Episode 3 - The Gas Attack - A Minute-by-Minute Account

This episode reconstructs, in forensic detail, one of the most devastating moments in Alphonsus (Albert) Joseph Edwards’ war: the mustard gas attack of March 1918 that permanently damaged his health and crippled the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company. Drawing closely on war diaries, appendices, and medical records, it traces the attack as it unfolded - minute by minute - from the first shells to the long medical aftermath.

Beginning in the tunnels around Loos, Béthune, and Hill 70, the episode shows how what initially appeared to be routine shelling quickly became a mass chemical assault. German gas shells released mustard gas that settled low to the ground and flowed into galleries, dugouts, and working shafts. Tunnellers, uniquely vulnerable underground, were exposed in conditions where respirators failed and escape routes were limited.

The narrative follows the immediate effects - burning eyes, choking lungs, collapsing men - and then reveals the true horror of mustard gas: its delayed action. Casualty numbers rose sharply over days as symptoms intensified, transforming a single morning’s bombardment into a rolling medical catastrophe. Within days, hundreds of men were blinded, burned, or left unable to breathe or speak. The episode places Albert among the most severely affected, matching his documented injuries - temporary blindness, loss of voice, skin burns, and long-term respiratory damage - to the pattern seen in the worst cases.

Listeners are taken through the chaotic evacuation process, from overwhelmed dressing stations to casualty clearing stations and base hospitals, illustrating how the medical system struggled to cope with mass chemical casualties. The scale of the disaster is laid bare: a specialist unit rendered nearly ineffective, its tunnelling work suspended not by enemy counter-mining, but by gas.

The episode then follows Alphonsus beyond the attack. Though permanently injured, he was not discharged. Instead, he returned to service on “light duties,” part of the vast, often invisible labour force that kept the front functioning in 1918. Repairing roads, maintaining infrastructure, clearing mines, and supporting civilians became his new war - one fought with damaged lungs and failing eyesight.

Interwoven with the broader narrative are the stories of other tunnellers who did not survive, underscoring the narrow margin between life and death in underground warfare. The episode closes by tracing the consequences of the gas attack into peacetime: Albert’s marriage in England, his diminished health, and the long shadow cast by a single morning underground.

The Gas Attack marks a turning point in the series. The war beneath the war has reached its most destructive moment, and from here, the story shifts to survival, aftermath, and the enduring cost of chemical warfare carried long after the guns fell silent.