A fictional diary, and a man who made bread from air

The piece, the notes say, is not a straight report. It reconstructs 1915 to 1918 through a fictional narrator’s diary, so that Haber’s development of poison gas and the wounds of the war can be told with both a historical line and a voice. May 1915 is flagged as a recollection after the loss of a woman the notes name Clara, and as a starting point for the research. The same Haber, the diary later remembers, had once eased a food shortage by developing nitrogen fertiliser, and was called a man who made bread from air. The Haber–Bosch process — ammonia synthesised from nitrogen and hydrogen, then mass-produced with Carl Bosch’s engineering — is credited, in the factual frame around the diary, with greatly increasing the world’s food. That double use of one chemistry is the moral the notes want a class to hold.

Chlorine at Ypres, mustard in 1917, and numbers left as written

In September 1915, the diary turns to a chlorine attack and to international condemnation. In January 1916, the carrying of the gas depends on the wind. The factual frame also places a large chlorine use on the Ypres front in Belgium in 1915, and, later, a competitive rush into phosgene and mustard. Haber, the diary says, went on to invent mustard gas, the most lethal war gas in this telling; German forces first used those shells in September 1917 in fighting against Russia, while an October 1917 entry is flagged for the development of the shells. The gas has almost no smell, they write, and raises severe blisters inside and out, leading to death. Each time the German army developed a new gas, the Allies developed the same and used it back. The gas war, they say, profited neither side, and brought only great loss. Germany inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Allies, and itself had some 200,000 wounded, of whom 9,000 died. Those figures stay in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total.

Defeat, a prize already in dispute, and a question of responsibility

The war ended, the diary writes, and Germany had lost — even though chemistry had been used unsparingly for victory. Toward the end, gas masks that blocked the inflow of poison were developed one after another, and the harm was reduced, but the dead did not return. The narrator is sure Haber will soon be named a war criminal, and thinks he ought to bear responsibility for a monstrous killing weapon. In 1918, the factual frame adds, Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the ammonia work, already controversial because of the weapons. After the war the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical and biological weapons, and in the 1990s a Chemical Weapons Convention banned development, production and stockpiling as well. The notes leave the class with a question: when a scientist’s conscience and a state’s demand collide, what is to be used as a measure? The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a fictional diary from 1915 to 1918 on Fritz Haber and poison gas, with the casualty figures and the 1918 prize left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026