The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War. By Susan R. Grayzel

Abstract

Susan R Grayzel’s latest monograph, The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War, traces the history of the gas mask from its inception on the battlefields of Ypres in 1915 to its establishment as the emblem of Britain’s home front during the Second World War. In her analysis of governmental policy, public response, and popular conceptions of the gas mask, Grayzel explores the complexities of civil defence and traces the deconstruction of boundaries between civilian and combatant between 1915 and 1945. By using the gas mask as a vehicle to understanding the way in which the boundaries between domestic spaces and the battlefield were broken down, Grayzel highlights how its development marked the evolution of a new type of warfare in the twentieth century—one in which civilian bodies became militarized. Indeed, her core argument positions the gas mask as the singular object which ‘embodied what it meant to be prepared for total war’ (p. 174). Despite the detailed focus on the gas mask as a singular object, Grayzel’s work also speaks to broader arguments about civil defence, empire, and gender; she argues convincingly that the core of civil defence was ‘to determine who could or should be protected, who mattered’ (p. 145, emphasis added). She explores the colonialist and imperialist overtones of gas mask design and distribution in Britain’s empire, which prioritized the safety of certain ‘useful’ (p. 3) bodies, and examines how the gas mask became wrapped up in ideas about wartime identity and civilian loyalty to the state (p. 173). Most notably, Grayzel positions the gas mask as the ‘incarnation’ of a benevolent state, and argues that it functioned not only as a device to protect bodies, but also to manage the emotions of a population at war (p. 127).