The Age Of The Gas Mask

"It was a bitterly cold evening, and I had just finished giving a talk that shared the glimmerings of a new research project that looked seriously at how the gas mask, a peculiar object that came into being in 1915, could elucidate what it meant to face total war. At that point, the project had begun by asking why many countries including Britain by 1939 to distribute tens of millions of gas masks as the primary means of protecting their inhabitants against the worst elements of modern war. After I had finished, an older man buttoning his coat and tying his woolen scarf around his neck, came up to me to report that my remarks had made him recall vividly some of his earliest fears from his childhood in England, when his brother would put on his gas mask and chase him around their house"--