Word: ypres
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...document was easily skirted by the Germans, who used poison gas to devastating effect in World War I. In April 1915, German soldiers surreptitiously installed 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine in the trenches along a four-mile section of no-man's-land near the Belgian town of Ypres. Using a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans were able to shatter the cylinders and release the lethal gas. In a single afternoon, 5,000 French troops were killed and an additional 10,000 were injured. The carnage in Flanders was commemorated in a poem by Wilfred Owen...