“
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
People create poetry and mustard gas. We invent gods and monsters and gods that might as well be monsters. We act with extraordinary grace and unfathomable cruelty. We're so terribly intelligent, and dreadfully easy to fool.
”
”
K.J. Charles (Spectred Isle (Green Men, #1))
“
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
”
”
David J. Morris (The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
“
..who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality..
”
”
Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)
“
I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case--to say nothing of 10 cases--of mustard gas in its early stages--could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes--sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently--all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.
”
”
Vera Brittain
“
His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.
”
”
Libba Bray (The Diviners (The Diviners, #1))
“
Like roses and mustard gas.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
And I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesn’t mind the smell of mustard gas and roses.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
”
”
Allen Ginsberg (Collected Poems, 1947-1997)
“
But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never knoew what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
“
To My Children,
I'm dedicating my little story to you; doubtless you will be among the very few who will ever read it. It seems war stories aren't very well received at this point. I'm told they're out-dated, untimely and as might be expected - make some unpleasant reading. And, as you have no doubt already perceived, human beings don't like to remember unpleasant things. They gird themselves with the armor of wishful thinking, protect themselves with a shield of impenetrable optimism, and, with a few exceptions, seem to accomplish their "forgetting" quite admirably.
But you, my children, I don't want you to be among those who choose to forget. I want you to read my stories and a lot of others like them. I want you to fill your heads with Remarque and Tolstoy and Ernie Pyle. I want you to know what shrapnel, and "88's" and mortar shells and mustard gas mean. I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh, the crippling, numbing sensation of fear, the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complimentary to the province of War and they should be taught and demonstrated in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms, and flags, and honor and patriotism. I have no idea what your generation will be like. In mine we were to enjoy "Peace in our time". A very well meaning gentleman waved his umbrella and shouted those very words...less than a year before the whole world went to war. But this gentleman was suffering the worldly disease of insufferable optimism. He and his fellow humans kept polishing the rose colored glasses when actually they should have taken them off. They were sacrificing reason and reality for a brief and temporal peace of mind, the same peace of mind that many of my contemporaries derive by steadfastly refraining from remembering the War that came before.
[excerpt from a dedication to an unpublished short story, "First Squad, First Platoon"; from Serling to his as yet unborn children]
”
”
Rod Serling
“
I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“
Mustard gas was stubborn, clinging to the ground as long as three days. Heavier than air, it settled into craters and trenches where men had taken refuge. It ruined food supplies.
”
”
Joseph E. Persico (Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918)
“
creating cocaine wasn’t a terrible enough legacy, the twenty-six-year-old doctor began experimenting with ethylene and sulfur dichloride, eventually inventing mustard gas and killing himself in the process.)
”
”
Lydia Kang (Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything)
“
The Germans sometimes chose to disguise mustard with xylyl bromide, a tear gas that smells like lilac, and so it came to pass in the wartime spring that men ran in terror from a breeze scented with blossoming lilac shrubs.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
“
Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered. What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never existed. The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The way it always will. Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
”
”
David J. Morris (The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
“
the history of experimenting on black people does not hold a place in their referential memory.5 No one makes mention of Tuskegee’s syphilis experiments on black men, or the military experiments of mustard gas on black soldiers, among other nonwhites, or J. Marion Sims’s experimentation on black women.6 No mention of Henrietta Lacks. My historical memory starts tossing examples at me as if it’s having its own dinner party. In the real one, no one wonders what the parents of the black children think when they see the word “study” associated with the center.
”
”
Claudia Rankine (Just Us: An American Conversation)
“
A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets.
These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome.
It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs.
”
”
Alan Moore (Snakes and Ladders)
“
set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.
”
”
Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War)
“
A Congressional subcommittee hearing in 1994 revealed that up to 500,000 Americans were endangered by secret defense-related tests between 1940 and 1974. These included covert experiments with radioactive materials, mustard gas, LSD, and biological agents. The General Accounting Office testified that between 1949 and 1969, the Army released radioactive compounds in 239 cities to study the effects.
”
”
Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
“
IN HIS EIGHTEEN-YEAR CAREER in the army, Shoemaker had come across a lot of people who seemed to think the military was exempt from civilian regulations and free to conduct medical research as it pleased. That was simply not the case, though this wasn’t to say it hadn’t happened in the past. The Pentagon tested mustard gas on American soldiers during World War II and Agent Orange on prisoners in the 1960s. But the days of unsupervised, freewheeling medical experimentation by the military were long gone.
”
”
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
“
Ali explained that Uncle Arash had been tasked with the strangest job in the Persian army. At night, after the human wave attacks and the mustard gas left countless dozens or hundreds of Iranians dying on the battlefield, it was Arash’s job to quietly and secretly put on a long black cloak, get atop a horse, and ride around the battlefield of fallen men with a flashlight under his face. He was meant to look like an angel. He was meant to inspire the dying men to die with dignity, conviction. To keep them from suicide. The delirious dying men would see Arash on his mount, in his illuminated hood, and believe they were being visited by Gabriel himself, or the twelfth imam returning for them. “Your uncle was an angel,” Ali told his son. “Literally. He helped a lot of people.
”
”
Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!)
“
On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal nerve agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague. Along with French supply houses, American Type Culture Collection of Manassas, Virginia, shipped seventeen types of biological agents to Iraq that were then used in weapons programs. In 1989, ABC-TV news correspondent Charles Glass discovered what the U.S. government had been denying, that Iraq had biological warfare facilities. This was corroborated by evidence from a defecting Iraqi general. The Pentagon immediately denied the facts.
”
”
Morris Berman (Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire)
“
The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on. Detonation. The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare. Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers. I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
“
per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number
”
”
Tarquin Hall (The Case of the Missing Servant (Vish Puri, #1))
“
In 1938 the biological warfare establishment Unit 731 had been set up outside Harbin in Manchukuo, under the auspices of the Kwantung Army. This huge complex, presided over by General Ishii Shir, eventually employed a core staff of 3,000 scientists and doctors from universities and medical schools in Japan, and a total of 20,000 personnel in the subsidiary establishments. They prepared weapons to spread black plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera, and tested them on more than 3,000 Chinese prisoners. They also carried out anthrax, mustard-gas and frostbite experiments on their victims, whom they referred to as maruta or ‘logs’.
”
”
Antony Beevor (The Second World War)
“
Chemotherapy, the third main prong in cancer treatment after surgery and radiation, came about by similarly unlikely means. Although chemical weapons had been outlawed by international treaty after World War I, several nations still produced them, if only as a precaution in the event that others did likewise. The United States was among the transgressors. For obvious reasons, this was kept secret, but in 1943 a U.S. Navy supply ship, the SS John Harvey, carrying mustard gas bombs as part of its cargo, was caught in a German bombing raid on the Italian port of Bari. The Harvey was blown up, releasing a cloud of mustard gas over a wide area, killing an unknown number of people. Realizing that this was an excellent, if accidental, test of the mustard gas’s efficacy as a killing agent, the navy dispatched a chemical expert, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Francis Alexander, to study the effects of the mustard gas on the ship’s crew and others nearby. Luckily for posterity, Alexander was an astute and diligent investigator, for he noticed something that might have been overlooked: mustard gas dramatically slowed the creation of white blood cells in those exposed to it. From this, it was realized that some derivative of mustard gas might be useful in treating some cancers. Thus was born chemotherapy.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Early stages now, though, and he had an idea for a new recipe that just might give his line of barbecue sauces an edge over other brands. He chopped the tops off a handful of garlic bulbs, then fired up a burner on the gas stove and glugged vegetable oil into his stockpot. Cranked on the oven—hot—and set the garlic in the cast-iron skillet and drizzled on olive oil.
To the pan on the stovetop, he added brown sugar and tomato sauce. Balsamic vinegar and molasses. Soon the scent of roasted garlic filled the kitchen, accompanied by the homey hiss and pop of bubbling sauce.
In the zone, he envisioned the components for his new blend as clearly as if they were scribbled on the subway-tile backsplash behind the cooktop like ingredients on a handwritten recipe card. Mustard, cayenne, salt, pepper. His hands moved with muscle memory—slicing, stirring, seasoning, blending the sauce to a fine puree. The earlier sense of intrusion was evaporating along with the extra liquid in the pot.
”
”
Chandra Blumberg (Stirring Up Love (Taste of Love, #2))
“
There was one other anti-invasion tactic that was never admitted officially, at the time or later.[212] Churchill ordered his military chiefs to investigate the possibility of drenching the beaches with mustard gas if the Germans landed.
”
”
Norman Moss (Nineteen Weeks: America, Britain, and the Fateful Summer of 1940)
“
But as those who lived through the Civil War died off, Grant’s reputation faltered. ... A generation that remembered war as mustard gas and trenches and wounds was not going to look back fondly on the high body counts Grant’s offensives racked up.
”
”
Brady Carlson (Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders)
“
An American ship carrying mustard gas off Bari in Italy was bombed by the Germans 1942. It helped develop chemotherapy owing to the effect of the gas on the condition of the soldiers who had liquid cancers (eradication of white blood cells). But
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
“
boots right off his feet. There were stories of men sucked down into the muck never to be seen again. Victor didn’t know if the stories were true, but he did think it possible. The mud was everywhere. In their hair under their helmets, flavoring their food, between their toes in their boots, layering their canteens, permeating their very souls. They couldn’t get away from the mud. They slept in it, fought in it, lived in it. Died in it. Sometimes after a hard downpour a new body part appeared out of the mud. Victor told himself it didn’t matter. Whoever he was, the man was dead, gone from his body to meet his Maker. What was left was just bone, sinew, and skin. And if Victor was ordered over the top and got hit by enemy fire to end up one of those bodies sunk down in the mud, what difference would it make if the soldiers lucky enough to still be breathing used his hand sticking out of the side of the trench to hold something up out of the mud. That’s how they were using Oscar’s. Nobody really knew the dead man’s name or even his nationality, but it only seemed right to name him, to make him part of their company when his hand emerged from the side of the trench. That’s how war was. A man had to survive as best he could. He couldn’t worry about what he’d left back home. He couldn’t worry about how long he was going to live. A man just had to follow orders and give all he had to win the war and save democracy. War wasn’t a thing like Victor had expected or maybe anything like anybody back in the States had expected. Back there, they’d taught them to march. Wasn’t much use for marching in the trenches. It was just hunkering down and hoping a sharpshooter didn’t spot your helmet if you forgot and lifted your head a few inches too high. Or that your gas mask would work when the Germans launched their mustard gas barrages. Or that you wouldn’t get the order to go over the top. Up
”
”
Ann H. Gabhart (Angel Sister (Rosey Corner, #1))
“
One consistent feature stood out: The samples all displayed a striking depletion of white blood cells within the lymph nodes and bone marrow, precisely the tissues that become packed with the feverishly dividing cells of lymphoma patients. Two Yale pharmacologists, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman, who had contracted to study the therapeutic effects of nitrogen mustard, made the connection. In a burst of imagination they entertained the possibility that the war gas possessed a dual nature, that it was a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde compound that could exist both on the battlefield and within a physician’s clinic.
”
”
Travis Christofferson (Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms)
“
these drugs were initially derived from the nitrogen mustard gas experiments during World War I and World War II. These poisons—and that’s exactly what they are—kill all fast-growing cells. Well, since cancer cells are fast growing, some genius decided to try these chemicals on cancer.
”
”
Paula Black (Life, Cancer and God: Beating Terminal Cancer)
“
Walter was among the American expeditionary forces gassed with high explosive projectiles northwest of Toul, on April 3, 1918, in the course of intense shelling that lasted through the night. How much damage he sustained is hard to say. By 1918, after more than three years of chemical warfare, troops were equipped with gas masks with charcoal filters, and there were relatively few casualties. In some accounts, Walter attributed the loss of his lower front teeth to the gassing, which also altered his voice, giving it a wizened, reedy quality that he would exploit so well for comic effect and adapt when he had to play characters older than himself. On This Is Your Life, when Ralph Lindsey mentioned they took “a little shot of mustard gas,” Walter cut him off: “We’re not going to talk about that.” The two men fought together in four major campaigns in 1918: Aisne (May 27–June 16), Champagne-Marne line (July 15–18), Saint-Mihiel (September 12–15), and Meuse-Argonne (September 26–November 11). At Aisne, the Germans bombarded the Allied line with four thousand artillery pieces, and seemed to be winning until the American expeditionary forces arrived and counterattacked.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
“
The History of World War I in 'M's
Madness
Mills bomb
Maconochie rations
Mournful Mary
Mystery ship
Minnie
Mustard gas
Mud and more mud
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
Oh, the places you'll go when you watch the news. After exposing myself to the day's headlines, my only thought is this: I will never, ever, ever bring a child into this world, for the same reason I will never, ever, ever buy a pet hamster, bring it home from the store, and then drop it into an enclosed tank which has been filled with mustard gas. After all, it's pretty much the same thing.
”
”
Josh Woodrose
“
The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spare the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing.
”
”
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead (Gilead, #1))
“
It has been said that the First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists’ war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians’ war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information.
”
”
Simon Singh (The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography)
“
the First World War was the chemists’ war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time,
”
”
Simon Singh (The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography)
“
II Duce had a megalomaniac vision of merging this territory with the colonies of Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and Libya to forge an East African empire. Some five hundred thousand Ethiopians were sacrificed in a campaign infamous for its savage use of mustard gas.
”
”
Ron Chernow (The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance)
“
crossed glances with my one true love, a Russian who had been blinded by the mustard gas used so indiscriminately in this war and for whom I was willing to do anything. I
”
”
Paulo Coelho (The Spy)
“
Those who survived mustard-gas attacks later developed severe anemia, requiring monthly blood transfusions. They were also prone to recurrent, lingering, and sometimes fatal infections. In 1919, one year after World War I ended, two American pathologists, Helen and Edward Krumbhaar, performed autopsies on seventy-five soldiers who had been killed by mustard gas. They found that the gas depleted the bone marrow, where red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are made. They also found that lymph nodes, another source of white blood cells, had shrunk. The Krumbhaars published their findings in 1919. No one noticed. Specifically, no one recognized that if mustard gas could eliminate white blood cells and shrink lymph nodes, maybe it could also eliminate cancers of the bone marrow (leukemias) and cancers of the lymph nodes (lymphomas).
”
”
Paul A. Offit (You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation)
“
Savages were meant to be subdued and put to work—what good were they otherwise, to themselves or anybody else? When Il Duce’s sons dropped mustard gas from airplanes among barefooted black soldiers and thus put them to rout, they were proving themselves superior beings,
”
”
Upton Sinclair (Wide Is the Gate (The Lanny Budd Novels #4))
“
It was teeth and talons and fire and mustard gas, it was ghosts scorched into Hiroshima streets, showerheads pouring poison into tiled rooms, and a grasp that twined itself around his own bones, a tongue that licked for marrow in his own spine, and a hunger he could feel in his own stomach.
”
”
S.R. Hughes (The War Beneath)
“
Mustard gas, which is the favorite frightfulness of the Hun, does not smell like mustard at all. Its pungency is something like the taste of mustard, but its smell is that of sour, fermented raspberry, with mold on top.
”
”
Clair Kenamore
“
The Skull Valley reservation is ringed by toxic and hazardous waste facilities (Figure 1). To the south lies the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the US Army tests chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and other weapons and trains elite members of the US armed forces in their use. To the west is the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast swath of desert the US Air Force uses for target practice by bombers, the testing of cruise missiles, and air-to-air combat training for fighter jets. North and west of the reservation a private company, Enviro Care, landfills 93 percent of the nation's Class A, low-level nuclear waste. East of the reservation sit the Tooele Army Depot, one of the largest weapons depots in the world, and the Deseret Chemical Depot, which until recently was home to nearly 50 percent of the nation's aging stockpile of chemical weapons. From 1996 to 2012 the US Army worked around the clock to incinerate over a million rockets, missiles, and mortars packed with sarin, mustard gas, and other deadly agents.
”
”
James B. Martin-Schramm (Earth Ethics: A Case Method Approach)
“
Unlikely. That wine is the reason, the only reason, I took the case. In the nineteenth century, Chateau Haut-Braquilanges produced the finest wines in France. Their signature claret was the product of a single vineyard, of about two acres, planted in Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot. It was situated on a hill near Fronsac. Unfortunately, that hill was violently contested in World War I, drenched with mustard gas and poisoned forever, and the chateau leveled. There are at most two dozen bottles left of the vintages from that chateau known to exist. But none from the greatest vintage of all—1904. It was believed extinct. Extraordinary that this fellow has a case of it. You saw how reluctant he was to part with even the one bottle.
”
”
Douglas Preston (Crimson Shore (Pendergast, #15))
“
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.
[...]
Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Timequake)
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By then it was Newt Gringrich's city as much as anyone's. Whether he ever truly believed his own rhetoric, the generation he brought to power fervently did. He gave them mustard gas and they used it on every conceivable enemy, including him. At the millennium the two sides were dug deep in opposing trenches, the positions forever fixed, bodies piling up in the mud, last year's corpses this year's bones, a war whose causes no one could quite explain, with no end in sight: l'enfer de Washington.
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George Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America)
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UN inspectors concluded the Muthanna plant was capable of producing two tons of sarin (GB) and five tons of mustard gas daily. 10. A relatively permanent change in hereditary material
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Chuck Missler (Prophecy 2020: Bringing the Future into Focus Through the Lens of Scripture)
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I have stood knee deep in mud and bone, and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved. This is your coming century! They will eat them Mandus, they will make pigs of you all and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will eat. your. hearts!
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The Engineer (Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs)
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I always thought their masterpiece was the night they hauled away a corrupt judge’s sports car from his driveway and returned it to the same spot before dawn, compacted into a gleaming block of crushed metal not much larger than a footlocker. Ozone Eddy was to New Orleans what mustard gas was to trench warfare; you tried to stay upwind from him, but it was not an easy task.
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James Lee Burke (Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux, #19))
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and had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches.
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Alan Brooke (Alanbrooke War Diaries 1939-1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke)
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PROTEIN SOUP This soup is very easy to digest and can be eaten all year long. You could live on it alone for quite some time if need be. I recommend it especially for anyone with digestive difficulties like gas, malabsorption of food, or chronic fatigue. This soup makes a great medicine to rebuild the body without digestive difficulties, and so is ideal for babies, women after giving birth, the elderly, or anyone in a weakened condition. Spicing beans with onions, hing (asafetida), cumin, fennel, cayenne, salt, pepper, and cardamom helps produce less gas. INGREDIENTS 1 cup split yellow mung beans 2 cups white basmati rice 1 inch fresh gingerroot, chopped 1 small handful fresh cilantro leaves, chopped 2 tbs. ghee (clarified butter) 1 tsp. turmeric 1 tsp. coriander powder 1 tsp. cumin powder 1 tsp. whole cumin seeds 1 tsp. mustard seeds 1 tsp. kosher or rock salt* 1 pinch hing (asafoetida) 7–10 cups water *Bragg Liquid Aminos can be added after cooking for flavor or to replace salt. Wash beans and rice together until water runs clear. In a large pot on medium heat mix ghee, mustard seeds, turmeric, hing, ginger, cumin seeds, cumin powder, and coriander powder, and stir together for a few minutes. Add rice and beans and stir again. Add the water and salt and bring to a boil. Boil for 10 minutes. Turn heat to low, cover pot, and continue to cook until rice and beans become soft (about 30–40 minutes). Add the cilantro leaves just before serving.
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John Douillard (The 3-Season Diet: Eat the Way Nature Intended: Lose Weight, Beat Food Cravings, and Get Fit)