During World War I, four of baseball’s most accomplished, most celebrated Hall of Famers volunteered in The Great War, specifically in the Chemical Warfare’s “Gas and Flame” division.

Ty Cobb was a captain who served under Army Maj. Branch Rickey, a former baseball player and manager. Two other famous baseball players were in the unit, including Army Capt. Christy Mathewson and Army 1st Lt. George Sisler.

Soldiers were prepped to advance across no-man’s land, under cover of an artillery barrage as they sprayed liquid flames from tanks strapped to their backs and tossed gas-filled bombs like grenades into enemy trenches. Mathewson, Cobb, Rickey and Sisler were also trained to endure the potential horror of deadly phosgene and mustard gas attacks that paralyzed, then brought on a slow, agonizing death.

All four volunteered, spurred on by a deep, abiding patriotism. Rickey was 38 years old and the sole support of four young children. Matty, who had already retired from baseball after notching 373 victories, was also 38 with a family. And Cobb, fresh from leading the American League in batting, a feat he would do more often than any man in the history of the game, was the “youthful” age of 32.

He, too, was his family’s only breadwinner. Sisler, 25, was an enlistee preparing to go overseas until the war ended November 11, 1918, relieving him from his military obligation.

“The Gas and Flame Division” was created at the height of the war to subdue mounting public alarm as news of gas attacks began to filter home when soldiers on the front lines wrote home. Gas attacks were a deadly and virulent horror of war that the German’s introduced to the battlefields in the war’s early stages.

At first, soldiers were given simple gas masks to carry as potential protection, but the masks were cumbersome, ineffective, and required the men to breathe through large unwieldy tubes.

By 1918, the military was increasingly concerned and re-doubled its efforts to repel the gas threat. Eight million military and civilian personnel had died during the bloody war in just four years. During the summer of 1918, the military brass hatched a plan, secret at first, to repel the attacks with a new elite fighting unit officially named “The Chemical Warfare Service,” more commonly known as “Gas and Flame.”

Choosing Washington D.C. as a backdrop to heighten the importance of the plan, they gathered the most influential members of the press to break the news. The war department wanted news of the unit to receive the maximum amount of coverage possible not only to scope out men of extraordinary leadership capabilities, but to inform the public that they would stem the frightening consequence of the German gas attacks in a most effective way.

The new unit was still undergoing training when Cobb arrived. He and his baseball mates served as instructors, conducting realistic readiness drills, one of which sent soldiers into airtight chambers where actual poisonous gas was released. One day the drill exploded into turmoil. Several men — including Cobb and Mathewson — missed the signal to snap on their masks. Cobb finally donned his mask and groped his way to the door past a tangle of screaming men and thrashing bodies.

“Trying to lead the men out was hopeless,” Cobb said. “It was each one for himself.” Eight of Cobb’s fellow patriots died that day, their lungs ravaged by the gas. Eight more were crippled for several days. Cobb felt that, in his words, “Divine Providence” had spared his life.

Mathewson was not as fortunate. “Ty, I got a good dose of the stuff,” Matty told Cobb. “I feel terrible.” His respiratory system was weakened from his poison gas exposure, which led to tuberculosis, from which he died on October 7, 1925 in a Saranac Lake, New York sanitarium.

The following day, before the second game of the World Series, players from the Pittsburgh Pirates and Washington Senators wore black armbands to honor Mathewson. The 44,000 fans at Forbes Field stood while the flag was lowered to half-mast, and all sang “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Mathewson, who never pitched on Sundays because of his Christian beliefs, established records that will never be broken, including hurling three complete game shutouts in the 1905 World Series.

Cobb attended Mathewson’s funeral two days later in Lewiston, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania native was laid to rest in a cemetery next to his alma mater, Bucknell University, where Mathewson had starred for both the football and baseball teams.

“He looked peaceful in that coffin,” Cobb said. “That damned gas got him and nearly got me.”

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research and Internet Baseball Writers’ Association member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.