Starting with popular memories of the civilian gas masks of the Second World War, this chapter argues that the emergence of this singular, material object signals the arrival of the civil defense state and its accompanying militarization of civilian life. It reveals the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of The Age of the Gas Mask, and shows how the gas mask connects the histories of both world wars, of combatants and civilians, of men and women, of metropole and colony, of the state and the individual, thus shedding new light on total war.

Chapter 2 shows how the arrival of lethal chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 led to the invention of anti-gas protection. It traces the crucial role played by women in this initial process and how the prospect of gas masks for civilians slowly emerged during the First World War and then continued in the war’s aftermath. The prospect of a future war of aero-chemical annihilation motivated feminist antimilitarists and others demanding the curtailment of chemical arms. Nonetheless Britain continued in both the metropole and empire to develop both such weapons and equipment to protect individuals from poison gas. Chemical weapons also had defenders, and the debate over their legitimacy played out in public even as government officials, who were inventing civil defense in secret in the 1920s, incorporated individual anti-gas protection into their calculations.