YELLOW CROSS
2019 - 2020
various sizes
mixed media on paper

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On July 12, 1917, a volley of artillery shells, marked with small yellow crosses, was launched to British troops stationed near the small Belgian town of Ypres. The bombs quickly evaporated and spread the gas in the cool night air. The soldiers, falling asleep in the barracks and the odds, woke up from a sickening, sharp smell: a harsh horseradish spirit hovered over the Cretaceous fields. In no time, the British rushed to the shelters, coughing and sneezing in the mud. Blind men made their way between the dead. Mustard gas penetrated the skin and rubber, seeped through the layers of fabric. For several days he hung a poisonous mist over the battlefield, and from the dead began to sniff the mustard. In that one night alone, gas killed two thousand fighters, and in one year, hundreds of thousands. On December 2, 1943, German military flew a fleet of American ships in a harbor near the Italian city of Bari and dropped bombs. The fire immediately broke out on the ships. SS John Harvey, one of the Navy's ships, was loaded with seventy tons of mustard - for use. When Harvey exploded, the same thing happened with the toxic cargo. The German raid was unexpected and terribly effective. Fishermen and people living near the port of Bari began to complain of the smell of burnt garlic and horseradish. Young American sailors, greased with pain and horror, with swollen, closed eyes, were pulled out of the water by dirty. The gas quickly spread through the port of Bari and caused destruction. About a thousand men and women have died from
complications in the next few months. The Bari incident, as the media called it, has greatly embarrassed the Allies, but it has opened the way for researchers who have been able to synthesize a magic bullet that has become deadly for certain cancers. The fact that this bullet would ever come from the same chemical weapon that killed thousands of soldiers during World War I, was a perversion.

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