Above all, do no harm

Long, stagnant, and costly wars tend to begin in idealistic fervor and end in cynical misery. Our own Civil War inflicted a horrendous toll of death and seared our national consciousness with a brand that has only become deeper with time. In 1862, the Union Army rejoiced in singing the year's most popular ditty:

Yes we'll rally round the flag,

boys, we'll rally once again

Shouting the battle cry of Freedom,

We will rally from the hillside,

we'll gather from the plain,

Shouting the battle cry of Freedom...

So we're springing to the

call from the East and from the West

And we'll hurl the rebel crew

from the land we love the best.

By 1864, Walter Kittredge's "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground" had become the favorite song of both sides. The chorus, with its haunting (if naive) melody, summarizes the common trajectory:

Many are the hearts that

are weary tonight,

Wishing for the war to cease;

Many are the hearts

looking for the right

To see the dawn of peace.

But nothing can quite match the horrors of World War I, the conflict that the French still call la grande guerre (the Great War) and that we labeled "the war to end all wars." America entered late and suffered relatively few casualties as a consequence--so we rarely appreciate the extent of carnage among soldiers or the near certainty of death or serious maiming along lines of stagnant trenches, where men fought back and forth month after month to take, and then lose again, a few shifting feet of territory. I feel chills up and down my spine whenever I look at the "honor roll" list posted at the village green or main square in small towns in England and France. Above all else, I note the much longer lists for 1914-18 (often marking the near extermination of a generation of males) than for 1941-45. Rupert Brooke could write his famous poems of resignation and patriotism because he died in 1915, during the initial blush of enthusiasm:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner

of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer

dust concealed.

His fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who survived and became a pacifist (a condition first attributed to shell shock and leading to his temporary confinement in a sanatorium), caught the drift of later realism:

And when the war is done

and youth stone dead

I'll toddle safely home

and die--in bed.

Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, the third member of this famous trio of British war poets, in the sanatorium. But Owen went back to the front, where he was killed exactly one week before Armistice Day. Sassoon published his friend's single, slim volume of poetry, containing the most famous and bitter lines of all:

What passing-bells for these

who died as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger

of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles'

rapid rattle

Can patter out their nasty orisons.

Among the horrors of World War I, we remember not only the carnage caused by conventional tactics of trench warfare with bombs and bullets but also the first effective and large-scale use of newfangled chemical and biological weapons--beginning with a German chlorine gas attack along four miles of the French line at Ypres on April 22, 1915, and ending with 100,000 tons of various chemical agents used by both sides. The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925 by most major nations (but not by the United States until much later), banned both chemical and biological weapons--a prohibition followed by all sides in World War II, even amid some of the grimmest deeds in all human history. (A few violations have occurred in local wars: by the Italian army in Ethiopia in 1935-36, for example, and in recent wars in Iran and Iraq.) The Geneva Protocol prohibited "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices."

A recent contribution to Nature (June 25, 1998), the leading British professional journal of science, recalled this episode of twentieth-century history in a remarkable letter entitled "Deadly relic of the Great War." The opening paragraph reads:

The curator or a police museum in Trondheim,

Norway, recently discovered in his

archive collection a glass bottle containing

two irregularly shaped sugar lumps. A

small hole had been bored into each of these

lumps and a glass capillary tube, sealed at

its tip, was embedded into one of the lumps.

A note attached to the exhibit

translated as follows: "A piece of

sugar containing anthrax bacilli,

found in the luggage of Baron

Otto Karl von Rosen, when he

teas apprehended in Karasjok in

January 1917, suspected of espionage

and sabotage."

Modern science to the rescue, even in pursuit of a mad scheme that came to naught in a marginal and forgotten outpost of a great war--the very definition of historical trivia, however intriguing, in the midst of great pith and moment. The authors of the letter removed the capillary tube and dumped the contents ("a brown fluid") onto a petri dish. Two columns of conventional scientific prose then detailed the procedures followed, with all the usual rigor of long chemical names and precise amounts: "After incubation, 200 [micro]1 of these cultures were spread on 7% of horse-blood agar and L-agar medium identical to L-broth but solidified by the addition of 2% Difco Bacto agar]." The clear results could be stated more succinctly, as the authors both grew some anthrax bacilli in their cultures and then confirmed the presence of DNA from the same organism by PCR (polymerase chain reaction for amplifying small amounts of DNA to levels that can be analyzed). They write: "We therefore confirmed the presence of B. anthracis [scientific name of the anthrax bacillus] in the specimen by both culture and PCR. It proved possible to revive a few surviving organisms from the brink of extinction after they had been stored, without any special precautions, for 80 years."