Baptism Of Fire Paperback - 2008

From the rear cover

The Second Battle of Ypres pitted highly trained German soldiers--armed with the first weapon of mass destruction, chlorine gas--against the 1st Canadian Division, which had been in the trenches for just over a week. Yet it was the Canadians who triumphed, stopping the German advance. After that battle, which claimed John McCrae's close friend, the doctor and poet penned "In Flanders Fields," now read every Remembrance Day.

In Baptism of Fire, Nathan M. Greenfield revisits the battlefields and war rooms of history, deconstructing military motives and unearthing scores of unpublished interviews. He gives voice to the Germans who nervously joked that the mysterious silver cylinders, filled with poison gas, were a new kind of German beer keg; reveals how surprise turned to terror as the Canadian infantry saw the first clouds of chlorine gas rolling towards them; and relates, in the soldiers' own words, the nightmare of the "filthy, loathsome pestilence" that turned copper buttons green and seared men's lungs.

Recreating how the Canadians immediately filled the 12-kilometre-long hole in the Allied line after the initial gas attack, Greenfield takes readers into the unimaginable horror of shell fire that obliterated trenches and turned men into "pink mist," leaving the survivors to defend a position of death. And he explains how the untried Canadians, with their defective Ross rifles, breathing through urine-soaked handkerchiefs, made one of the most important stands of the war--perhaps even staving off an ultimate German victory.