Mustard Gas

Mustard Gas
Here they are; the wicked
A panic floods the field
Deliverance; unthinkable
They play their part, performing oh so well

With empty cores they carry on
(“A twisted soul”) “An apparition”
Born of a beastly brand, they butcher purposely
(Just have the sense to run away!)

Scream at the sky and beg
Beg for a reason he would allow this
Look to the sky and say
“We would be better off without this”
“Who would allow this?”

We’ve never felt alive
But none of us can die just when we want to
We’re stuck in this disguise
With leather skin; these eyes designed to haunt you
But do we haunt you?

Scream at the sky and beg
Beg for a reason he would allow this
Look to the sky and say
“We would be better off without this”
“Who would allow this?”

You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side
You’re on the other side

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Following the Thief’s directions, Hunter finds himself caught on an active battleground in the middle of a mustard gas attack. Failing to escape it, the agonising gas cripples him so severely, he can do nothing but lay screaming and wait to die.

What’s in a name?
‘Mustard Gas’ — The final horror of war, this one representing Suffering. What’s there to say about suffering? It’s the horrible sensation of just pain and pain and pain and pain with no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the absolute agony that makes you wish you were dead and didn’t exist so you don’t have to keep feeling it, and makes you loathe the very concepts of ‘justice’, ‘compassion’, ‘goodness’, or ‘mercy’ as bald-faced lies of the universe.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>Here they are; the wicked
The figures that approached at the end of The Thief come into view, leading everyone present to think: we’re doomed.

It’s a group of enemy soldiers in gas masks, dispensing Mustard Gas over the field. Rather, they already have been dispensing it as heard at the end of The Thief, but only now upon seeing them are the allied soldiers making the connection of how they’re under attack. More than that, in their delay to respond, the gas has spread and saturated so escaping it is now impossible.

Off the bat, Hunter characterises the gassers as ‘wicked’. We’ll see he regards them as completely inhuman beings, similar to the Tank in that the outer visage of the mask makes it feel like there’s no human soul behind these actions, but if the Tank was evil for being ruthless and mechanical, the gassers are downright Satanic. The thing about them, which makes them so horrible, is that they still have the illusion of a human shape. It suggests that they may have once had, or should have, some reluctance to inflict the vast pains they’re inflicting. But they don’t.

Note that mustard gas itself is rarely fatal in the short term — its purpose is rather to cause such excruciating pain and injury that the enemy soldiers are too crippled to fight, inflicting long-lasting tortures over entire swaths of battlefield at a time.

>A panic floods the field
The allied soldiers know they’re screwed — they don’t have gas masks. A mad rush back to the trenches breaks out.

>Deliverance; unthinkable
But even if they get to the trenches, they can’t escape. All they can do is hide and hope the gassers don’t notice them. Still, the gas will proliferate wherever the wind carries it, so the answer to what they can really do to avoid the gas is ‘pray’. But there is nothing that will ease the pain once the gas reaches them. They are all going to be casualties, they are all going to suffer, and no merciful power is going to intervene to save them.

>They play their part, performing oh so well
‘They play a part and act a scene’? Probably not…

The gassers are methodical and obedient in how they administer the gas. Their willingness to adhere to their orders, and inflict such suffering, sticks out to Hunter — remember that Hunter broke away from the war machine in Cauda because he saw how he was inflicting pain (‘with abrasive eyes / pain in plain sight’). These are ‘people’ who have not and seemingly will not ever have their ‘Cauda moment’, and if they have, they’ve pushed that voice of conscience aside so they can continue serving as their masters demand. Such, their senses of morality and empathy have been so utterly subsumed by their training that they are basically soulless. Hunter bitterly observes how pleased their superiors must be with them, or how pleased they must be with themselves.

>With empty cores they carry on / (“A twisted soul”) “An apparition” / Born of a beastly brand, they butcher purposely
The gassers proceed in spreading gas across the field, firing artillery anywhere they suspect there are soldiers.

Hunter’s impression of them continues to echo Cauda — ‘an apparition awoken with an urge to own and occupy’, ‘twisted beasts with a desire for disorder’. The Mustard Gassers are the final result of perfect indoctrination, the ‘twisted beasts’ that Hunter felt himself pressured into becoming at the start of the war. They don’t think for themselves, they don’t even think of themselves, they are simply pawns of their masters made to destroy the enemy’s pawns. They do this since it is their purpose, and their party line is telling them it’s morally right. Probably, that’s the only way to inflict such suffering and not be inconsolable.

Any human heart underneath the mask is surely dead. Overall language here frames them as being, basically, demons, or some other kind of metaphysical entity that parodies and preys on humans. The uncanny valley of the human silhouette under the vile masks is highly unnerving to Hunter.

>(Just have the sense to run away!)
Hunter pleads inside himself for the soldiers to not try fighting the gassers, as his regiment tried fighting the Tank, and instead just run. Hunter, we can figure, is running as fast as he can to get away from this scene.

I can also weirdly read this as coming from the gassers, like even they want Hunter’s side to give up and save themselves, but it still doesn’t stop them from doing what they’re going to do.

>0:52 – 0:59 Instrumental
The gassers advance, firing off another round of gas. Hunter is still distanced from the front lines of this fight, but close enough that he can hear the screams of the afflicted soldiers and for the gas to begin billowing its way to him.

>Scream at the sky and beg / Beg for a reason he would allow this / Look to the sky and say / “We would be better off without this” / “Who would allow this?”
Echoing WIMTBA and Cauda: ‘With our hands to the sky / We extend our limbs begging “why oh why?”’; ‘we cannot allow this, this is terrible’.

The pain and horror of the mustard gas is abominable. Screams and wails of agony rise from every man caught in the cloud, leaving Hunter with this impression: a just God would not allow something as horrific as mustard gas to exist. We heard him plead for God in WIMTBA, but now he is condemning God as himself negligent or wicked for permitting men to suffer and die in such an excruciating manner.

Basically Hunter facing the question of evil: how can God be good when evil exists? And comes to the conclusion that, if God exists, then he is not good, but sadistic.

>We’ve never felt alive / But none of us can die just when we want to
Now we get to hear what’s going on in the Mustard Gassers’ world. Unsure if this is a literal hard cut to them as narrators, or them just being close enough now for Hunter to see them clearly and append this perspective onto them.

And wow is their perspective something. Contrasted against all the suffering and horror, life for the Mustard Gassers sounds cartoonishly silly as they bumble around the field, firing off more gas. They are extremely divorced from the pain of what’s going on here, rather, they are aware they are inflicting terrible pain, but are so beyond the point of doing anything about it that their attitude has wrapped around and become disturbingly cheery from all the grimness of it.

The gassers acknowledge that yes, they are soulless. Hunter’s read that they have subsumed their hearts to the war machine is correct, so they have all lost their selves by doing things that have shattered their personal ethos to the dirt. For this, they feel dead, and don’t mind if reality catches up with that inner deadness. Unfortunately, since their superiors still have use for them, they still have work to do, so they can’t just let themselves get shot or whatever. In its own way, this inability to defy the command to torture others is also a kind of torture.

>We’re stuck in this disguise / With leather skin; these eyes designed to haunt you
Driving in the point again that the soldiers are unable to behave with humanity or empathy because their superiors have forced them to become monsters. Even the gassers feel trapped and inhuman in this role — these horrible masks have, in a sense, become their faces.

>But do we haunt you?
There’s the literal element of how frightening a gas mask looks, and how the image of it might linger in nightmares, but I think it’s also like, ‘do you think you could’ve wound up like us?’.

>You’re on the other side.
So why are the gassers doing this? What justifies all this suffering? What justifies any of the atrocities that have happened over this war? Well, nothing, really, except that the other guy is the enemy. In the end that’s all it comes down to.

I like envisioning this as the gassers having broken through the previous front line and are now directly upon Hunter. More gas deployments go off and off all around him, fresh clouds bursting in front of him as he tries to flee. However he tries to avoid it or fight it off, he quickly succumbs to the choking effects of the gas and falls to the ground in agony, while the gassers continue along in their warpath, heedless of him or just uncaring.

That said, I could also figure him being gassed earlier, in either of the chorus iterations (so that his condemnation of God doesn’t just coincide with him seeing others in agony, but with him experiencing it for himself… then the gassers’ verse can cut in while Hunter himself is writhing there in front of them before they trundle onwards). But with the big energy of this verse it feels appropriate to imagine things coming to a head here… up to however you want to read it, I think.

>3:43 – 4:13 Instrumental
Hunter faints. Thinking he is dead, the mustard gassers proceed on, leaving behind what is now a quiet scene.

The Thief | Act III | Saved