutral and allowed munitions to be shipped
No, I wasn’t. But no arch duke in the history of mankind was worth the human cost of WW1.
I agree absolutely. You asked for the cause, not the justification.
Your question is a non sequitur. There can be and have been many reasons for wars throughout human history. Wars, by their nature are ugly and people die. If you can clarify your question I will try to answer.
What did tens of millions die in WWI for
What got us into it was the Zimmerman Letter.
Ferdinand would have been the first to agree with that. His wasn't a random assassination at all, nor was it because he was the crown prince at the time. He was assassinated by Serbian Black Hand radicals in order to start a war with Austria (over Bosnia and especially Sarajevo) that the Serbian government did not want. In the Austro-Hungarian government at the time was a sizeable war party (headed by Conrad Hotzendorf) who did want that war to throw Serbia out of the area, and a smaller peace party that had a plan to settle that difference peaceably. Francis Ferdinand was the leader of that peace party. When he died, the hotheads on both sides, but especially Austria, lost their biggest roadblock.
As a broad rule, all of the principals of the eventual war except Great Britain and Turkey (who had other pressing issues) welcomed some sort of war against another of the principals for one thing or another, but none of them wanted or could even imagine the war they got. These things turn out not to be controllable.
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