Joel A. Vilensky. Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction. Assisted by Pandy R. Sinish. Foreword by Richard Butler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xxiii, 213. $24.95

If World War II was the war of the physicists, then World War I was the war of the chemists. The tremendous destructive power of long-range artillery shells accounted not only for the highest portion of the war's terrible and unprecedented death toll; it accounted, as well, for the predominant symbol of the western front: a deforested, cratered landscape dotted with pools of poisoned water. By war's end, those pools often were infiltrated by an insidious substance known as “mustard gas.” Mustard, so named because of its odor (it was unrelated to mustard seed), had been brought to the war by Germany in the summer of 1917. It followed in the grim tradition of chlorine and phosgene gases, also introduced during the Great War. But mustard was different: far more toxic than phosgene, it would—once vaporized—cling tenaciously to everything,...