Feelings Run Deep at Belgian Birthplace of Chemical Warfare

Every evening at precisely 8 o’clock, police halt traffic through the Menin Gate, the main eastern entry to this walled city. A trio of local buglers steps into the stone archway and sounds the “Last Post,” the traditional final call of the day in the British army.

The ceremony, a daily ritual for the last 59 years, is more than a tribute to the nearly half a million, mostly British, World War I soldiers who died on the flat battlefields of Flanders in northwestern Belgium.

It is this town’s way of forcing itself to remember four years of misery, death and destruction, of German bombs demolishing virtually every building, every home, every tree, of soldiers falling by the thousands in the first chemical warfare attack in the history of human conflict.

And remember the townspeople do--especially the poison gases used by the German army in such heavy bombardments that corroded canisters and shells of deadly chlorine and mustard gas still are found frequently around Ypres.

Living with the memory as well as the legacy of chemical warfare has made Ypres the fountainhead of West European opposition to the proposed start-up, after a 17-year hiatus, of U.S. chemical weapons production.

People here fear not only the lethal leftovers of World War I, but also--like many elsewhere in Europe--the possibility that in a future East-West conflict their lands would again be made a chemical battleground.

“We’re all living with fear here,” said Tony R. De Bruyne, curator of the Ypres Salient Museum, where photographs of blinded World War I gas victims hang on the wall near rows of disarmed German chemical bombs.

He says he believes Americans do not fully realize how personal the issue is for Europeans.

“We’ve known the chemical attacks,” he said. “We still have people who are suffering from it.”

The Pentagon plans to begin gearing up this month for production of a new generation of chemical weapons to replace the aging arsenal that it stores in the United States and West Germany. Actual production is scheduled to start in October, 1987.

Then-President Nixon halted U.S. chemical arms production in 1969. No other NATO member is known to have any chemical weapons.

Preparation for new U.S. production had been set to begin Oct. 1, but an impasse in Congress’ budget negotiations--due in part to a House bill that would prohibit any spending on American chemical weapons--has blocked the allocation of $120 million originally earmarked for the plan.

Since last May, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization formally cleared the Pentagon’s plan in a procedure that leaves no room for rejection, European attention to U.S. and NATO chemical weapons policy has grown:

- On a recent Saturday afternoon in Ypres, a series of skits, debates and informal discussions about chemical and nuclear weapons was organized for teen-agers by two local peace groups and the Ypres city council. On the cover of a pamphlet advertising the event was a drawing of a baby in diapers with a helmet on its head and a gas mask over its face.

- When NATO defense ministers met in Brussels last May 22 to discuss the U.S. plan, a Belgian newspaper ran a front-page story vividly recounting the 1915 German attack near Ypres that marked the first-ever use of chemical weapons.

- The governments of Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands have declared their strong opposition to building new U.S. chemical weapons. Belgium, Luxembourg and Greece have expressed varying degrees of uneasiness. They worry that it could hurt chances for new arms control agreements.

“Here in Europe, chemical warfare, we are afraid of it,” says Aubin Heyndrickx, a professor of toxicology at the University of Ghent and a leading authority on chemical weapons. “This is still a part of the lives of these people.”

President Reagan, supported by the major NATO commanders and political authorities, contends that the Soviets have gained a big lead in chemical warfare capability during the 17 years since the United States halted production.

The President also argues that if chemical weapons were in better East-West balance, the Soviets would be less likely to use them against NATO. They also might be more willing to agree on a global ban on such arms, Reagan says.

But many Europeans remain unconvinced of the need for more U.S. chemical weapons.

At a rural crossroads near the hamlet of St. Juliaan, where thousands of Allied soldiers were forced to give ground in the German gas assault, a stone monument, topped with the bowed head of a soldier, stands in honor of 2,000 Canadians who died there.

A few miles to the northeast, at a bend in the road called Steenstraat, a huge steel cross on a stone pedestal pays tribute to all the victims of that first chemical attack. The memorial was destroyed by the Germans in World War II but was rebuilt on the same spot.

These public reminders, and the private memories, keep many Europeans loyal to the hope that chemical weapons never again will touch their soil.