This chapter takes up a half-forgotten novel fragment of 1941-2 by André Malraux based on first-hand accounts from the 1914 War, as well as two, neglected photographs of targeted civilian casualties of poison gas made in a Macedonian town in 1917 by the German Jewish criminologist R. A. Reiss. It moves beyond conventional archives to uncover complex histories, interweaving cultural artifacts with archival material to represent at two distinct moments the experimental poison gas war on the eastern front. Prussic acid -- by 1917, the base for an early form of Zyklon – provides the constant in these episodes. Eastern Europe, an area historically associated with colonialism and post-colonialism, furnished the choice terrain in 1915-17 of poison gas warfare, and so, premonitions of a Nazi continental imperialism which relied on gas, a weapon designed for colonial use, to enforce racial hierarchies. These cultural artifacts –Malraux’s Bolimów/Bolgako and Reiss’s Monástir -- map the head of the “Zyklon trail,” in Lemkin’s phrase. The experimental poison gas war on the eastern front substitutes premonitory vistas for the classic, western battlescapes of Wilfred Owen’s poetry by redrawing the templates and boundaries of the developmental logic of Nazi “scientific violence” amidst occupation, subjugation, and ethnic/racial warfare.

This chapter continues the exploration of the gap between legal theories on the conduct of war and enemy aliens on the one hand and the practice of states at war on the other. It focuses first of all on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that anticipated the mobilization of the nation-in-arms and examines, in particular, the expulsion of "Germans" from Paris and Strasbourg in the summer of 1870, the consequences of the expulsion and the lively debate among international lawyers it sparked. The chapter continues with an analysis of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, concentrating on the emergence of a humanitarian discourse in order to legitimize intervention. Then it moves east to take into consideration the treatment of enemy aliens and the accompanying discourses on civilization in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. This chapter also delves into the novelties that occurred in the field of international law and international relations with the signing of the Geneva Convention, the foundation of the Institute of International Law in Brussels, the two Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907. The final part of the chapter concentrates on the Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and the atrocities against civilians.