دانلود کتاب عصر ماسک گاز – چگونه غیرنظامیان بریتانیایی با وحشت جنگ همگانی روبرو شدند

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 had decided 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. This was the first of many anecdotes about gas masks that strangers and acquaintances shared with me in surprising ways. A year or so later, I was discussing this project with a fellow academic in a café in London when a woman interrupted us from the next table. “Were you talking about gas masks?”When I affirmed that we were, she continued: “One of my worst moments in the war was when I left my gas mask on the train. I was in tears coming home. How would we pay to replace it? What would mother say about my not having it about?” Later that year, in South Carolina, an audience member at another lecture came up to me: “I remember getting my gas mask. My sister’s was pink and mine was blue. My mum told me, ‘Now if you smell a funny smell, put it on.’” Another retired professor told me, “I had a gas mask, but I really wanted the big one, not the one for babies,” and a guest at a dinner in London recounted, “I hated that my sister had the pretty one, you know, the one that was red and blue, whilst I had the ugly one.” What all of these stories and others like them share is a distinct memory of the gas masks that people received as children. They associated it with a sense or sensation or feeling: “the smell was awful, like rubber”; “it was hot”; “I hated it.”